El Rey Leon

Every day after lunch while we are waiting for everyone to finish eating, we watch an English movie upstairs. This helps us corral all the niños in an organized way, but it also doesn´t matter when they arrive. This helps us to all start reading at the same time afterwards.

This week we have been watching El Rey Leon- The Lion King, but in English. Today we watched the scene where the stampede in the gorge kills Mufasa and Simba sees his father die. The kids usually understand mas o menos what's going on, but today they understood it all.

I always hold my laptop in my lap so they can all see the screen, and I watch the best movie- them. :)

But today it was so sad. Their eyes were so terrified. So pitiful. They saw Simba's suffering, and it hurt them too.

It was one of the saddest sights I have ever seen- 50 Peruvian mountain kids, worried and afraid and sorrowful for the absense of Simba's father in his life and the pain at his parting. They didn't need it to be in Spanish and they didn't need translation. Death is life, family is life, and they knew it.

Life is the same for all of us. Things that make someone cry, like losing a parent, usually hurt just as bad for the next person.

It makes me want to be more compassionate towards others I don't understand. Some people do weird things I really disagree with- but at their core- they too are human. They want love, family, acceptance, public success. This motivates all of us. People that do weird things usually just have different means of achieving what I too am trying to achieve, they just attempt success differently than I do, usually because their culture or family or hard circumstances have trained them to fight their wars differently.

So let us be compassionate.