Thinking Outside The Box

What you get when you have:

A projector which for no apparent reason would not focus no matter how much you twist the little focus dial; 4 guys trying to make it work; a random funny comment and a pair of glasses?

... and so the story begins:

Movie nights here at mission school is a night out, literally, a night out. I set up the screen outside one of the student's houses (house 5) and then everyone gathers round and sits under the bright African stars and watches the evening's movie.

Last week everything worked fine - no problems, this week the projector refused to focus at a distance - the largest we could get a picture that was in-focus was maybe 5cm from the lens, and then it was about 5cm x 5cm... not very helpful when you have over 40 people trying to see! A general consensus was that the projector was missing a lens - which inspired the random comment of "We should try a pair of glasses!" - Everyone chuckled, but I figured that we couldn't lose anything by trying, so I held my glasses in front of the projector and it worked! We tried several different prescriptions, but mine was still the best. One of the other ladies had an extra pair that was a tad stronger than mine, but for astigmatism, so I wore them for the duration of the movie and the projector wore mine!

We got some books, carefully positioned the pair of glasses on them, a bit of duct tape and we were all set! The picture was still a bit fuzzy around the edges, but we could see well enough, and most importantly we didn't have to cancel movie night!

I still have NO idea why the projector wouldn't work, nothing weird happened to it between last week's movie and tonight - it just sat in it's bag in a corner of my room. Who knows? But I think that the improvisation of tonight will make me smile for quite a long time still! :-)