Kung Fu

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Kung Fu

***** Location: Kenya
***** Season: Topic
***** Category: Humanity

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Explanation



April holidays --
shrieks from boys doing Kung Fu
on the sawdust pile


Yes! Kung Fu is very popular with the kids here.
In the slum, there are business rooms where they show video to the public because very few people can afford a coloured T.V. and a video player with electricity being a another barrier. I grew up in the same environment and every Saturday morning we would gang up and go to the Video Show to watch movies.
Normally, there are black boards outside each video show room where the day's movies are written, their poster and the time the movie will be showing.

Each video has its own routine and program. The first movie is for free. So you pay for the second movie on the board. Kung Fu movies are normally shown in the morning, mostly the second movie, the one you pay for. The first movie is free because its could be a comedy or a local play and its purpose is to entertain the few that are there waiting for more to pay. Once the video room is full, or near full, the free movie is removed and now the second movie is put. That means that the first free movie doesn't have to end, as long as the business man thinks that the number is considerably good, that's it!

So on Saturdays we watched a lot of kung fu and what makes Kung Fu even more popular to the kids is the fact that in the Video Shows, we have DJs. Not the club DJs but someone in the same video room with a microphone whose work is to translate the language( not word to word but just make the audience have a clue of what is going on ) to the people in the video and to add jokes and call the characters in the movie some local names.

That means the DJ must have watched the movie before to know what will happen next )..all in attempt to make the movie interesting and fun. At the end of it all, language is not a barrier, because even though the kids cannot understand Chinese and don't know how to read the subtitles, they end up understanding the movie and having a lot of fun. I should also mention that the themes in these movies are easy for the kids to comprehend. Like the virtues of honesty, hard work and determination.

I should add that when you come out of that room, you want to act like what you saw the star doing, making the "attacking" sounds and stuff like that... and that is what the boys were doing when I observed the haiku, only that they had to find some soft place so that when they fall they don't get hurt...

Caleb Mutua


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Chinese martial arts,
sometimes referred to by the Mandarin Chinese term wushu (simplified Chinese: 武术; traditional Chinese: 武術; pinyin: wushu) and popularly as kung fu (Chinese: 功夫 pinyin: gōngfu), refers to a number of fighting styles that have developed over the centuries in what is today the country of China.
©　More in the WIKIPEDIA !


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Worldwide use


kanfuu 功夫(かんふう) カンフー
bugi 武技


Shaolin and Daruma


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Things found on the way


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HAIKU


Swift oriental
martial art with seventeen
syllables—thrust-kick!

Michael R. Collings, USA, 2007

WKD : Haiku about Haiku



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Reference : Kung Fu Haiku



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Related words

***** WKD : Reference


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