Clowns Without Borders - USA

Volunteers: Sibongile(CWB SA), Jamie (CWB SA) and Selena (CWB USA)

Short radio piece: listen here

From Jamie:

Last update from Selena:

In our first afternoon workshop with the kids at the WWO orphanage, Jamie’s story about Zama and the magic paintbrush is perfect for these kids. It is long but they stay with it the entire time. Me I am sitting amongst the kids, wedged in at the back of a table on the part of the bench with a broken slat. At the moments when Jamie does something silly - a silly voice or face, or as he is sitting on a cracked plastic chair, when the chair slips and threatens to send him crashing down - the kids turn around and look towards me, to share in the laughter or smile, maybe also to make sure it’s okay, or to share their astonishment. This sharing of looks with the adult is the look of the clown. It is special that these looks go both ways with this group. We are both clown and teacher to these kids…
But during the rest of the story they stay captivated, watching Jamie and Lemlem. A moment of total focus as a group. The focus is just as special if not more so, than the laughs during our warmup and games. When we go to leave and they start cleaning up for dinner, we get a taste of the usual chaos of a house of 39 orphans ages 3-14. I realize what a respite it must have been to listen quietly all together, caregivers included, to an oral story. No TV, no music, no bickering, or distractions. Just listening and being transported.

Chase (I don't know how to say chase in Amharic)

“These kids are so lucky,” we had this said quite a few times. Tonight
Jamie says “So lucky and yet so unlucky,” yes they are fed better than many (maybe most?) kids in Addis. They have great medical care, are clean, and have good school situations. But all of them are orphans and all are HIV +. These kids are adorable and a few of them especially smart and gutsy leaders. The handful of kids who sneak or bicker to be next to me in the cicle or who whine about getting the right color crayon (I hear “Bourtoukan blah blah blah bourtoukan” - orange, the only color I know in Amharic) remind me of the everyday tiffs of the kids I teach at the American School in Paris. Kids are kids anywhere.
But when the caregivers come around with some of the kids’ medecines during one of the our circle activities, the normalcy of it brings home hard the everyday reality of being a young orphan growing up HIV +.
On Thursday during our second workshop with them, we turn their life dreams (that they had drawn pictures of after listening to Zama’s story on tuesday) into group theatrical tableaux. The child whose dream it is, is the star of the tableau:

From Selena: Story Telling Workshop: On Saturday we taught a workshop for some of the guardians of children at the WWO schools. There were 30 participants, young, old, single parents, relatives turned guardians. They trickled in, laughing at our ridiculous Amharic greetings and our handshaking. The goal of this one-time workshop was to play, release, relax and to freshen up their tools for relating to their children through games and stories.

We started with a warm-up, played games, and sang a South African song with choreography to much delight. The main activity was remembering a day or a moment from our childhoods when we felt happy and really proud of ourselves for even just a moment. Then we tell our stories to a partner who transformed it into a fairytale for the rest of the group.
During the story telling one woman gets up into the middle of the circle. Her tone is different than the others, Mimi who is next to says that she is telling her own story, not her partner’s. She keeps going. The tone is different than the only stories. She stands steady, her feel rooted to the center of the circle, and she leans forward slightly. Someone in the circle says something. I guess that she puts the person in their place saying something like “No, this is what I lived through.” Something like that, because she waves the back of her hand at the person, but really I have no idea. But her voice is so steady and strong, her words come out spinning a strong rope. Then suddenly the tension in the circle changes, I feel that what she has said changes how I feel too. It’s like a strong knot that she’s tied with the rope of her story. I don’t know what she’s said, just that something in the tone has changed yet again and then I notice someone sniffling across the circle from me, then another person, and another, she keeps talking, they keep crying, even one of the men has tears in his eyes and is wiping his nose. The entire circle is moved, has shifted, so many people are crying. She sits back down and all 36 of us sit in silence for a very full few seconds.

Mimi who has been translating the stories into my ear is also so moved by the story that I don’t expect her to say anything. We just sit there witnessing the change in the group. Then Jamie asks how she felt to tell her own story. She answers that she told her own story because she felt it needed to be shared and says, “I felt so happy I could come here and tell my story. I felt like a very important person.”
After the end of the workshop Mimi summarized this woman’s story for us: “She was a maid for a family and the husband and the wife were both infected with HIV and they both knew it but she didn’t know. And the husband started raping her when the wife was away even though he knew he was HIV +. She got pregnant and still she didn’t know until she went to the hospital to have the baby and then she fund out she was HIV+ and she thought that the baby would be too. The baby stayed at the hospital for 7 months and then they tested him and he was negative. She says that he was cured by the people at the hospital.” When Mimi tells me this she kind of sighs. (Because less effective HIV testing with some fake positives was done in Ethiopia a few years ago, some people tested positive once and then after visiting holy waters or seeking other traditional cures, they tested negative…so now some people in Ethiopia do believe it is possible to be cured of HIV)

We talk about the power of telling stories, of creating a space in which to share our stories. The participants speak about the common ground between all of their stories. Then we close our ideas and do a relaxation exercise….
…when I open my eyes, the faces across from me look so peaceful and full of rest. One man says “I was disturbed by the deeply touching story she told us, now I feel relaxed and I feel at ease.”

We finish with Ethiopian song, a whole lot of shoulder shaking, big laughs, and warm handshakes.

FROM Selena:

WORKSHOP FOR KIDS AT WWO ORPHANAGE: Zama’z Magic Paintbrush for the Good of the People

In our first afternoon workshop with the kids at the WWO orphanage, Jamie’s story about Zama and the magic paintbrush is perfect for these kids. It is long but they stay with it the entire time. Me I am sitting amongst the kids, wedged in at the back of a table on the part of the bench with a broken slat. At the moments when Jamie does something silly - a silly voice or face, or as he is sitting on a cracked plastic chair, when the chair slips and threatens to send him crashing down - the kids turn around and look towards me, to share in the laughter or smile, maybe also to make sure it’s okay, or to share their astonishment. This sharing of looks with the adult is the look of the clown. It is special that these looks go both ways with this group. We are both clown and teacher to these kids…
But during the rest of the story they stay captivated, watching Jamie and Lemlem. A moment of total focus as a group. The focus is just as special if not more so, than the laughs during our warmup and games. When we go to leave and they start cleaning up for dinner, we get a taste of the usual chaos of a house of 39 orphans ages 3-14. I realize what a respite it must have been to listen quietly all together, caregivers included, to an oral story. No TV, no music, no bickering, or distractions. Just listening and being transported.

“These kids are so lucky,” we head this said quite a few times. Tonight Jamie says “So lucky and yet so unlucky,” yes they are fed better than many (maybe most?) kids in Addis. They have great medical care, are clean, and have good school situations. But all of them are orphans and all are HIV +. These kids are adorable and a few of them especially smart and gutsy leaders. The handful of kids who sneak or bicker to be next to me in the cicle or who whine about getting the right color crayon (I hear “Bourtoukan blah blah blah bourtoukan” - orange, the only color I know in Amharic) remind me of the everyday tifs of the kids I teach at the American School in Paris. Kids are kids anywhere.

But when the caregivers come around with some of the kids’ medecines during one of the our circle activities, the normalcy of it brings home hard the everyday reality of being a young orphan growing up HIV +.

On Thursday during our second workshop with them, we turn their life dreams (that they had drawn pictures of after listening to Zama’s story on tuesday) into group theatrical tableaux. The child whose dream it is, is the star of the tableau:

WORLDWIDE ORPHANS FOUNDATION

Our first day we meet with the people at WWO, we give them an overview of what Clowns Without Borders does and try to find out as much about their programs as possible. We talk about a few directions our work could go with them in the longterm and make some changes to our schedule for our two weeks here . We are trying to figure out how our work can mesh with their programs and go far.

During our first two days I see an interesting mix of elegance and poverty. The women running WWO dress really nice. The surroundings are simple. We are driven around in a new 4-door pickup truck weaving through insane traffic - few lane markers, no traffic lights, intense exhaust smog, and 4 lane main roads that shrink into 2 lanes with just a few rocks as warning. Tons of new construction being built  - cement high rises, with simple wooden pole scaffolding. Apparently there are only 3 big supermarkets in a city of 5 million. People buy their food from vendors on the street and at the market. And yet there are 7 branches of a chain of coffee shops in perfect imitation of Starbucks. Big green signs spell: KALDI’S COFFEE and the people inside wear the same green aprons, even the chairs and music are similar.

We drive all around town to visit the places we will be performing: A primary school of 1,800 kids; Ababech Gobena an amazing center with outreach programs, a clinic, a women’s empowerment through work program - there are red chili peppers drying in the sun and they export injera (Ethiopian flat spongy bread), a school, public showers, clean water, etc; Mary Joy, a clinic, orphanage, and a school for 150 kids; and of course the two WWO schools.

On top of this we eat dinner with 2 teachers from New York who are working with the WWO teachers, and of course, we create our show. We rehearse in my hotel room, on the lawn of the orphanage, and then on the terrace of the hotel. It is only at the nightly check-in, when our voice settle and drop in pitch, when we go over how we are feeling at the end of the day, that I realize just how much we’ve done and see in the last two days.