Clowns Without Borders - USA

Tour II, Jacmel and Croix des Boquets March 18-April 2, 2010

Volunteer Artists: Sarah Liane Foster, Heddy Lahmann and Joseph Gallina

French translation available for some of Tour I 2010, special thank you to Étienne McKenven for translating.

Following the aftermath of the earthquakes of January 12, 2010, Clowns Without Borders international was approached by many organizations working on relief efforts in Haiti. Payasos Sin Fronteras (CWB-Spain) and Clowns San Frontieres (CWB-Canada) immediately sent groups to Haiti in mid-February. In March CWB USA in collaboration with PSF, Plan International, Handicap International and SOS Villages, sent two teams of artists to the work with children and adults whose lives have been devastated by the earthquakes.

Tour II Jacmel and Croix des Bouquets  March 18-April 2nd.

Current project March 18-April 2, 2010 Volunteers: Sarah Liane Foster, Heddy Lahmann and Joseph Gallina.

This project was in partnership with PLAN International

The group volunteered in Jacmel and Croix des Bouquets.

Journals

4/1/10 Last day, Heddy’s update So things are coming to a close here in Haiti. We did our last show this afternoon at an enormous tent camp sponsored by Isra-Aid. 400 kids surrounding us during the show, and when it was over crowding around us, tugging our clothes, grabbing our hands, pinching our legs (anything to get attention), one girl just wrapped her arms around my legs and wouldn’t let me go until we finally had to get into the car and leave. The time we get to spend with the kids after the shows often feels like the most special and significant, bu

t this time is always delicate and can often become little scary, depending on how big the crowd of kids is. They can easily get restless or frustrated at not being close enough, not being able to see or not getting enough attention and start shoving each other or start pinching and pulling us much harder to get noticed. This is especially true with Joe who all the boys all adore, but because he’s kind of the “punching bag” in the show (gets knocked around, falls down a lot), the boys think it’s really funny to just start hitting him. So there’s always this game of trying to find the balance between connecting with the kids and keeping them entertained and at bay enough that they don’t just eat us alive. Never a dull moment. I realize I’m talking about this as though we’re going to do another show tomorrow.. but we’re not. We get on a plane for New York tomorrow. It’s kind of a strange thing to come down from - doing these high energy, playful shows in this very extreme environment. And now that it’s over, grappling with the reality of this place and how our time here doesn’t even feel like a drop in the bucket.

I hate to leave my last update email on a sad note. So I’m going to just pop in a journal entry that has a lighter tone to it and with that, I’ll head back to my tent for my last night in Haiti. So many thanks for the suppo

rt and encouragement on this journey. I still can’t quite wrap my head around this experience - all that it’s meant thus far and how to process it all as we head home tomorrow.

3/29

I just have to take a second here to talk about the roosters. So like I said we’re sleeping in tents, and I really don’t quite know how we manage to sleep through the night (must be just that we’re exhausted) because these roosters man, I’m telling you. They crow from the time we go to bed to the time we wake up. And I’m making special mention here because it’s completely bizarre what takes place in the night. It’s like the king rooster of Haiti lives on this property. So in the middle of the night, when one inevitably wakes up as a result of sleeping on gravel, one will hear the foll

owing. The King Rooster crows his mighty call (from right outside our tent). Then, miles away, another rooster bellows in response. I can only assume this is the King’s henchman, or perhaps the rival rooster trying to usurp the his throne. And then, I swear I speak the truth, ALL the roosters of Haiti crow in response. Like a cacophony of cockadoodledoo’s echoing off of the surrounding hills. Having grown up in Southern California, the only thing I can compare it to is the sound of the coyotes cries in the valley. I’ve heard roosters crow before, but nothing so strange and eerie as what takes place here every night after dark.

3/28/10

Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti Sarah Liane Foster

For this week we are in Croix-des-Bouquets, an area right outside of Port-au-Prince. Plan International is putting us up in a guesthouse here, a building left undamaged by the earthquake (but with a tall, cracked cement wall next door ever-threatening to fall on it). The guesthouse is crowded, mainly with Plan emergency response staff, so three of us keep our things in a single room, and sleep at night in tents set up in the gravel yard.

Whenever I wake up during the night there is a rooster call and response song that seems to be going on between all the roosters in Haiti, headed up by our local rooster. Our guy crows from a few feet away from our tent. He’s answered by several roosters a bit further afield, and then that chorus is answered by roosters further and further in the distance until they fade away. Then our local representative starts it anew. This morning there are eggs and jus chadèque for breakfast. (A chadèque is like an extra-large grapefruit. They grow here, and for this tour I named my clown for that fruit. Audiences are generally very polite when I tell them my name is chadèque, but once the other clowns start laughing at it, they realize it’s okay to laugh, and do).

At 8am, the driver Jean picks us up for our first show of the day, which is at a tent camp set up in a nearby park. One thing that strikes me about this tent camp is the variety of tents in it. It looks like it was started with one organization’s donated tents: there are rows of matching off-white dome tents. Then there are some rows of tarps set up over stick frames. Then it looks like the tarps ran out, because the next rows are sheets and other scraps of cloth tied to the same kind of stick frames. The rainy season is coming, and then the hurricane season, during which the white dome tents won’t stand much chance, much less the improvised cloth structures. NGOs are working to build at least temporary buildings for people to live in, but they won’t be able to house anywhere near everyone before the hurricanes.

There is already an audience of about twenty kids huddled under the shade of a tarp. We start setting up the show and by the time we’re ready, about a hundred and fifty community members have gathered. And we begin! We start with a parade with me on the trombone, Joe on guitar, and Heddy playing harmonica and waving the umbrella that becomes the recurring prop of the show. Next comes an acrobatic vying for position to be the one to do the opening show announcement. As the bossiest of the trio, my clown wins. We all three take a bow, the other two on the outside flip me over backwards on the way up, I get mad, and a chase ensues. This particular chase features a bicycle a kid left leaning up against the tarp structure. Joe jumps on it, and I sprint along behind him …

Another hilight of this morning’s show was during the second chase scene: I’m chasing Joe, and he puts his hat on a young man’s head as he runs by. I scold the man, pretending I think he’s Joe. The man turns and runs, joining in the chase. He leads around and around the audience, across the stage, back around. He’s a natural clown: stopping, articulating his head, looking at me and at the real Joe, then running again.

This weekend we premiered a new routine in the show. On our first night in Haiti, one of the Plan staff, a doctor who specializes in psychosocial support for children, asked us if we could work up a routine with a specific message. After the earthquake, many children here have been afraid to go back into buildings, even the ones that are not condemned. In Plan’s efforts to help children recover from trauma and encourage them to go back to school post-quake, they are working to convey the message to local kids that it’s okay to school, and that life must go on. “Would you make a routine about that?” he asked us, “It’s especially important here in Port-au-Prince.” It’s a message we could get behind.

So over our first week in Jacmel we brainstormed, and then rehearsed, and now the we have a new routine! It involves Heddy and me happily dancing with an umbrella, Joe getting jealous and grabbing it away from us, and our umbrella developing a mind of its own, dragging Joe around the stage, and shutting on his head. Heddy and I pull him free of the umbrella. We stand under again and invite him underneath. He refuses. As we encourage him to come join us, our words turn into a chant: “you don’t need to be scared – life goes on!” This rhymes in Haitian creole, and we get the whole audience clapping and chanting it with us. “Ou pa bezwen pe – lavi ap continue!”  The chanting encouragement of the crowd gets Joe to get up and come under the umbrella, which behaves itself. The three of us dance off together under the umbrella.

It was challenge to craft this routine in a way that would be funny and metaphorical but still carry a specific message. I worried it would be too blatant and didactic, or completely miss the point. But we’ve done it six times now, and it seems to work. There is a nice calm as Heddy and I dance with the umbrella. The kids laugh when the umbrella gets the better of Joe, and when they see him being scared to go back underneath. They love clapping and chanting along with us. After the show James, our contact from Plan, gets up and talks a little about who we are and why we’re there. Today is his first time seeing the show, and he likes the message. During his talk he explains in creole what we’re doing in Haiti: helping people get over the trauma of the earthquake by sharing laughter together, and bringing the important message “Ou pa bezwen pe – lavi ap continue!” I am on stilts at the end of the show and stand behind him leaning on his shoulders and watching the audience as he speaks. When he says these words the adults nod, and some say them along with him.

In the car on the way back from the show, James asks us if we’d mind adding an extra show that day. We decide to fit it after lunch and before our scheduled afternoon show. It’s in Jean the driver’s neighborhood, so he goes over in advance to let people know about it. But when we get to the appointed spot, the community’s church, there is no one there. It’s mid-day, and HOT, and people are resting. We decide, since we’re already there, to unload the props and see what happens. A few kids walk over to see what’s happening, then a few more. We start the show for an audience of about twenty, and by the end there are at least sixty watching in the shady church.

The next show is at another tent camp with a similar array of tents, tarps, and cloth structures. As we set up and check over our performance area we warn each other of sharp rocks and pieces of broken glass that are everywhere sticking out of the dirt, and work out how to modify the acrobatics and falls in the show so nobody has to lie on the ground. Which is important for us to think about, and feels weird at the same time because many of the people who are milling around watching us set up are barefoot.

Before our show there is a 10-minute presentation by a Haitian drama group sporting World Vision t-shirts. They do a skit and then a song and dance about hygiene: wash your hands before you eat, put three tablets in your water to purify it, or boil it for 15 minutes. Someone next to me tells me they’ve been touring to all the camps to spread this message.

It’s a nice, big, multi-generational crowd that’s amassed by the time we start our show. Lots of laughter. One surprise hilight comes during the mask dance. Heddy and I put on masks and dress up as an old man and an old woman, respectively, and dance with each other and then with audience members. People laugh as their friends come up to dance with these strange old characters. But this time a middle-aged man runs on stage and starts dancing his own dance. He cuts in on Heddy’s dance, sweeping her across the stage. When I finish dancing with my partner, the man scoops me up and twirls me around. Then Joe steps up, not to be left out, and the man picks him up in the air!

3/26/10, Croix des Boquets Tent camp show. A crowd of about 150 kids and adults but more and more gather as we do the show. A couple of soldiers come over and watch. One of them gets to laughing so hard, he actually drops his assault rifle. This is a little unnerving, but kind of awesome at the same time. A couple of the older kids tease him. During one of our silly dances, the cutest little boy (hes got  to be about 2) jumps up with us and puts us all to shame with his moves. The crowd goes nuts. We talk to the soldiers afterward and find 2 of them are from Pakistan and the other is from Nepal. Venezuelans soldiers were overseeing the last tent camp we were at and we are supposed to perform at another later in the week sponsored by the Cuban military. I just had no idea how global of an effort this is. There are military and volunteers here from all over the world, and yet the needs and organization required to rebuild and get people shelter is so overwhelming.

3/27/10 Croix des Bouquets Orphanage sponsored by UNICEF. One of our tougher shows, maybe because we’re exhausted, maybe because these kids are struggling with loss that goes beyond our comprehension… The kids liven up as the show goes on, their faces brighten and smiles come onto their faces, and though they are a quieter group, they are still responsive and seem to be with us. After the show, they ask to take a photo with us. There is a disabled boy in a wheelchair in the corner and when they gather the kids together, he is still there. So I ask if we could move the kids, or bring him over, and one adult and 2 kids try to push his chair, but the tent we’re in is on gravel, so the chair won’t roll. And then I see that his chair is completely broken. Each time someone tries to push it, the wheel is splays out to the side. So between 4 of us we lift the chair and bring it into the group of kids for the photo. He tells me shyly his name is Jean-Pierre. He seems both pleased and embarrassed by the special attention but smiles for the first photo and sticks out his tongue for the second. Monday, 3/22/10, Jacmel, Haiti, Sarah Haiti wakes up early: people shouting, old trucks bouncing by, roosters crowing, an unhappy donkey next door braying to the sun. I’m awake at 5ish as the first grey light is starting to shine under the door. We come together at 7am for a breakfast of traditional Haitian pumpkin soup, and get ready for our first show of the day at a Doctors Without Borders hospital here in Jacmel. The pediatric ward is set up in a large white tent outside a large building which might have once been the hospital. The building still stands, but many of the remaining buildings here are vacated because they are no longer structurally sound. Plan is setting up a large number of school tents outside of school buildings right now for the same reason. Even when school buildings are structurally sound and deemed safe, some of the children who were traumatized by the earthquake will be too traumatized to enter them, another reason for the school tents. This pediatric ward tent is barely big enough for the eight or so beds lined with kids and families, and the nurses and hospital equipment. We can’t walk all the way through because of the tight space, so we pop in one side, do some gentle bedside visits, and the pop around to the other side. Heddy blows bubbles and dances to Joe’s guitar. I do a couple of magic tricks and toss juggling balls to the kids who are up and alert and wanting to catch them. Joe plays the guitar to the tiniest baby I’ve ever seen, which is wailing nonstop in its mother’s arms. It stops and looks up at him. A little crowd of mostly adults gathers outside the tent to see what we’re up to, so when we take leave of the sick kids we do a couple of small shows outside as well. Then on to our next show of the morning. As we pull up we see that the next venue is a preschool. We have a quick huddle, making a plan to be flexible and gentle as we perform for such a young audience. Our first entrance provokes a few criers – white people! In weird outfits! - but as we take off our noses and begin the show, jockeying for position and flipping over one another as we all try to be the one to make the first announcement, the laughter prevails. Waiting at the Plan office before our last show of the day, I get to talking to a man named Bernadel, who has been working in the office as an English/Creole translator. At first he expresses interest in Joe’s guitar: “I play the guitar too, but mine was destroyed in the earthquake.” I tell him I’m sorry his guitar was gone – I’m sure Joe would let him play his for a while. He says he lost his house as well, and his 2-year-old son, and he misses his wife who cannot stop crying and is staying with family near Les Cayes while he finds work here. He shows me pictures of his late son, his wife, the remains of his house where he wasn’t able to find his son’s body. A thirteen-year-old family friend was watching his son at home and she died as well. Bernadel was in a car at the time of the earthquake. A roof from a building fell and landed on the car. He was sitting in the passenger seat. The driver and the people in the back seat were killed, but he walked out of the car unhurt. “You are lucky,” I say. “No, not lucky,” he answers. “I am privileged.” He wants to get out of Haiti where all these bad memories are. “I hope that you and your wife will find joy together again,” I say. “Yes, I hope so,” he says. A few minutes later another Plan staff person came out to the porch where we were sitting and asked if we could add an extra show tomorrow, to perform for all of the Plan staff in the morning. “Yes!” we say. Adults need laughter along with the kids.

3/23/10, Jacmel, Haiti, Sarah This morning our contacts at Plan International take us to play for a school. There are many schools that are not yet back in session after the earthquake, but this one has a big enough yard that they were able to set up temporary classrooms under tarp canopies to protect the students from the strong sun and impending rains. They find a tarp to roll out on the bare ground to mark our playing space, and six hundred boys file in to watch the show. From the very first moment of the show when we start parading in, me on trombone, Joe on guitar, and Heddy on harmonica, the crowd is responding. Our first series of flips over each other as we vie for position to make the opening show announcement is met with laughs and cheers. Boys push forward to see the show better, and our stage is shrinking. The rest of the show is a mixture of effusive joy and chaos: boys laughing and leaping and roaring at the show, and then pushing their friends to see it better. We are caught between wanting to cut the show short before the pushing gets worse, and riding it out because they are so enjoying it. We end up cutting one act in the middle, and turning the ending dance into an ending parade so that everyone can see and join in. I am on stilts for the parade. Joe walks in front of me, keeping space for me to walk and fending off the crowd of boys who want to grab my legs to see how the stilts work. Boys crowd around as I sit down on the front of the truck to see me take the stilts off. Eske nou te reme spektak la? (Did you like the show?) I ask. Yes! they say. I look down to take my stilts off and they start pushing each other and I realize I need to keep them engaged. I talk and play games with them, trying not to take my eyes off them as I remove the stilts. My new favorite things is to make animal noises with a big group of kids: they seem incapable of not laughing at animal noises. I ask them if they speak French. A handful say yes. Haitian creole? They all say yes. Bird? No. Well, I speak bird. Let us hear. Cree cree cree coooo! Do you speak cow? A boy moos. The rest laugh. Etc … until the stilts are off and the teachers come to take the boys back to class.

Our second show of the day is strangely similar to the first. It is actually at the same school, but for the afternoon students, mostly girls. They divide the day so that more students can use the outdoor school space. We come up with a set-up and seating strategy to avoid the chaos of the morning, and our contact who’s taking us around as well as the school director assure us that the girls in the afternoon will not push each other like the boys. And then … they do! Joy! Madness! Chaos! We take off the red noses in the middle to regain our stage space and look around for teacher assistance … no teachers, or adults, in sight: just a sea of excited girls. We skip a section of the show again, wind up with a wild parade again, and pile in the car exhausted. On to the last show of the day at a big tent camp. The tent camp houses a little over 3,000 in rows and rows of army green tents. The ground is dirt and rocks. There is a long line of people, many kids, waiting with containers at a water pump. People look tired, and dirty. Emmanuel, our contact, explains that there’s no set place to do the show and there isn’t an organized audience to see it. The people walking around us do not at first glance look in the mood for a show. I ask Emmanuel if he’s sure about this situation as a show venue. He is optimistic. As we unload our trunk and stilts and instruments, he organizes the mixed-age group of people milling around nearby into a large circle. He gives them a talk about not pushing forward, and keeping the circle big. “Okay,” he says, “you can start the show.” It turns out to be our best show of the day. Babies, kids, parents, grandparents, NGO aid workers, Venezuelan soldiers, all stay in a big circle and watch the show and laugh. Many of these folks don’t have shoes for their feet. Some kids don’t even have pants. We’d met the Venezuelan soldiers earlier in the week and they’d said “come to our camp! The kids are so sad there. They sit there and cry.” Seeing them laugh was a great end to the day.

3/22/2010, Day 5 3 shows today. 530am rise. Our first hospital this morning. A bit emotionally overwhelming at first, felt myself starting to lose it, but swallowed it down to do what we came to do. Small pediatric tent. A tiny, tiny newborn wails in a makeshift crib. A little girl with a head wound, a boy and a girl hooked to tubes, more injuries. The little newborn stops crying at the sound of Joe’s guitar playing. I try in vain to blow some bubbles, but today they’re just not working, so I put them away and play the harmonica a little. Smiles and silly faces go a long way here. A very different environment from the shows we’re doing in tent cities and schools. It’s a lot of sensing where these kids and their families are at, taking it very gentle and slow.

After the hospital we head to a preschool. Another place where a little more sensitivity is required because these kids are so young. We take off our noses which seems to ease some of the initial shock at these white people in wacky outfits marching into their environment, and soon they are laughing and screaming, singing and dancing with us. Almost as awesome as doing the show for the kids is the time we get to spend with them afterwards. The kids are thrilled by Sarah’s stilts “jambes du bois” as they call them here, seeing Joe fall in any capacity is always cause for roars of laughter, and the little girls get a kick out of my tutu. Lots of hugs, high 5’s, making outrageous animal sounds, and when we’re lucky, the kids will do a song and dance for us.

We head to our final show of the day, a tent camp. This is a more intense place. The needs are far greater here. We pass through soldiers guarding the entrance, lines of people waiting for water, and spray painted messages on the walls, “we need help. US, Canada, please help us.” There doesn’t seem to be any organization here as far as where we’re going to be performing. It’s a little unnerving to say the least, but we get of the car and people begin to gather, probably as uncertain as we are. We are able communicate with the onlookers enough so that they form a large circle around us, creating a 360 degree stage. And we begin the show. Seeing solemn, pained  faces transform into laughs and screams of enjoyment – I will never forget it.

3.20.2010, Jacmel, Joe Today was some of our best work!  We performed in the streets of Jacmel for a crowd of about 75 people.  This afternoon, we really found the core of the show, and a wonderful connection with the audience.

During the “Balloon Funeral,”  one of the boys in the crowd jumped into the act playing a dead body as his friends carried him in.  I continued my wailing over him, temporarily forgetting the loss of our Balloon friend, and then he gets up spontaneously and laughs at me as he runs back into the crowd, totally stealing my bit.

When we got to one of our chases, a dog somehow ended up running around with us, and during the Amazing Paper Bag Act, a chicken wandered into our performance area!  When I had my big prat fall, I landed on the chicken!  The chicken screamed (I’d never heard a chicken scream before) and THE CROWD WENT WILD!  Talk about working with what you’re given.  I thought the chicken was trying to upstage me, but it turns out he was setting up the perfect comedic collision.  Thank you, chicken, for being such a great acting partner!

Heddy and I found a man wearing a UConn t-shirt (our grad school), and of course, we had to get a picture with him.  All in all, a wonderful day, a great audience, and a mission well accomplished.  There was not one person on that street without a smile on their face and a laugh in there heart.  Laughter is the true universal language; it crosses all borders and boundaries without prejudice.  Once we all learn to laugh together, maybe we’ll all learn to live together.

Great job clowns!!! Joe

Heddy’s journal 3/18/2010, Day 1 Flight delayed, slept a little on the plane. Chaos at airport. No conveyor belt system for baggage because the old building is no longer in use – this is a new one. All the bags are carried in by airport employees one by one and placed in random areas at which point everybody floods in and tries to find they’re own bags. Lots of crowding and shoving as the panic of “where’s my bag?” seems to fill the crowd. Lots of volunteers wearing t-shirts: Virginians for Haiti, Haiti Relief, JOY… This goes on for a good hour and a half- 2 hours. Finally locate our final and probably most important piece of luggage – the clown trunk – and head out of the airport. Outside, people hanging through bars watching the arrivers come out. A guy immediately grabs our bag and begins leading us somewhere…do we know this guy? And we hear a voice yelling Sarah’s name, it turns out to be our host from Plan International, and no, that guy was definitely not with her.

Driving from the airport to the hotel – collapsed buildings, devastation. We arrive at the hotel but are unable to sleep indoors because the building has not been deemed safe since the earthquake, so we are outside in tents for the night. We rehearse for what will be our first of many shows tomorrow. Paddi, the Irish security guy gives us a very intense security briefing.

It’s all a bit terrifying and amazing. Such will be this journey, I think. -Heddy