Clowns Without Borders - USA

In 2010 we are planning four projects in Haiti. These projects will focus on performances for large and small audiences, workshops for street children in and around Port Au Prince, peer educators who go into their own communities to bring awareness to HIV and AIDS and local performing artists with hopes for empowering Haitians through physical theatre, clown and social circus.

Rudi will be returning to Chiapas this December through January.

A massive, 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti near the capital of Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, January 12th. The area has since felt many aftershocks making the effects of this disaster hard to fathom. We are doing our best to keep informed and provide assistance as needed. While smiles and laughter are important, at the moment medical aid, shelter, food and water take utmost priority. We hope that with your support we can raise awareness about the gravity of this disaster and mobilize people to support emergency relief efforts. Please see below for a list of organizations you might wish to support.

Colombia has seen as many as 3.8 million people driven from their homes by violence brought on by paramilitary and rebel forces battling for territorial control with the government resulting in Colombia ranking third in the world after Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo for the largest number of internally displaced people (IDPs). This year, Clowns Without Borders-USA will initiate a Project to meet the young people of these communities and other vulnerable children.

Sarah, Tim and Suzanne, along with Dianna and two filmmakers, are now in Cap-Haitien for one week and then off to Port Au Prince for the second week. The project will consist of performances and workshops. Sarah and Tim are thrilled to be returning to Haiti, this will be their first trip back since December 2007. This will be Suzanne’s first project with CWB.

Still in awe of the harsh living conditions that most in Haiti live in, Deven’s blog of Clowns Without Borders project to the poorest country in the western hemisphere attempts to capture some of the experience.

Nick Trotter writes from Chiapas, Mexico where he joined Rudi Galindo on a Clowns Without Borders project in January 2008.

In fourteen days we did 18 shows plus two workshops and entertained almost 5000 children!
This was a follow-up to our trip to the same region in 2006 when we toured communities that had been devastated by Hurricane Stan, killing over 1000 people and cutting off nearly every road in the country. The highlands of western Guatemala are heavily populated by Indigenous Mayan people, most of whom live in extreme poverty. The area is also plagued by a high level of violence left over from a genocidal war waged by the Guatemalan military (with US support) from the 1970’s through the early 1990’s.

Sarah, Brendon, Elisa and Moshe spent the first week in the Les Cayes area in the southwest of Haiti. This was CWB-USA’s third visit to the area. The group spent the week performing shows, doing walk-around performances, and teaching stilt, juggling, balancing and clown workshops to local kids. We saw a lot of old friends – adults and children in the community who remembered some of us, our previous shows, and even some circus skills they were ready to build on. We also met a lot of new people and made some new contacts – for example, we visited a nearby orphanage and did a lively show under a metal airplane hangar for about 600 kids.

Here’s a little about our expedition so far - more will follow when we get back to the states later this week. We leave 40-something degree weather in the states and step off the plane in Port-au-Prince into air that was about 95 degrees but felt like 107 with the humidity. Extreme heat, great joy and sorrow, hope and desperation: Haiti sometimes seems like a collection of extremes. When we arrive in Torbek we are met by a mass of children. They remember the group from CWB who visited last April, and we are greeted with smiles and shouts of “Tim! Tim!” and “Nou pedi!” which means “We’re lost!” - the theme of the April clown show. Kids come and watch as we prepare for our performances around the area; an outdoor rehearsal ends in a long improvised clown show with a bunch of local kids.