Clowning Around in Mpande, Eastern Cape - March 19, 2010

It is already morning in this hemisphere, we are changing money at the Johannesburg airport, and our trip leader is trying to get us to take off our red clown noses. "We don't want to cause any problems," says Willi Rechler. "Guys, we're going to take off our clown noses when we go through customs."

We agree, but reluctantly. We have been egged on by the words of one member of the India-bound Reach Out trip, who spotted us at JFK before departure: “South Africa? Oh, so you guys are the crazy ones.” In fact, we are the clowns—or at least, the aspiring clowns. Over the next two weeks, we plan to put together a clown show and tour along the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa performing and conducting workshops for children and their guardians. Some of us have acted at Yale, and our trip leaders have clowned before, but the rest of us will be starting from scratch.

Maybe we are crazy. We remove our noses, only to transfer them to the plush animal-shaped neck pillows we bought on impulse while waiting for our flight. We are trip leaders Camila Garcia and Karissa Britten, Dan Amerman, Cameron Webster, Isabel Siragusa, Tully McLoughlin MC, Emily Bernstein TD, Sarah DeLappe, Michael Sparks, and Willi and me. We hope that over the next two weeks, our craziness can share space with our desire to do something meaningful, and we will learn, over the next two weeks, that the work of Clowns Without Borders draws on both these drives.

Clowns Without Borders, the organization with which we worked for our two weeks in South Africa, was originally founded in Barcelona in 1993. It has since spread its mission—“No child without a smile”—to countries all over the world. In 2004, Clowns Without Borders USA started working in South Africa, and in 2007, Yale alumnus Jamie McLaren Lachman ’98 founded Clowns Without Borders South Africa. Jamie, having studied at the Dell’Arte School for Physical Theater, also acts as the organization’s artistic director, and with three local South African artists—Sibongile Tsoanyane, Bongekile Mabuya, and Mr. Fish—he coached us in putting together our clown show.

The work of Clowns Without Borders takes several forms. The international organization brings laugh relief to areas in crisis, recently making news for sending performers to Haiti. In South Africa, Clowns Without Borders performs in communities with little access to the arts, where the HIV/AIDS epidemic has ruptured social and family structures. There, clown shows confront themes of trauma—and just as important, they create an atmosphere of celebration. Besides performing, Clowns Without Borders conducts workshops with children and their guardians, embodying the spirit of clown to let kids be kids, and to help their caretakers connect with them.

During our week of training in Durban, we learned quickly that clowning is unlike many forms of art. “You’re allowed to break the rules, as long as you don’t get caught,” said Jamie our first day. “And the more questions you ask, the more rules there are.” Jet lag notwithstanding, we plunged right into seven-hour rehearsals, and within three days, we were learning our routines for the show—precisely choreographed bits, largely soundless (they would be set to music), with names like Paper Bag and Butt Tunnel. We began incorporating talents—juggling, simple acrobatics, and musical interludes provided by Sarah, Tully, and the ukuleles they made it their mission to find our first day in town.

We rehearsed in an upstairs studio at a facility called the BAT Centre for the Arts, and there were artists working all around us. One day, when Sarah and Tully were strumming their ukuleles over lunch, a local musician came over, set up something he called a string bass, and without introduction joined them. He played a big wooden box topped by a curved stick and a string stretched taught - and he was good.

"Welcome to the circus," quipped Mr. Fish, as afterward we hurried up the stairs, adjusting costumes, late for our afternoon rehearsal. The next day, an artist working below our rehearsal space asked me if I was part of "the circus group upstairs" - and I realized we were no longer just 11 college kids on spring break. Over the course of a week, in the eyes of a man from Durban, South Africa, we had become artists - clowns, in fact. At least that was the hope we counted on when we stopped rehearsing Friday afternoon to leave for safari. We took the day off and took in zebras, giraffes, and rhinos before our epic drive to the Eastern Cape.

That second week, we performed twice every morning, our venues ranging from tiny one-room preschools to schools that served children of all ages. We traveled standing all together in the flatbed of a Toyota, and in our costumes, we were a sight to see. One morning, as we prepared to perform in the yard between the two long parallel buildings of one school—setting up our backdrop, strapping on our noses—it started to pour. We decided to move the children under the porch of each building, out of the rain, while we performed in the yard between them, trying to play to both sides—an awkward arrangement, but the best we could do. About five minutes into our show, the littlest kids started moving their chairs out from under the porch to the center of the yard—into the rain—to get a better view of our performance. That morning, we felt like we were doing something right.

At one of the bigger schools, the arts and culture teacher stopped us after the show to tell us that he had never seen a ukulele before—and that our performance, in that small village that never saw performances, had expanded his world. He went on to say that if our show was able to broaden the world of someone so old, who had seen so much, then it must have enriched immensely the children, who had experienced only seven years’ worth of life. As the week wore on, we learned that if we waved and shouted “Ajukujah”—a line from our show—from the truck as it pulled away, then the schoolchildren would shout and wave back.

In the afternoons that second week, we conducted workshops—the strategy of Project Njabulo, a program of Clowns Without Borders South Africa. With the South African artists, we divided into three groups: one to work with children ages two to six, another to work with ages six to sixteen, and the third to work with their guardians, mostly older women. HIV prevalence is gut-wrenchingly high in the places where Clowns Without Borders works, and the epidemic has taken its toll in breaking down family support structures, leaving orphans to be cared for by their grandparents—or someone else’s. These guardians, often grieving a loved one, can be disconnected from the child-rearing process. The workshops seek to provide them with tools to relieve stress, connect with their inner children, and communicate and play with the children in their charge. The workshops for children have also been developed with the emotional and social effects of the epidemic in mind. Clowns Without Borders teaches older children to develop theatrical tableaux in which they realize their life goals, and gives younger children a safe environment for empowering play.

We had only a very short amount of time with our workshop groups—three two-hour sessions—but nevertheless, all workshop leaders saw participants open up, leaving us optimistic about the program’s effects, especially if Clowns Without Borders trains local people in continuing the workshops, as they plan to do. Those of us working with the smallest children saw them grow eager to play the leading role in a call-and-response game and begin to clamor for more rounds of Duck Duck Goose—a game in which two children become the center of focus as their community cheers them on.

The leaders of the guardian workshop saw composed, initially reluctant women begin to giggle after a few theater games. The guardians also grew eager to recount their completion of each night’s homework—assignments that encouraged them to connect with their children through play. On our last day, one guardian asked for a workshop leader’s phone number so that she might continue to report updates on her progress with her child.

We all spent a lot of time, that second week, discussing whether our work had real impact. After all, we were only in that community for a week—how much could we accomplish, really? At one school, a teacher came up to one of us and said, “Look at what we have”—gesturing to the corrugated metal shack, the buildings in disrepair, the desks gathered under a tree for want of a classroom. We eleven Yalies could have built that teacher a new school and more with the combined cost of our plane tickets to South Africa. We hoped our trip amounted to more than simple self-indulgence, but sometimes we had trouble remembering why.

The value of our work became clearest in the context of the broader organization, Clowns Without Borders South Africa. As part of that organization, we were conducting follow-up visits at schools the clowns had visited in years past, and we were laying the groundwork for future visits. We were piloting programs that could be made sustainable by their transference to volunteers at the local level. We were working as hard as we could in the short time we had. And at one small elementary school, a teacher greeted me with the words, “You’re back.”

I had never been within a continent of her before—she meant “you,” you clowns, you crazy Clowns Without Borders. I told her yes, we were back. She remembered the last time the clowns had passed through—2007 or 2008, she said—and told me how happy the clowns had made the children, and taught me the local Xhosa word for “dance.” Her English, though infinitely better than my Xhosa, was basic, so she and I mostly stood and smiled at one another. After the show, as we pulled away in our clown truck, she waved and called after us: “I love you.” You, Clowns Without Borders.