Haiti November 2006
Participants : Elisa Lane, Sarah Lianne Foster & Tim Cunningham
SARAH'S JOURNALS
“Ou fou!” a girl’s voice calls through the
twilight as
we walk back from a circus skills workshop session
down the road. “Ou fou”: “you’re crazy”
in Haitian
creole, has become the refrain of the clown show that
we performed all over the rural, impoverished town of
Torbeck, Haiti. “Ou fou,” our clowns said to each
other. “Li fou” (“he/she’s crazy”),
we explained to
the audience. “Ou fou. Li fou. M pa fou! Ou fou.
Tout moun fou!” Tout moun fou: everyone is crazy.
Our show provided audiences with 45 minutes of
craziness which, judging from the shouts as we walk
down this rocky dirt road, they carried with them back
to their lives after the show ended. The voice in
question this time belongs to a girl who looks about
12. She is sitting outside her corrugated tin house
with her hands in a bucket of laundry. “Ou fou,”
I
call back, “bon jou fou!” “No, ou fou,”
she says,
smiling and waving as we continue down the road.
From November 2nd through 15th, Tim Cunningham, Elisa
Lane and I performed clown shows, taught theatre and
circus skills workshops, and did walkaround
performances on a Clowns Without Borders expedition to
Haiti. Our goal was to spread joy, laughter and play
among people, particularly children, who face hardship
and trauma in their daily lives.
In Haiti, the
poorest country in the western hemisphere, paralyzed
by corruption and political unrest, and plagued by
malaria, AIDS, and malnutrition, hardship is indeed a
daily reality. Often the kind of government
infrastructure that we take for granted – navigable
roads, electricity, drinkable water – does not exist
there. When we performed in hospitals we saw children
dying preventable deaths and sick people starving in
their beds. But we also saw sick people and their
families look up and smile at a disappearing/
reappearing handkerchief, or a song strummed on the
ukelele. We constantly encountered amazing children
and adults who were strong, proud, and open to joy.
Monday, 11/6, Cayes: The head of a community
technical college has asked us to perform for his
students. We start playing with the audience as we
set up and they trickle in. The women tend to cast
their eyes down; the men sit back with their arms
crossed, waiting to see what we “blancs” (whites)
will
do. Then the show begins and the laughter starts.
Tim dropping the suitcase and all the props on his
feet. A chase on stilts. An acrobatic sequence as
Elisa chases an invisible bird through the air...
I brought a mask with me to Haiti and this is the
first time we're using it in the show: I dive into a
suitcase and emerge as a hungry donkey. Tim and Elisa
try to tie me up with a rope while I search the stage
and then the audience for something to eat. “Mwen
grangou!” (I’m hungry!), I yell. “Mwen grangou”
is a
phrase we hear from everywhere we go – at schools, in
hospitals, in the street. Money and food are scarce.
To put these words in the mouth of a white person in a
donkey costume is potentially risky. We are hoping
that the imminent reality of hunger in here will make
this bit hilarious, rather than sad or
anger-provoking. The donkey runs through the audience
in search of food, finally sitting on a man’s lap
while eating out of a woman’s purse. Hilarity wins.
We have incorporated two doctor bits into the show to
empower audiences and provide a context for people to
laugh at the reality of disease. An enthusiastic
audience volunteer doctor helps me perform “surgery”
on Elisa. We pull numerous objects out of her belly,
including a shower cap, latex gloves, and funny
glasses, all of which he happily puts on. When Elisa
finally jumps up, cured, Tim turns on music for a
final dance. Our volunteer jumps in and dances with
us with no prompting, much to the audience’s delight.
After the show we bring out stilts and people line up
to try. Most learn amazingly fast, letting go of my
hands and walking by themselves as quickly as they
can. The last man who tries has the most trouble – he
is very shaky on his tall legs, but refuses to give
up. He finally lets go and takes off across the
floor. We start clapping rhythm. Tall man starts
singing, and everyone joins in. There are about 25 of
us singing “pilé pilé pilé, n’ap
pilé tet satan.”
Someone translates: “We are stepping on the head of
the devil.” I imagine hunger, disease, poverty,
violence rearing their ugly heads, and this man on
stilts stepping, crushing them down.
Saturday, 11/11, Port-au-Prince: Where Torbeck
was
rural and relatively quiet, Port-au-Prince is crowded,
dirty, and more dangerous. Haiti is less violent and
treacherous than the US media makes it out to be: I
have never witnessed violence here or felt endangered.
We hear stories here of foreign reporters roaming
Port-au-Prince, searching for gun violence so they can
take interesting photos for their papers. Still, when
we are in Port-au-Prince it is best for us not to go
around alone. When we go out to do shows and
workshops in Port-au-Prince, Fanfan, our contact,
always picks us up and drives us.
We drive past piles of garbage that line and clog the
torn-up streets – pushed to the sides or piled in the
middle or heaped down the banks of a river. Goods for
sale spread out on cloths: secondhand American shirts,
bottles of bath products, buckets of charcoal, live
chickens with tied feet. Cement buildings with
corrugated tin roofs stand side by side by side.
Every cement wall sports spray-painted writing
advertising political candidates, protesting rising
prices. Trucks and brightly painted taptaps packed
with people cut each other off and drive fast over
bumps and mud puddles, through a traffic light with no
light. Thick polluted air pours in the window as we
ride, giving the city a sleepy sheen. 
Monday, 11/13, Port-au-Prince: Fanfan picks
us up
early in the morning for four shows in the Carrefour
neighborhood. But when we reach the road to Carrefour
he turns the car in the opposite direction. “Change
of plans,” he tells us. It’s then we notice that
the
road we were about to turn down, devoid of the usual
traffic, is flowing with hundreds of people walking
away from the Carrefour area. There is a protest: we
need to avoid that part of town for a while. We pull
into a high school yard and Fanfan goes to speak with
the teachers. He comes back and says “Okay, they’re
on break now. You go down to that gazebo – see there?
You have fifteen minutes.” We have a quick planning
meeting and go: Tim picks up our props and parades
through throngs of highschoolers with his hat over his
eyes, tripping and dropping things on his feet. Elisa
runs ahead blowing bubbles. I come through on stilts,
feigning instability, grabbing heads and shoulders for
support. Before we know it we have a raucous, excited
crowd of about 1000 kids. What follows is what Tim
later describes as bone-shaking, powerful laughter.
Completely, absolutely fou.
May you all be well, and fou,
Sarah
From: sarah foster
Date: November 13, 2006 2:38:35 PM GMT+01:00
To: moshe cohen
Subject: little update
moshe - here is a little bit about our time in ayiti
- we'll write more and send pictures when we get
back. sarah
Tout Moun Fou!: Clowns Tribo Babo (Clowns Without
Borders) in Haiti
Hello from Ayiti! I am here with Tim Cunningham and
Elisa Lane for two weeks of clown shows and workshops,
beginning in Torbek and Okay in the south of Haiti,
and finishing up with five days in Port-au-Prince.
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.
Angelo begins directing us, making up funny bits with
Tim's battered hat. Fabi creates a playful scene with
my black umbrella. Jojo finds a big clown nose and
puts it on his small face, then picks up some bubbles,
lifting the nose with one hand to expose his mouth so
he can blow the bubbles up to the sky. We begin a
playful banter with our limited creole. "Li fou!"
(he's crazy) I say, pointing to Tim. "Ou fou!"
(you're crazy) he replies. "Li fou!" "No, li
fou!"
"Ou fou!" "Mwen fou? no, m pa fou!" In
the end the
children help us find the theme to our clown show that
we've been searching for: "Tout moun fou" (we are
all
crazy). In the coming days our work is to help these
kids, and all the others we meet, to play and laugh
and act fou, despite the hardships of daily life.
On Saturday we travel to a hospital in Okay to perform
for kids in the pediatric ward. As we enter, a mother
leads her small daughter up to us and lifts up her
shirt. The girl's head and limbs are small and thin,
but her belly is enormous, swollen with infection.
She moans. Tim takes out his ukelele. We begin to
play and sing softly and the girl focuses her eyes on
us for a moment to listen. Dr. Stan, our host who
brought us to the hospital, quietly explains to the
hospital doctors that they should stop giving the
mother hope - the girl's case is hopeless. The
pediatric ward is packed and stuffy: rows of children
in beds, surrounded by families. Many parents here
tell us they are hungry: the hospital provides care,
but the families must buy their own medical supplies
and food, and many can't afford it. We play quietly
around the room - songs, little dances, a disappearing
handkerchief - and people gather around us to watch,
laughing. We do our best to distract them from their
sorrows.
There is so much to tell about our time in Torbek and
about the work we have just begun in Port-au-Prince,
but now it is time to go get ready for our next show
... more to come. May you be well and a little bit
fou.
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