Clowneando

Clowning with my beauties

Well, I´ve been here for almost 10 days in Iquitos. I´ve clowned at a children´s shelter, a respite center for special needs kids, a mental institution, and a market-place. Tomorrow I am going to a prison, which should be interesting. I have also been painting houses in lower Belen, a town that floods during the rainy season and the people travel by canoe and live in the upper level of their homes (Don´t ask me how they deal with the mold ?). I have also been helping out with a garden project and dance workshop. Needless to say, it´s been pretty busy.

Every night we break into 10 ¨families¨of 8 for meetings, which involves debriefing about the day and planning for the following. I am lucky enough to have Patch in my group along with clowns from Peru, France, and the US. There are also clowns on the trip from Argentina, Colombia, and Italy. We wrap up on Sat with a clown parade and a big performance by the kids to show off the art they created out of recycled trash, their percussion ensemble (drums also recycled from trash), puppetry, and dance. Then I am going back to Lima for a Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) conference.

In other news I have eaten a mountain of platanos (basically bananas...but I feel that one word cannot possibly do justice the wide variety of banana like treats that platano encompasses) in so many wonderful forms...fried, boiled, in tacacho (a ball of mashed bananas with bacon), juiced, grilled, etc etc. YUM

This is where we went to buy plants for the gardens we planted

You have to love a truck full of clowns. See also the moto-cars

House I painted and 2 of the people who live there