Well, I haven´t really updated since I´ve been here as I´ve been so tired/busy/enjoying things too much to sit in a sweaty internet cafe. The other morning just before I woke up, I was apparently was so tired that I slept through a small earthquake...nothing was disturbed in the tiny temblor, but you´d think I´d at least awaken for it. Too much clowning, too many meetings, too many late nights at Nikaro (a bar that we take over when we´re here), though I´m not sure if I can say too much dancing...dancing here is a cure-all for the clowns, and it´s amazing how no matter how little sleep you get, it´s really always better psychologically and physically to go out and dance a little than to sleep a couple extra hours.
Today we clowned at a prison with three parts--men, women, and young men, which was great but highly depressing. The people were all so lovely and normal, and human...it made me sick that they had done some thing in the past and were now living behind bars for some amount of time, only to be released as if nothing happened in some years....especially sad is the young men who are wasting their youth in a cell.
A couple days before I clowned at a general hospital. I had a beautiful moment with a Polish clown named Psemo. He was blowing up balloons for people to draw faces and figures on, and he came over to a guy I was talking to. The guy had only recently sat up; when we walked in, he seemed uninterested. Psemo handed him a balloon and the guy started to smile a little. He then handed him a marker to draw on it and we realized that the man didn´t have the fine motor skills to do anything but scribble fine lines, so we had him hold the marker as tightly as he could and I moved the balloon around on the marker to draw a heart, a star, a flower, and to write his name: Alejandro. The old man was beside himself with joy, smiling hugely with his near toothless mouth, and moving his treasured art work around with his hands. Sometimes I just feel like I´m wandering around dressed up in silly clothes, but that was one of those moments when I realized ahh yes, this is what we are doing here!
much more to come about the parade, vaccinating dogs, and petroleum in the jungle...
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