tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62745142011-07-14T14:31:24.261-07:00A small group of performers and activists working with traumatised kids in Iraq, January 2004. Vive la circo-revolucion. BOOMCHUCKA.Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comBlogger501100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1097680855828015102004-10-13T08:20:00.000-07:002004-10-13T08:20:55.826-07:00

October 13th 2004 Clowns to Kurdistan We made a load of plans for the Boomchucka Clowns to go back to Iraq this autumn, compiled an info sheet for people who wanted to join the circus, planned for some fundraising, made a list of useful stuff and people to blag it off, agreed who was going to do what. And then Ghareeb was dead; Ghareeb who took me to Falluja, who took countless foreigners to

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March 31st Basra Basra starts suddenly, as you approach from Samawa. On one side of the railway tracks there is nothing but desert, immense trails of oil tankers oozing along the highway, similar sized hordes of camels traipsing the other way, the Japanese troop carriers on the way out of Samawa giving way to British ones further south. On the other side are houses, densely packed, expanding to

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March 29th Samawa At sunset swallows dive among the washing lines and satellite dishes on the flat rooves across the town of Samawa, about 120km north of Nasariya, and the market comes to life, dead chickens lying in trays, the insides of half sheep hanging in doorways, pungent fish and bags of sour yoghurt and cheese curd, cages of pigeons, fruit and vegetables, a tea stall here and there

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March 26th The Girls’ Day Out “This was a Baath party building. The girls have never been in this hall before,” Maha said by way of explanation for the ones who burst into tears and went and hid. “Only three girls come to the youth centre and they only come for sewing lessons.” For the last couple of weeks she’s been visiting the girls’ schools and talking to their parents, negotiating and

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March 24th The Southern Tour A sign on the wall opposite says “Idle Association Thi Qar”. Thi Qar is the southern governorate which includes the city of Nasariya and the road in front of the Idle Association is closed off every morning by a couple of vehicles of Italian troops, dark blue carabinieri in tight trousers and sunglasses, smoking cigarettes out of the roof hatches, a few more on foot

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March 24th The Southern Tour A sign on the wall opposite says “Idle Association Thi Qar”. Thi Qar is the southern governorate which includes the city of Nasariya and the road in front of the Idle Association is closed off every morning by a couple of vehicles of Italian troops, dark blue carabinieri in tight trousers and sunglasses, smoking cigarettes out of the roof hatches, a few more on foot

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1080122549032018492004-03-24T02:02:00.000-08:002004-03-24T02:05:56.546-08:00

Twinning Opportunities The circus has made contacts with lots of groups of kids in schools, youth centres and orphanages of various kinds. We want to set up twinning links with groups of kids in the UK, so the kids can get to know each other, talk about their lives and their countries and their ideas. Possible activities include exchanging letters, via a translator, which I can organise,

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March 21st Bayaa The kids painted a mural on the wall outside what used to be a Baath party building, a harp, the tower in Samara, a lion and now it’s a youth centre. There are three different age groups who use the centre on different days: six to ten, eleven to thirteen and fourteen to eighteen. The Children’s Council consists of four boys and three girls elected by the other kids from all the

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March 20th Peace Prayers Part of the experience of Baghdad immediately before the war and often since has been the unexpected meetings with people from all over the world: the students from Congo and Chad, a young Serbian woman with stories of war and peace, the Vietnam vets, the refuseniks, the African American reverend, the Buddhist monks, the Japanese with their drums and the South Americans

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March 19th Sanctuary After the carnage of the bomb, after the much smaller bomb in the electricity box in the next street, our feet drew us to the Mother Teresa orphanage, maybe more for our sanctuary than for their entertainment, to a small group of children who are mostly, I am sure, unaware of the blood and screaming that daily happens outside their walls. Sanctuary it hardly seems when you

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March 18th The Bomb I set off for the internet. I’m wearing the poker face I’ve learnt from the Iraqi women to deflect harassment, staring straight ahead, slightly fiercely, not responding to any shouts or remarks, even greetings, because as soon as one man sees you say hello to another, you’re fair game. The air seems impossibly full for a second and then bursts with a roar, sending a tremor

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March 16th Schools Headmaster Mohammed looked out at the horde of kids outside the school gate and mused that quite a lot of them might come back now they’d seen the circus. They wouldn’t want to miss it if it came back again, he said. Loads of kids dropped out because of poverty in the family, the dangers and difficulties of getting to school or the poor conditions of the school itself. Kids

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March 12th Maxmur His eyes sparkled with joy and tears. For the first time in the eleven years of his life, a refugee for all of them, Nuredi was hearing music, holding Luis’s didge to his ear. Bright brown eyes, amid the freckles, sunburnt nose and a huge smile of disbelief and delight which didn’t leave him the rest of the day. Rindo kissed the top of his head as he gazed at us like we were

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March 9th The Dictator Thursday is a holiday, a celebration of the anniversary of the creation of the Kurdish zone in northern Iraq shortly after the end of the 1991 war when the Kurds who had risen up for freedom were betrayed by the ceasefire and massacred by Saddam's army. It's a celebration of their freedom. Four teenage girls sat on rugs by a heater under shimmering chandeliers, minding

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March 8th The Federal State Drums announced the coming of the parade, men and boys, the red, white and green of the Kurdish flag, with a many-pointed gold star in the middle, the placard featuring Mustafa Barzani, the murdered Kurdish leader. The Kurds have been stateless people in the empires of others more or less forever, ruled by the Ottomans, the British, the puppets of the British and,

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March 7th Clowning in Kurdistan The boys' orphanage looked better on Saturday morning: there was still broken glass and heaps of half-furniture but a woman with a mop was making Jihad against the dust. The dust was still in control, on the whole, but the grime from the floor had gone and there were more workers about, the morning shift already gone to school and the afternoon shift milling about

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AL ALMIRYA 14/2/1991 R.I.P. I was going to try to make this weeks report a funny one. Was up until gone one last night writing the draft for it. But today there is no humor in me, only shame. Because today I went to almirya. If that name means nothing to you then don't worry, it didn't to me either. Although now, in hindsight, I remember seeing it on the news due in the first gulf war. It's a

peathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13764802340847929176noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1078507050340139302004-03-05T09:15:00.000-08:002004-03-05T09:20:32.093-08:00

STREET KIDS BECAUSE Because you were born a year into the sanctions that were to kill over ½ a million children, so all you've ever known is poverty. Because, when you were six, your widowed mother's new husband threw out any children that weren't his, so you moved onto the street. Because life on the street as a seven-year-old adult is so horrid, so you take the only escape route open to

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March 4th Erbil We were acting up in Kishmisha, the juice bar at the end of our street, taking bright red lights out of each other's ears and pockets, making hankies disappear, Peat apparently taking 30 or so ping pong balls out of his mouth and so on, as we seem to do most days. People expect it of us. It would be rude to disappoint them. A man we didn't know came in. "Are you some kind of

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March 3rd Post Traumatic Stress So. Yesterday was Ashura. The whole world knows now that yesterday was Ashura because they saw the bodies on TV. Four of Waleed's old school friends, now at college, were killed in the Kadhmiya explosions. The taxi driver asked had we heard. Everyone asked had we heard. And all of them said, "This is the Americans. They are trying to make us fight each other."

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February 29th Bubble Riots Marwa pointed to a young man, his arm in a sling, a striped towel wrapped around a plaster cast. “My brother,” she said. A pile of bullets on the ground, Sattar explained that you can melt them and sell the brass for 500 – 1000 Dinar per kilo. You can scavenge them anywhere. A few days ago, while he was working on one, it blew up and took his finger with it. A finger’s

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February 28th Ashura Two lines of young men, dressed in black, belts at the waist so T shirts flare at the bottom, green headbands around dark hair, swing their arms up, hands to the sky, swing them down so their bodies bend forwards as well, bring their hands up to chest height, arms bent at the elbow, mark another beat and then, with the crash of drums and cymbals, thump their chests. The

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February 23rd A Postcard from Jordan Would you believe it? My first morning out of Iraq, I was woken up by an earthquake in Amman. With every crash and thump, Simona and I looked at each other, shook our heads and reminded ourselves we were in Jordan now. There was no reason to think that noise was a bomb. The building started to shake and I was about to remark on the gale that must be blowing

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February 9th Reflections The reed hut used to stand at the edge of the water, its wendy house shape reflected in the sludge at the edges of the pool. Now there is but a puddle, several metres away. The drain at the Sha’ala camp isn’t completely finished yet but already there’s an enormous improvement. Huge tanks from me and them to everyone who helped build it. Still not everything is well.

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February 5th Back to Sha’ala The Sha’ala kids came running out to meet us, arms out. The girls joined in with the parachute games this time, asked to be picked as cat or mouse, lying on the fabric to be lifted up and run around on it. The women watched through the reed fence of the house next to the concrete square where we performed. They wanted the scarves that are tied to the broom handle for

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February 1st Happy Eid Lack of electricity was delaying the start of the Eid show at the Happy Family base so I climbed up on my stilts and we started clowning and boomchucking. The kids and the Happy Family lads all shout it at us when we arrive now. I nicked Luis’s hat and, as I was posing and strutting about with it and he was finding a child to put on his shoulders to try and reach it, the

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It was the last thing I heard before I slept, unfolding the spare mattress for Ahmed, sleeping off the alcohol he drowned his sorrows in, and the first thing I heard in the morning, when Hamsa opened the door and sat on the end of my bed. He is dead. He is dead. Four bullets destroyed his skull on the road from Hilla back to Baghdad. His name was Durayd. His four year old son is called Ibrahim

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January 30th The Workhouse “Workhouse for Orphans and Parentless Children” is scrawled in spray paint in English on the wall outside. Uzma was melodramatically bawling her eyes out when Afra tiptoed past her, pig-tails bouncing, picked up the broom and started doing Uzma’s sweeping, possibly the cutest and most charming act of solidarity I’ve ever seen. She’s seven and a resident of the Dar al

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January 28th Day Trip to Baquba The sheep were making some kind of effort at grazing on mounds of sand and heaps of discarded plastic while people crouched weeding out carrier bags in plots of green. A woman in black with a stick in one hand and a donkey on a string in the other hurried slowly into Baquba town centre, in Diyala province, north of Baghdad. The letters on the board labelling the

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January 27th Ghosts and Clowns Small hands held out four, five, six coloured glass balls, picked a prize piece for the contest, lined up the rest of the marbles, flicked one from an open palm at the row on the road by the stone wall. Crouching between puddles on the crumbled road, Fatima directed play, a feisty, dark skinned twelve year old girl. Hanging over the wall they watched Fuad and

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FROM PEAT Before I start this weeks report, a point about last weeks one, a point that some lost. The attack on the bunker was in the first gulf war, not the 3rd (the second being 12 years of santions that killed over half a million children). DREAMERS “WAAAAAAAAAA” She stands there, screaming out loud, fist rubbing eyes. “WAAAAAAAAAA” Around her 50 or more children listen, untroubled by her

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January 24th The Drain There was a tent up as we drove back into the camp at Al-Sha’ala: long and semi-cylindrical, open both ends, with people inside drinking tea, eating together on the ground or sitting against the walls drinking chai. It’s a traditional Shia mourning tent for two month old Mariam. “She died of the cold,” Abu Ahmed said simply. It’s been raining the last two days and the

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January 22nd The Making of Legends The meeting was supposed to be with the Environment and Foreign Ministers; the former was off sick and the latter abroad but dozens of journalists were there, nonetheless, to hear Kerim Hassan announce that his group, the National Association for the Protection of the Environment and Children, is about to bring one of the most famous circuses in the world to

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January 21st Sparks You drive out the far side of Al-Ghazalia into Al-Sha’ala [Flame], through a thoroughfare of listless sheep and squashed chickens, pied fruit and veg stalls and rancid shit, past the man blowtorching a cow’s head, for no reason that was obvious to me, over a concrete bridge and you follow a dirt track into the farm compound. You ask the teenage boys whether there’s someone

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AL ALMIRYA 14/2/1991 R.I.P. I was going to try to make this weeks report a funny one. Was up until gone one last night writing the draft for it. But today there is no humour in me, only shame. Because today I went to al Ameriya Shelter. If that name means nothing to you then don’t worry, it didn’t to me either. Although now, in hindsight, I remember seeing it on the news due in the first gulf

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1074617212276263322004-01-20T08:46:00.000-08:002004-01-20T08:48:51.606-08:00

January 19th May The Farce Be With You The first floor hallway was full, when I got in, of people who came round for a couple of drinks on Amber’s last night and men with big guns and Iraqi Police armbands, asking for beer and arresting Tom for having a beard. Well, you can have a tin if you let Tom go. Perhaps he could go for a shave while you’re drinking it. “Lawyer,” It’s what Wisam calls me

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1074538446842623292004-01-19T10:52:00.000-08:002004-01-19T10:56:05.606-08:00

January 18th Today’s bomb woke us with a sound the shape of a rugby ball, starting from a point, swelling to a full bellied roar and tapering again with perfect symmetry. It was surprising less as an alarm call than as a reminder. I haven’t heard one in a couple of weeks. Peat and Amber haven’t heard that sound since they arrived in early January, although the headlines on the internet daily

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Hooray. The photos are posted. Only one power cut today.

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1074360899894701522004-01-17T09:29:00.000-08:002004-01-17T09:36:55.340-08:00

INTERNET MAKES CLOWNS CRY Oh, woe is me, for I can't post a few $%&$#(# photos to the internet, because the connections are so rubbish and the power keeps going off at critical points. I could describe them to you, but I think they'd lose a little. Anyway you can see the ones I did post here. And I'll try and get everyone else's posts up here shortly - having a few technical problems... Grrr

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January 16th Pictures of Smiling Children We got into our clown kit in Eman’s place behind the barrier made out of metal locker doors in the camp at the air force centre we went to a few days ago to arrange the show. There’s a curtain across the gap in the barrier and another across the doorway into Eman’s room. Inside are a couple of rugs on the floor, a gas cooker and a picture of Al Sadr on

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January 12th Playing in the Street There are those who advise keeping a low profile as a foreigner in Iraq and wisely so, I expect, especially if you’re a business contractor. But we needed to practise a new plot involving stilts and skipping ropes and even now the ceiling fan has departed there isn’t room in the apartment for spinning a ten metre rope, so we went outside to the forecourt. We

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January 14th Haifa Camp How did she come here? Asmaa sighed. “It is a very long story and I am tired and sick.” She lives in a tent with UNHCR stamped on the roof in the grounds of the old Haifa Palestinian Sports Club, among twelve thousand homeless families. “I was born in Iraq and brought up here, married here and had my children here, but my father was Palestinian so I am Palestinian. I have

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1073842351931340092004-01-11T09:31:00.000-08:002004-01-17T09:46:17.250-08:00

January 10th Small People on Stilts Exhausted. Today I tied seven thousand* children to stilts, helped them up, walked them round, fended off the hordes of other kids dancing around my feet and their stilt bottoms and tried to remember which order I promised the next few kids a go in. Peat is a superstar. Luis did funny stuff with a didgeridoo and chains. (* A small exaggeration for dramatic

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BY PEAT - STREET KIDS BECAUSE Because you were born a year into the sanctions that were to kill over ½ a million children, so all you’ve ever known is poverty. Because, when you were six, your widowed mother’s new husband threw out any children that weren’t his, so you moved onto the street. Because life on the street as a seven-year-old adult is so horrid, so you take the only escape route

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1073842123088614012004-01-11T09:28:00.000-08:002004-01-11T09:29:03.796-08:00

January 8th Thawrat al-Seerq Our first performance was in a hospital in Thawra, which means revolution. Hemce ‘thawrat al-seerq’ is the circus revolution. We went with Fadhil and performed after their play, clowning on stilts, just me and Amber, blowing bubbles and dancing, playing the kazoos and getting the kids to clap and dance along. Fadhil is into the idea of putting together some kind of

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1073491565647514052004-01-07T08:03:00.000-08:002004-01-07T08:06:25.470-08:00

Last night at 10pm Amber taught me to stilt walk. Tonight we're stuffing bean bags for juggling. I can still do a somersault. Tomorrow we start. Circus revolution in Arabic is "Thawrat al-seerq". It's all good.

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1073413479847125662004-01-06T10:20:00.000-08:002004-01-06T10:24:59.143-08:00

Check out this story . Quick preview: To children attending Boxing Day circuses across the world, juggling balls or balancing a spinning plate may not seem essential for success. But 40 children in Outer Mongolia know differently. Previously they lived in the sewers and heating pipes systems beneath the streets of Ulan Bator where temperatures are routinely minus 25C. Today they know that the

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1073413124942869002004-01-06T10:17:00.000-08:002004-01-06T10:19:04.333-08:00

Hi there folks, For those of you who don't know me, my names PEAT. DEVILSTICK PEAT. I'm a real live, honest to goodness fool!!! That is to say that I wear a red and yellow costume, complete with bells and horny hat, and use humor to make a living. I also use it in my work with what I call "conflict kids" I.E. youngsters who's life's are affected by war, genocide, domestic violence etc. And these

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1073231714522629332004-01-04T07:53:00.000-08:002004-01-04T08:12:00.520-08:00

The plan is this – Peat and Sam (UK) and Amber (US) and Luis (France) will join me, Jo, in Baghdad for about 3 weeks, insha’allah, and work in hospitals, schools, youth centres, institutions for handicapped kids, orphanages and the squatter camps where internally displaced people are living rough. We’ll perform and spend some time teaching the kids skills like juggling, clowning and acrobatics.

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6274514.post-1073056250161274632004-01-02T07:08:00.000-08:002004-01-02T07:11:08.543-08:00

A small group of performers and activists from the UK, US and France will shortly be arriving in Baghdad to work with kids traumatised by the years of war, sanctions and occupation. This will be the diary of the trip. No time to write more now, but I will explain everything later. Jo

Johttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10822368309720714924noreply@blogger.com