Clowns Without Borders Brings the Best Medicine to Stricken Areas

As an aid worker, Tim Cunningham has been around: South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Mexico, Brazil, Haiti. But when he went to those places, he didn't set broken legs, repair buildings or win converts. He did, however, put 20 ping-pong balls in his mouth at once.

Cunningham is a volunteer with Clowns Without Borders, an international organization that puts on clown shows in disaster areas around the world. Their mission is to give children and adults in disaster areas psychological relief along with other aid effort. They can't measure their accomplishments in pounds of smiles or liters of laughs, but he and the rest of the clowns maintain that what they do matters.

"People need to have a good time, because we're all humans. I think what Clowns Without Borders does is help brings the humanity to humanitarian aid." The limited number of volunteers with the organization don't take their jobs lightly. They travel in elite, four-clown teams of professional entertainers capable of delivering fart jokes while dehydrated in 110-degree heat under looming threat of explosive diarrhea.

Clowns Without Borders began in 1993, when a professional Spanish clown named Tortell Poltrona was invited to perform at a refugee camp in Croatia. His performance drew an audience of over 700 children, and he was so moved by the outpouring of support that he came back with two colleagues on a second trip, and then spurred a cycle of performers performing regular shows throughout the ex-Yugoslavia region.

Now, there are branches of the organizations in nine countries -- Clowns Without Borders is based in the United States, but national diversity is key to their mission.

"There are definitely times when it's not appropriate to send Americans to certain places," explains director Dianna Hahn. "And so we work with international artists as well."

Cunningham trained as a clown at the Dell'Arte School of Physical Theater in Northern California, and he tried the professional acting circuit for a little while with modest success. But for him, Clowns Without Borders provides an experience that can't be replicated in a theater.

For many years, the administrative support behind the organization couldn't keep up with the enthusiasm of volunteers (the board of directors was really just a bunch of clowns, Cunningham explains), but the organization recently hired non-clown Hann and has been partnering with other NGOs in an effort to expand their reach.

In 2009, the organization performed for 40,000 children in nine countries.

They do get hate mail from people who think that they're wasting time and resources that could be going to traditional aid. Theirs is an intangible aid, but there are moments that offer a confirmation that the people they serve cry for laughter as they cry for water.

Cunningham thinks a quote from Dickens sums up what Clowns Without Borders is:

‎"It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humor."