HIV/Aids 'ravages' Lesotho

2008-07-18 12:20

Malealea - A last make-up check in the wing mirror of the van. Red button nose: check. Silly hat: check. White paint under the eyes and around the mouth: check.

Banjo Max, his instrument slung across his shoulder, and his little band of merry associates were ready to go to work in Malealea, a hilltop village in the tiny southern African kingdom of Lesotho.

Banjo Max was the performance name of Jamie McLaren Lachman, a United States-born performer with Clowns without Borders (CWB), an international NGO that had been bringing smiles to places starved of laughter by poverty, conflict and disease for over a decade.

While Britain's Prince Harry was hammering nails into planks last week at his Sentebale children's charity outside Lesotho's capital Maseru, Lachman and fellow clowns, South Africa's Delia Meyer ("Fwing") and "Nkgono" (grandma) Sibongile Tsoanyane were pulling smiles from poor kids in the remote west of the country.

Life for most children in Lesotho, one of the world's poorest nations, where about one in three was HIV positive and the mountainous terrain barren was Dickensian grim.

African kids 'unfamiliar with clowning'

About 300 000 kids in Lesotho had lost one or more parents to HIV/Aids. With their parents gone they could also usually kiss their childhood goodbye, as kids as young as 12 were left to rear a clutch of younger siblings.

When CWB South Africa showed up in Malealea last week, at the invitation of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), there were already many red noses among the group of villagers, wrapped in traditional blankets, waiting in the cold to attend the weekly clinic.

"A lot of them were sick with HIV or TB (tuberculosis). The clinic comes just once a week. So we performed for them while they were waiting," says Lachman.

"I dressed up as a doctor who doesn't know his elbow from his eyeball."

Because many African kids were unfamiliar with clowning, the performance often began with a simple routine like blowing bubbles while the clowns put feelers out to find what tickles.

Apart from the novelty of seeing clowns, a good belly laugh could also be a novel experience for kids that had been traumatised by poverty, illness or conflict.

So what tricks were guaranteed to make kids smile, from the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where he had also performed, to the snow-capped peaks of Lesotho?

"I stick a horn in the back of my pants and sit down and honk. That's guaranteed to get some laughs."

Lesotho 'wrangling with high HIV/Aids rates'

Hoots of laughter also go up from the crowd of kids when Sibongile, who sings and talks to the children in their native Sesotho, tumbles head over heels, revealing her bloomers.

Clowns without Borders was founded by Spanish clown Tortell Patrona in 1993 during the Balkans wars to inject a little levity into the lives of shellshocked children in camps for the displaced.

Lachman started up the organisation's operations in southern Africa in 2004. Since then, he and other foreign and local artists had performed for 110 000 people throughout Africa and the Middle East.

Apart from humouring kids an important component of CWB's work was building capacity among community caregivers. Lachman and his team taught them how to incorporate performance into their work as a way of tackling tricky social issues.

"We try to get them also to reconnect to what it is to be a child," says Lachman.

As part of their ongoing work, CWB was involved in a year-long capacity building programme in a remote area of Swaziland - a country that, like Lesotho, was wrangling with high HIV/Aids rates, food shortages and drought.

One of the group's most "intense" experiences recently was meeting some of the thousands of African migrants displaced by a spate of xenophobic violence in South Africa in May.

"There we were in Johannesburg - probably the richest city on the continent - and there were 5 000 people in a refugee camp."

- SAPA