The Awassa Youth Campus

I’d gone on other developing-world trips with Ben Sota before. He teaches circus skills in youth organizations that have circus programs. It sounds odd for Americans, but street performers are not uncommon. Because many aspects of circus rely on communicating through gesture, it fits in places where many languages coexist.

The Awassa Youth Campus which runs a circus, is a free-form self-described “open door” courtyard where kids from 5 or 6 years through young adulthood go. Spontaneous jam sessions break out. Teenagers practice acrobatics with ferocious intensity while other kids hypnotically concentrate on the juggling pins that fly through the air. Four tiny boys watch intently. These little ones are homeless. The campus welcomes all kids—homeless, working class, middle class. It doesn’t matter. There are only a few organized classes: Aikido, English, and circus practice. One young man paints in an open air studio. Others play foosball. There is an air of randomness that fits with the laid back rythem of the town. John Mckay keeps track of the kids, trying to fuel the sparks of creativity and interest that happen spontaneously with the kids.

Ben’s job was not so layed-back. He had to act as artistic director for a show that was to go on tour in the Omo Valley in just one week. A second circus, Fekat Circus, from Addis had come down to join the tour. He cobbled together the existing acts of the two circuses around a loose storyline about three little boys who discover a world of circus underneath the trappings of everyday life. Check out the slideshow >>

We went to the Omo Valley—35 people stuffed in a 24-person bus for 5 to 8 hours a day mostly on dirt roads. The landscape changed to a more arid savannah. We saw fields of corn that had received too little rain too late brown-edged leaves on scrawny stalks hopelessly finishing the growing season with the only the anticipation of a woefully lean harvest. It was the beginning of a green famine. Most people looked relatively good, but the mood was angry and jealous of anyone who had the money to ride into their town on a bus.

It was obvious that for every look, for every plea for money, for every brown field, there was a deeper, incredibly complicated tangle of failure that was so much a part of everyday life that people had adapted to it. Loss of the tribal seclusion, the spread of AIDS and malaria, conflict escalated by cheap, plentiful and deadly weapons, and misplaced foreign aid were just the easy factors to point to.

I felt frustrated. I felt humbled by my own self-righteous ideas that I might be able to help right something in a tsunami of wrong. I stayed focused on my work, videotaping and photographing everything I can find. The trip is exhausting, bouncing in an overcrouded bus along unpaved roads for hours. We can only travel by daylight because the risk of running off the unlit mountain roads is too great as is the threat of bandits. When we would reach the day’s destination, the troupe sets up for a show at a market-o (outdoor weekly market) or a football (soccer) field, blares the bus’ loudspeaker to draw a crowd, does the show and then moves on until late afternoon when we would find cheap hotels to stay in. (I opted for the relatively posh rooms at $5 a night.) At one hotel I pitch my tent on my bed and keep my gear locked down because there were just too many cockroaches in the room.

I have had a pretty easy trip in comparison with the way that most people in the country travel, still, I feel a resentment when I see the Landrovers full of rich adventure tourists in Jinka. I feel it, so I can’t imagine how many times it amplifies in the minds and hearts of people who do not have enough to eat. White means “extravagantly rich” there. I can’t hang a disclaimer on my skin. And I can’t even imagine the absurdity of translating, “but really—I don’t have money, not money like THEM.” So I just don’t. I understand better why there are so many warnings about banditry. All those CNN clips about class warfare take on a new dimension. But to only tell the violence of the story is not fair.

Anne Frank moment: “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.”