More than half our time has passed now and I am currently enjoying with passion my day off. We have been working our little bootys off to spread the bliss. Almost every day we have made visits to schools, hospitals, and orphanages, exploding from our trucks with stickers, bubbles, magic tricks and a ton of energy! Blowing their minds like a crazy alien species that just beamed down on a rainbow…we proceed to put on a 40 min show of all our wonderful circusy acts, then teach them a range a the circus skills including hooping, poi spinning, balancing, staff spinning, and juggling, skills which increases hand eye coordination and right-left brain communication. Some of these kids have been enjoying our visits for several years now and have been improving their skills with the donation kits of toys we leave everywhere we go, and they are bursting to show us their improvements. We paint faces, play games, have dance parties and much more. We connect, we show the kids that there is a big full world out there that cares about them not matter how small they may be or how hard its been for them, we look eye to eye with them as we tie a friendship bracelet on their tiny wrists to show them that the world has gifts for them, we inspire them to be more than their situation has told them that they have to be, we spread bliss. Our evenings are spent doing fire or light shows for some of the schools, the community, or upcoming shows in some of the refugee camps, we where even privliged enough to do a show in a temple last week with all the young monks as our audience! I have been brought to tears on a nearly daily basis in full gratitude to get to take part in such a special experience.
Imagine the most fun you ever had in your life, the games you played as a child, the toys that you had, your creativity growing and expanding and what figures took part in that expansion. Now imagine your life in a refugee camp, you where born here, everything is brown and gray scale. Your toys are nothing more that pieces of bamboo, dirt, and your imagination. Most of these kids will never know anything outside of these walls, and when we arrive in their lives we get to bring them tools to expand that imagination beyond these political, social, and physical barriers. Imagination can take them anywhere and we are bringing the fuel to ignite this in them. Yesterday after a particularly exhausting day at a school with over 400 hundred schools, a day spent chasing really high energy kids in blazing heat, I had a moment during our final dance party with the kids while I had the realization that it was the pure energy and joy of the kids was the only thing that kept me moving at that point on the brink of total exhaustion, and that the pure intention behind this kind of work can assist in great things, one smile at a time.
