“Childhood is a basic need and a human right,” says a clown who wants to make safe places for kids
Guillaume Vermette is getting ready for a two-week trip to Ukraine by packing his clown clothes, which include a red nose, suspenders, and a colorful suit.
Next week at this time, a volunteer from Trois-Rivières, Quebec, who calls himself a “humanitarian clown,” will be entertaining kids and families in Lviv, which is several hundred kilometers west of the front line of the war that broke out after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Vermette has been a clown for 18 years. He has worked in remote communities, orphanages, and refugee camps in Nunavik, Syria, Greece, Russia, Lebanon, and Jordan. Vermette will be going into a war zone for the first time.
“I’ll be honest, I’m a little bit scared,” Vermette said. “But I feel like I’m ready.”
“My goal is to make people safe…. I don’t mean physical safety. I mean emotional safety. Children need rules, routines, and a safe place where they can be themselves.
He says that over the years, he has remembered many times when kids felt safe enough to tell him sad things about their lives, like the deaths of family members.
“That made me feel very sad,” Vermette said.
“Working with kids is very hard, and it’s very important to do it right. They’re our future.”
For this trip, he is going to join Siobhan’s Trust, a small charity based in Scotland that has been setting up mobile food stations close to the front lines in Ukraine, where larger charities don’t always go.
Vermette says that during his trip, he wants to make safe places for children whose normal childhoods have been interrupted.
“Kids go through a lot of trauma, and sometimes they grow up too fast,” Vermette said. “They forget how to play, laugh, and smile a lot. They forget that they can take the time to talk about how they feel and work through the trauma.
“Everyone has the right to a childhood,” he said.
“Their childhood was taken from them.
He got in touch with Siobhan’s Trust in April after hearing that they could use his skills as a child specialist who had studied clown theater and psychology.
Vermette said, “They told me, ‘We’ve seen kids whose childhoods have been taken away from them.'”
Siobhan’s Trust has been on the ground since the war started, says the group’s founder, David Fox-Pitt.
The organization started out in 2020 as a way to help kids in Dundee’s inner city. Fox-Pitt says that when the war in Ukraine started in 2022, they saw a new need and used the pizza oven they had in their garage to feed people for free.
“We saw those terrible pictures of thousands of women and children crossing the border. And we thought that the pizza oven should go to Ukraine. So our motto was ‘Make pizza, not war,'” Fox-Pitt said.
“What we do is make people feel better. It’s not just pizza and hot drinks.”
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Working closely with the Ukrainian police, the organization gets frozen pizzas from donors in Italy and Germany and drives them to the border of Ukraine in freezer trucks. Fox-Pitt says that since the war began, they have served one million pizzas. About 20 people work on the ground to serve up to 5,000 people every day.
“That is a huge difference. “These people are very emotional. There’s a lot of hugging and crying, and they can’t believe we’ve come to share the risk with them,” said Fox-Pitt, who often wears a yellow and blue kilt on the trips.
“There’s music and dancing, and it’s just a bit of coming together. So they know we haven’t forgotten about them. They are afraid that the world will forget about them and that we will move on.”
Joanna Fox-Pitt, who is married to David and helps with volunteer questions, said that because they are a small charity, they have been able to decide to work in places where bigger ones can’t.
“There are a lot of great groups doing great things, but some of the bigger NGOs can’t go deep into Ukraine because of their rules,” said Joanna.
“Sometimes language can be a barrier, but often just talking to someone and giving them food, a hot drink, fruit for their kids, or sweets or biscuits is all it takes to make a big connection with them.”
Vermette says that the day he gets there, he just wants to help cook pizza before putting on shows and leading interactive games. He says he’ll use different clown tricks while out in the field, which is something many parents like.
“At first, they often don’t know what’s going on and wonder, ‘What’s going on? Who’s that clown? Who’s that weirdo?'” Vermette said with a laugh.
“When they come to me at the end… They might put their hand in front of their heart, bow a little, and cry while saying “Thank you.”
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