In January I got call from my good friend Dave Lowe of the humanitarian group UAid Direct, active in Ukraine since the onset of the war. He had a trip planned and wanted to know if I would be interested in joining. "We'll hit all out spots in the south. And we'll have the clown too."
I must not have fully registered that last bit. Or rather I did but knew well enough by then not to ask too many questions - if Dave had arranged it, it would be good to photograph.
The entire thing was bizarre from the onset. Dave had met James in Medyka, on the border of Poland and Ukraine in the early days of the refugee crisis. Met is one way to put it.
Dave was driving down one of the characteristically unkept backroads that led from the UAid Direct Warehouse to the border, when he spotted a man on a penny-farthing bike, careening between potholes and puddles. At first, he chalked it up to the weeks of sleep deprivation his team had endured working to facilitate aid for the refugees at Tesco. A double take. The strange sight was real.
Dave rolled down the window and asked in a cork-Irish accent “Well who are you then?”
“James”
“Wait, are you from Waterford?” Dave exclaimed.
“Are you from cork?” James retorted. Fast friends.
What started as a surreal chance meeting had evolved into a partnership between Dave and James. Months spent on the road in Ukraine – delivering aid and laughter. Thousands of children given the opportunity to join in James’ signature antics.
When I met the group in Kyiv, I realized for myself that the clown Dave had cryptically mentioned on our call earlier that week, was indeed, a clown. An Irish clown at that. An Irish clown with a day job as an electrical engineer working on everything from car safety systems to the circuitry inside digital cameras. (“I’ve worked on the circuit board of one of those back in the day, he had casually mentioned one evening as I cleaned the lens of my canon.”)
We spent a week travelling across Kherson, Mykolaiv, Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia - show after show in venues as diverse as hospital rooms to well-lit church studios. A crew of five, Dave, Gerry, Kate, Laura, and James. His performances designed to teach stress reduction skills and trauma response. His individualized magic translated a story of strength and resilience his audience, tricks that brought more than one stoic adult to cathartic tears.
To be honest, it took me until day three for the reality of it to set in. How utterly bizarre the whole thing was. On one side, I was surrounded by Irishmen - (Dave, James, and Gerry,) which for someone who spent at least a third of their life working at a Chicago Irish bar, was strangely comforting. On the other end, I was a member of a literal clown act - one that at times performed at check points, gas stations and bomb shelters to war scarred soldiers and weary civilians drinking away their stress. It was bewildering. We were risking out own lives, for the show. Soon I felt it, something without words, but that this thing I was on was special.
The cynics roll their eyes or hide a certain disapproval when I tell them about James. "Why?" they ask. "What does that help with?" To be fair - at first glance they don't know about the design of the shows, the hours James spends with psychologists, performers, and trauma specialists back in Ireland to form his acts. The months he spends perfecting them. Some are swayed when that is conveyed.
But the cynics also fail to realize something more elemental. It is our capacity for the seemingly absurd, to create light in the darkest moments, to care about the needs of the soul as much as those of the physical body, that makes us human. Laughter and love despite it all.
If I read this to James, I think he’d laugh – lots of words for something simple. I asked him once to tell me why he did these shows. I expected a long response. His answer was three words.
“Because it’s fun.”