It Was Very Daring
By Caroline Blanchard
Cameroon — For a young and fragile group like ours, it was very daring, even a bit crazy, to suggest during a meeting in June with our director that we put on a show for the World Day for Overcoming Poverty and that we use the large performance hall of the French Institute in Cameroon. At the time of the meeting, the small group of friends of ATD Fourth World had only rudimentary elements to carry out the plan. These elements included:
- The desire to work with Piko, a Central African actor whose talents we had seen when he worked with children of the Petit Dan and Sarah Foundation, whom he trained in theatre arts by putting on a comic production with them;
- The trust that all our partners would answer the call, each in their own way: the Fustel de Coulanges French school; the Edimar social centre, which works with children and young people sleeping in the street; and the Lucioles social and educational library;
- The hope that others, like the Cameroon Club for Young Rehabilitated Blind People, would join us.
It was daring and risky to bring these groups together on stage and in public — young people living and sleeping in the street, visually impaired young people, and young people from a privileged world like the French school.
It was really daring and courageous to publicly bring together expatriates and locals, westerners and Africans, knowing that we do not have the same sense of humor and do not speak quite the same French. Would we all understand and make understood the important message we wanted to convey?
It was very daring; and we gave ourselves quite a challenge filling the performance hall.
But the challenge was taken up and fulfilled beyond our expectations. The room was packed a few minutes before the beginning of the show — so packed that we had to turn people away. Even our friends from the Lucioles library had trouble getting in. Also, the artists supported us, supervised us, guided us, accompanied us, and trained us: Piko, actor and director; Jean Ndjonbe, another actor; and others, including musicians and photographers. Our bonds have been strengthened through this experience.
We had little time to write and to put together the show, but we succeeded in two things that are at the heart of 17 October: to honor people in poverty and to enable people to meet one another.
We were overjoyed when children from the Petit Dan and Sarah Foundation made us all laugh in the sketch “I’m eating”, a parody of the workplace. We were enormously proud to show the talent of these vulnerable, orphaned children.
We were filled with happiness when visually impaired young people on stage shared their sense of humor and their artistic talent in singing “You say I cannot see, but I say I see better than you. Today I want to talk to you about my life, my heart, because when I fall, I get back on my feet.”
We shared the harmony and hope of the Fustel de Coulanges primary school pupils when they sang about their sense of solidarity and their determination to preserve our planet.
We heard a young man’s message of hope: after eight years in the street he is apprenticed in a bakery, housed by his employers, and working hard to learn a trade and keep up with school. We hope that this testimony of working life, small savings, and constant support for his family will help change the perceptions people have of children who sleep in the streets.
Of course it was too hot in the crowded room; of course we did not manage to keep to the schedule; and we will learn from this great experience and build on it. But we are sure of one thing: by daring to organise the show, we were able to mobilise people. We were living up to the ambitions we have for tomorrow’s world.
