UVa nurse travels world with Clowns Without Borders

The bitter tears of a clown shed during a starving infant’s final moments led to the birth of a healer.

Charlottesville resident Tim Cunningham, and the international entertainment troupe Clowns Without Borders, had just finished goofing around with sick and hungry children and blowing bubbles over a malnourished baby in a remote part of impoverished Haiti.

“They had nothing at that hospital. The kids were dying of disease and malnutrition and AIDS and we just went bed-to-bed blowing bubbles and juggling and trying to give them a laugh,” Cunningham recalled, sipping an espresso outside Para Coffee on Elliewood Avenue.

“At first, the doctors and staff wanted us to be quiet, but then they’d tell us to come over to this bed or that bed. In the end, we had a dance party going. I mean we had doctors and nurses and kids dancing and singing. It was a very successful performance.”

It was successful up to the bitter end.

“As we walked out, we saw doctors and nurses gathered around a little bed,” he said, palpable sadness in his voice. “It was the 2-month-old we had blown bubbles for.”

She had died.

“As we walked out of the hospital, I felt something go through me. I thought that it sucked that this child died from disease caused by having too little when my country is so close and we have people dying from disease caused by having too much,” he said. “I came home pretty traumatized. That’s when I decided what to do.”

Cunningham — a 32-year-old Waynesboro native, College of William & Mary graduate and avowed entertainer — became a registered nurse and went to work in emergency medicine. He now plies his trade in the University of Virginia Medical Center’s emergency department.

“I love the fact that I can make a difference, that I can help people at a difficult time in their lives,” he said. “My experience with Clowns Without Borders comes in handy because people in the emergency room are in stressful situations and, sometimes, a little bit of clowning will help them get through it. You can help people medically and emotionally.”

Dianne Hahn, director of Clowns Without Borders, does not clown but respects Cunningham’s serious and silly sides.

“He’s probably one of the best people I’ve met as far as being able to turn on the persona and turn it off,” Hahn said. “He carries through with what he decides to do, both as president of this organization and in his life. He decided he wanted to go into medicine and he did.”

“Tim brings an intense playfulness to every moment on the road,” said Sarah Liane Foster, a fellow performer. “He has a way of making each person he’s performing for, or just talking to, feel personally connected to him. I haven’t seen him in action as a nurse per se, but I bet he brings this same joy and connection to that work as well.”

Clowns Without Borders exists to ease with laughter the tension and suffering of daily life in refugee camps, war zones and impoverished regions of the world. Without the big feet, fright wigs, grease paint and balloon animals of birthday party clowns — and facing language barriers — the international clowns focus on street theater and physical skills such as magic, acrobatics, juggling and skits.

The volunteer outfit has no political motive. It does no religious proselytizing. It does not educate, pontificate or indoctrinate. It operates on private donations and goes where invited by communities and relief agencies.

Cunningham has traveled with the troupe to a variety of places, including Africa, Mexico and Haiti. When he joined the organization in 2000, it was for the joy of performing.

“I couldn’t wait to get out of Virginia when I graduated college, so I went off to Northern California and hung out with hippies for a while and started performing,” he laughed. “When I joined, it was partly because I believed in it, partly because I loved to perform and partly because I wanted to travel.”

He did it all and had many adventures, from balloon funerals in South Africa to being dragged behind a horse ridden by a love-struck, drunk vaquero at a performance in Chiapas, Mexico.

“This guy on the horse had really connected with the woman clown I was working with,” Cunningham recalled. “We didn’t speak Spanish and the audience didn’t speak English, so it was situational, physical comedy and we were doing a skit in which I’d hit her with a rolled-up newspaper.”

The vaquero, watching the performance closely, didn’t like Cunningham’s shtick. Fairly new to the trade, he mistook the man’s intensity for the positive connection often made between performer and audience — until the vaquero let out a shout, the crowd vanished and Cunningham found a lasso around his waist.

“Everyone yelled at me to run, but I only got one leg out of the lasso before he turned the horse around and took off,” Cunningham laughed. “I realized as I was being dragged on my butt behind a horse ridden by an intoxicated cowboy that something wasn’t right.”

Other clowns joined the fray, chasing the clown-dragging cowboy until they got the rope free and allowed Cunningham to escape. Then the man pulled a machete and came after the other clowns.

“I’m sure it would have been quite comical, had it been videotaped,” Cunningham said. “It ended when a man came out of a building and shouted at the horseman. He stopped and left.”

Cunningham recently returned to Haiti on a medical mission.

“It was weird adjusting. The hardest part was getting to the clinic early in the morning and seeing 100 people who had been waiting for medical treatment for who knows how long. My first tendency was to go entertain them,” he said. “My colleagues would have to come and get me and get me back to medicine.”

Cunningham said he has not supplanted clowning with medicine and that medicine can never replace clowning. He loves both and believes they complement each other.

“The personality I have when I perform is very much like the personality I bring to the hospital,” he said. “You have to be totally present and respond to whatever the situation requires and to be ready. Clowning helps a lot when you’re in a stressful situation and something happens that you can laugh at and encourage others to laugh. It’s important to laugh when funny happens in the midst of seriousness.”