PEOPLE: Johnie K brings his own form of humanitarian aid to the world's war zones and refugee camps. He tells Nicoline Greer how laughter can pierce the hardest heart
In situations of dire poverty and desperation, few of us would think of laughing. Johnie K does. And when he laughs, other people do, too. Back in Christmas 1992, a friend showed him photographs of Romanian orphanages. The photos affected him deeply and he wanted to help. Most people volunteering to go there were plumbers and electricians, but John Patrick Kavanagh has a different trade.
This professional clown packed his red nose and circus clothes into a van. He travelled for three months around Romania with an international band of merry-makers calling themselves The Serious Road Trip. When Johnie joined them, the group had just returned from Sarajevo, where they had taken a double-decker bus, delivering food and another form of humanitarian aid - laughter.
"Every year since 1993, I've been in a war zone," he says. But the place that affected him most was that first trip to Romania. "The orphanages were the most horrible places you ever saw in your life. Children tied to beds - nasty stuff," he says. "In a lot of the cases, the show didn't matter, because a lot of these children were really far gone, they had been in these institutions since birth and terrible things had happened to them."
Johnie K started his career in the Blackpool Towers Circus, but left because he hated the cruelty to animals that he saw. That same compassion led him down a remarkable road.
After Romania, their next trip was to Croatia. Refugees were streaming out of Bosnia and heading for the Dalmatian coast. The clowns travelled up the coast, stopping off in the army barracks, sheds and hotels where the refugees were stationed. Food and fresh water had to arrive by boat; if the boats didn't arrive, the refugees would starve. When the clowns arrived, it must have looked like a bad joke. "We'd say, 'we're here to make the children laugh.' They'd say, 'Laugh? We don't need laughing. We need medicine, we need a roof over our heads, we need our country back,'" he says.
But, says Johnie, laughter pierces the hardest of hearts. They would persuade gun-wielding adults to give them a chance. And when the same people who were shouting objections heard the children laughing, they would often be moved to tears, slapping the clowns on the back, saying "thank you".
"The sound and feeling of laughter is something that these people haven't had in a long time. They have lost everything. But when the adults hear the kids laughing, no matter how hard they are, or how many people they have killed, they laugh. I've seen the hardest of men cry, Kalashnikovs on their shoulders, wiping tears out of their eyes."
It is then that people see what Johnie really believes: that children need more than bread and water, shelter and clothing. They need to be allowed to be children.
The group usually does one show in each place and then moves on. However, Johnie often teaches tricks to truck-drivers who are delivering aid. They also leave a lot of circus equipment behind in the hope that the smiles won't disappear with them.
Their repertoire includes juggling, stilt-walking, uni-cycling, magic tricks, fire-eating and slapstick comedy. Artists paint murals with the children. They brighten up some of the grimmest places in the world, sprawling canvas cities of makeshift tents, with no toilets or running water, where people are living in squalor.
Everywhere they go, they learn some basic phrases, such as how to ask the children their names, or say, "everybody clap". He has found, though, that most of the time they don't need spoken language, "because laughter is universal". One of his favourite shows was staged in a school for mute children, whose eyes lit up for the performance. "I loved that show because we never made one sound. We mimed the whole thing," he remembers.
In Russia, they put shows on in borstals - prisons for children aged five and upwards. Johnie also travelled to Kosovo, Albania, Chechnya and Ingushetia, as well as Romany gypsy camps all over Eastern Europe.
More recently, the clowns travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where more than 500,000 refugees are living in a vast desert area, which, they were told, was contaminated by nuclear fallout. The clowns have often placed themselves in dangerous situations. They have been shot at entering places such as Kabul, but none of them has been hurt.
Johnie has always found returning to Ireland a culture shock. "The saddest thing coming back from places where people have absolutely nothing is the abundance here. People complaining about this and that. I just feel like saying, 'get on with life for God's sake,'" he says.
Arthritis in his knees has put him out of action for travelling overseas, but he still co-ordinates other clowns' trips. At the moment, he is working in primary schools and on anti-racism campaigns. He hopes that the next destinations for the clown troupe will be India and Iran. But Johnie has always known his limits. "I learned early on in Romania, don't get too attached because it'll just destroy you. You'll become a crusader, and I'm not a crusader. I'm a circus clown."