Puppets acting to save the day

From Afghanistan to Indonesia, puppeteers are preparing children to cope with disaster, reports Fiona McCann

Badu, a fisherman, is swinging on a hammock on the veranda of his little wooden house on the beach, soaking up the sunshine as his neighbours scurry about their business. Even an earthquake fails to shake him from his torpor, and when the sea suddenly retreats before him, he's too excited by the presence of all the sparkling fish that have been exposed to notice the approaching wave, a tsunami that engulfs him before he can even react.

The good news is, he's saved by a squirrel. And, even better, Badu is a puppet, whose purpose is to help save entire villages from a fate like his own.

Badu is the creation of No Strings, the brainchild of Co Donegal aid worker Johnie McGlade and leading puppeteers Kathy Mullen and Michael Frith, a husband-and-wife team whose talents have helped bring to life some of the best-loved puppets of all time in shows such as The Muppets and Fraggle Rock.

With No Strings, they've pooled their strengths to come up with puppets such as Badu and LG, the Little Girl who's ready for any catastrophe. Through the stories of these two endearing characters, they hope to teach people in areas at risk how to cope in the event of natural disasters.

It may sound like a gimmick, but there's something about these puppets that's instantly compelling. McGlade, whose work with Goal and War Child has taken him to war-torn regions such as Sudan, Rwanda and Angola, first noticed the impact puppetry could make when he brought his own hand puppet, Seamus, out on the field with him.

"It was given to me when I lived in the West Indies, and it was my party piece," he says. "I brought it out to Sudan when I first went out . . . and eventually started bringing it to the feeding centres."

It was there he noticed the attention even a simple hand-puppet like Seamus could command and how it focused children in a way that its operator never could. "We organised proper queues and stuff through the puppet, and the interpreter would interpret the puppet as opposed to myself," McGlade says.

As McGlade and his No Strings colleagues enthuse about the impact puppetry can make, it's hard not to remain sceptical, until Mullen reaches behind her and brings out the collapsed cloth body of Little Girl, or LG as she's known. As Mullen's right hand disappears, LG comes to life. Straight away, all eyes are on her and no one could fail to be engaged by her wide-eyed enthusiasm and a kind of winning earnestness that's enthralling.

It's this effect that McGlade hoped to harness, noting that it worked in every country he visited with Seamus, regardless of the culture or language. When his work brought McGlade to Afghanistan, Seamus came with him, and once again, children would appear from all over to gather around this simple puppet.

MEANWHILE, MULLEN AND Frith, both from the US, were also focused on Afghanistan, and looking for a way to help out. "My husband and I were looking for something to do to help after 9/11, after America started bombing Afghanistan," recalls Mullen. "We thought: 'Oh my God, they're going to start bombing the hell out of those people. That's just awful, maybe we can do something for Afghanistan.' "

As fate would have it, Mullen's niece then fortuitously fell in love with an Englishman and moved across the Atlantic to be with him, in the process getting to know her new man's flatmate, "a crazy, insane aid worker who has this puppet he takes out into the field, that's falling apart", as Mullen recalls her sister describing McGlade.

Mullen was asked if she'd fix McGlade's puppet for him, and she readily agreed. But when the crazy aid worker finally made contact, he had something else on his mind. Recently back from Afghanistan, one of the heaviest-mined countries in the world, McGlade was already working on a way to use puppetry to warn children of the dangers of landmines. With Mullen and Frith sharing his enthusiasm and bringing their expertise on board, No Strings was born.

The original plan was to create a travelling live show to bring to schools and centres around the country, and to train local people to use the puppets to communicate the message about landmines. With zero funding, Mullen, Frith and McGlade delved into their own pockets to get their project going, their faith in its potential fuelling them through the initial, cash-free phases.

"It was very much a labour of love, but we knew it was going to work," says McGlade.

The project hit a snag when the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan meant the plan to bring a team over and move around the country had to be shelved.

"It started getting worse over there, and aid workers were being targeted," says Mullen. Not to be deterred, No Strings looked for another way to get their message out, and found it in film.

Scripting a film required research to incorporate local traditions and culture. Once the film was completed, it had to be translated so Afghan children would understand it.

"Dubbing it was a scream," recalls McGlade. "It was mental - they'd never done dubbing before, ever, in Afghanistan!"

Determination and an infectious enthusiasm ensured that such concerns didn't stop the project, and the DVD was finally completed - the story of a little boy made from carpet whose wish to become a real boy can only be granted after he learns to avoid landmines. It was an instant smash, and was acclaimed by the audience that counted most: the local Afghans.

"The locals loved it, the local ministry said it was just magnificent," says McGlade. Such was its success that the No Strings team were galvanised to do more, and began to seek out new partners and sponsors to fund more puppetry projects. When Trócaire got wind of what this colourful non-governmental organisation was at, it was immediately interested.

"Trócaire worked in the immediate wake of the tsunami in providing relief, and then moved into recovery," says Kim Wallis, Trócaire's regional liaison officer for southeast Asia. "We felt that we had a responsibility to help communities prepare for this if it happened again. In Indonesia, something happens nearly every week, whether it's a volcano, an earthquake, a flood, and we're all experiencing that on a weekly basis. So it was really kind of part of our language and approach that we have to do something in this area."

WITH THE HELP of funding from Trócaire, five more No Strings films were made to educate people in the tsunami-hit areas about floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and conflict resolution.

The films were originally intended to have a pair of talking orang-utans as the stars, but cultural sensitivities about the personification of animals meant the idea had to be scrapped, paving the way for the birth of lazy but lovable Badu and the diligent LG.

While Badu continuously manages to make the wrong decisions, stacking high shelves in his shop with heavy boxes despite living in an earthquake zone, or selling his hillside of trees to an illegal logging company, leaving his house exposed to flooding, LG is always there with an emergency kit and a warning system.

This unlikely pairing ensures that the messages contained about disaster prevention, and what to do should it strike, are communicated with humour and a light touch that makes it much more palatable to its young target audience.

But does it work? McGlade is just back from an area of Indonesia where the film and its puppet stars are already being used in the local school.

"They give them a questionnaire about what they know at that particular stage about an earthquake," he says. "Then the puppets come in and introduce themselves and introduce the film. They show the film, the guys come back with the puppets and, through the puppets, they would do a Q&A session."

After the questions, the children are asked to complete the questionnaire again. "Then they go over it to see what the children knew before and what they knew afterwards. It may be something like 15 per cent before, and by God, it's pretty close to 100 per cent afterwards," says McGlade with pride.

No Strings also provides puppets and trains locals to operate them. It's clear that the message is getting through, and the smiling faces of children at the puppet show is one of the most positive stories to come out of a region that's been plagued by natural disasters.

This St Stephen's Day marks the third anniversary of the tsunamis which claimed the lives of a quarter of a million people in southeast Asia, and left a further 1.7 million homeless. While many people in the areas No Strings is working in, such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka, were not as fortunate as the hapless Badu, who manages to survive every disaster despite his lack of preparedness, the hope is that he and LG, powered by the energy and commitment of McGlade, Mullen and company, will ensure that the children so amused by their antics take away valuable messages that could save their lives.