


After their street performance, Patch Adams invited Bul Bul to join the troupe of clowns as a fellow performer for the whole three weeks of their mission. The man calls himself Bul Bul, which is the name of a popular bird. Gerald Tooth: As the clowns make first contact, a grey-bearded Afghan man on a bicycle stops and starts making bird-calls. Under the Taliban the only entertainment in this city had been the public executions, hand amputations and floggings at the soccer stadium every Friday afternoon.

Bewildered children and neighbours come to see the spectacle. Gerald Tooth: After arriving on an Italian military flight, Patch Adams leads some of the clowns onto the street outside the large comfortable house that they've rented. He mobilised a global network of clowns to come and personally deliver the aid and try to give Afghan people a reason to laugh. Gerald Tooth: The Italians also convinced world-famous clown doctor, Patch Adams, to lead the troupe for the first three days of their three-week mission. I found out that she was a clown doctor, and I said, 'Let's go to Kabul with the clown doctors, and let's go to the hospitals in Kabul where the war victims are, and victims of land-mines are, and we'll do your job that you do daily in Italy in the Italian hospitals we'll do it with our clowns in Kabul.' So I wanted to do something in terms of offering different images to the media, and I met this girl, she looked to me beautiful and very young. Stefano Moser: I was sort of getting fed up of seeing the images that were on television, knowing this country is not only a land of terrorists, and it's not only a land of warriors, because I've been in this area of the world a few times. They convinced the city of Rome to put up $AUS 160,000 to fund the trip, and persuaded a host of organisations to donate tonnes of medical supplies, school equipment, clothing and food.

The clown mission, called A Patchwork for Peace, was conceived in Rome by documentary film-maker Stefano Moser and his girlfriend Sarina Roveta. Come with me today on a surreal journey of hope in a land of profound despair. To deploy a love-bomb you mobilise 10-tonnes of aid and 21 clowns from all around the world, set them loose in a war zone with an Italian documentary crew and a Background Briefing reporter and stand back and see what happens. They've dropped what can only be described as a massive love-bomb on the streets of Kabul. Gerald Tooth: As US-led coalition forces continue their bitter death-struggle with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Italian Army has unleashed a virulent biological weapon in the nation's capital. The picture gallery which accompanies this program can be found here Maybe that’s true.Īs Sigmund Freud assiduously pointed, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.This program was originally broadcast on 17 March 2002 Finally, there was Norton’s association with Pat Musitano.Ĭops say no go on a mob hit. There were credit card and other fraud charges over a takeout dinner in 2001 he was arrested for driving a stolen BMW in 2006 and in 2007, he was busted in Brantford for possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking and possession of marijuana. Instead, it could have simply been the tally of a life lived on the edge.
