Frank Wood: My Very Special Journey to Ethiopia
About the author:
Frank Wood took home a Best Featured Actor Tony Award nine years ago for his moving performance as an emotionally repressed jazz musician in Warren Leight’s Side Man. Since then, his roles have ranged from the Adult Men in the off-Broadway premiere of Spring Awakening and narrator in Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell to his current stint as Bill Fordham in Tracy Letts’ Tony Award-winning play August: Osage County. But the highlight of 2008 for this talented actor happened far away from Broadway, on a two-week trip to Ethiopia to teach theater at a children’s camp run by the Worldwide Orphans Foundation. Why did he decide to go halfway around the world to work with kids? What was it like when he got there? And what did he learn about himself from the experience? Read on for Wood’s heartwarming tale.
Last winter, my girlfriend, Kay, and I were putting the finishing touches on plans for a two-week trip to Scotland in August. We had bought the plane tickets, booked a room at a bed-and-breakfast and even arranged for our trip to overlap with the vacation of my cousin Susan and her family. We were going to hike in the Highlands and look at beautiful landscapes, maybe take a day or two in Glasgow or Edinburgh.
One day, Kay called me on my cell phone and asked without preamble if I would go to Ethiopia if it meant not being able to go to Scotland. We’d been invited to teach dramatic arts for two weeks at a summer camp for young children, many of them HIV positive, many of them orphans, all of them living in extreme poverty. Kay seemed to anticipate all the arguments against it—not the least of which was my sharply whetted appetite for the glens and crags of the Scottish Highlands.
I said “yes” without a beat or a hitch in my voice.
I was saying yes to a principle, an idea, and giving an answer to a question that had actually been asked many months before. It was the conclusion of a conversation Kay and I had been having since her friend and colleague Christine Hall had, with Kay’s help, written a grant proposal to work with the Worldwide Orphans Foundation WWO in Ethiopia. Scotland was just a stand-in for “summer at the beach,” “reunion with the family” and “great acting job.” But I was not saying yes with an easy heart. I was wary.
Kay teaches dance to elementary school-age children at the National Dance Institute and has extensive experience teaching acting and movement to professionals. She is as qualified as any American who does not speak Amharic the official language of Ethiopia to teach dramatic arts to Ethiopian orphans. I have worked for Lincoln Center Institute as a teaching artist and I am a trained actor. But now I had agreed to take on the responsibility of teaching children, representing my profession, my country and an organization dedicated to saving lives. Would these five-year-olds even know what a play was? I wasn’t sure I was up to the challenge.
And then it poured: I was offered the chance to replace Jeff Perry as Bill Fordham in the Broadway production of August: Osage County, beginning two months before our trip to Ethiopia. I would need 17 days off to fulfill my commitment to Worldwide Orphans. For the first time in a long time, I discovered that I knew something important about myself: I wanted to go to Ethiopia with my girlfriend and work with orphans more than I wanted the certainty of a job on Broadway. In the end, I got the best of both worlds. “Yes,” said director Anna D. Shapiro. “Yes,” said Jeffrey Richards and the rest of the August producing team.
Armed with Kay’s excellent lesson plans drawn from Ethiopian children’s books, Carl Sandburg poems and Dr. Seuss, we arrived in Addis Ababa New Flower on August 8 after 27 hours. We were met at the airport by a man named Berhane, who drove us from our guest house to Camp Addis and back, every day. He exchanged money for us and translated for us at the boundless open air Merkado. He honked every 10 seconds or so at other drivers, at goats and their keepers and at the stream of pedestrians fighting to get across four lanes of traffic with almost no formal crosswalks. Aluminum shacks stood next to modern-ish office buildings.
Camp Addis is a partnership between WWO, which is dedicated to providing direct services to children in orphanages, and the late Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall camps. It is part of the vision of WWO founder Dr. Jane Aronson, known for her expertise on foreign adoptions. The ride to the camp from our guest house took us along the outskirts of the city, and we saw soft, rolling countryside and mountains in the distance. Green trees and gray mud dominated the rainy-season landscape. If you squinted, you could imagine you were in Vermont.
Arriving at the camp each day, we were greeted by the children, three and four at a time, who would hug and kiss us and transport our bags equal to their weight to the staff room. The counselors were young and quick and spoke English with a lot of the same affect American teenagers use. They teased each other and dismissed each other, but they got a lot done and, essentially, ran the camp and its mission of improving the campers’ health while introducing them to the arts.
The day began with an American-style circle time led by Daniel, the young camp director. He would select individual counselors, who would enlist a few campers to lead stretches and other warm-ups and sing camp songs. The most recognizable song was a version of “Yankee Doodle” that when sung by Ethiopian children sounded like “Ankee Doodie.”
By the time we arrived, the camp had been up and running for four weeks and the campers had apparently overcome malnourishment and skittishness. They smiled a lot as they played with jump ropes, hula hoops and balls of all sizes before classes began. The campers were divided into four groups: Red Monkeys, Blue Lions, Green Gorillas and Yellow Tigers. They all had corresponding T-shirts that they pulled over camp sweat suits. They were intensely cute.
Kay and I conducted four 45-minute classes almost every weekday and used them to teach two groups of 25 children. Kay made dance the central vocabulary, even though we were aiming at performing dramatic material. It helped solve the language problem because it was easier to teach movement without talking, and easier for the children to remember what to do when they had counts. Kay did almost all the teaching while I stood in as her emergency warm-up leader and test-dummy.
We struggled to translate Carl Sandburg’s “Fog”: “The fog creeps in on little cat-feet” never got any clearer than “The fog gets into the cats’ legs.” The counselors translated and were strongly encouraged to participate and persuade reluctant campers to stay in the room long enough for Kay or me to figure out a way for every child to become engaged and involved. The mood of the camp was almost always festive, and it seemed to me the counselors were finding a way to embrace their exhausting jobs with greater enthusiasm every day.
Two short weeks later, we were on our way back to New York.
It’s virtually impossible for me to track the full range of successes and failures we stacked up at Camp Addis. My anxiety about teaching never melted away, but my appetite for it grew. I saw that these children were more often overcome by tiredness than apathy, vastly more loving than needy. And I answered my questions about whether the trip was worth it this way: Go with your good intentions, and find out how you can be useful as you go. Think of a great story to tell, then figure out how to tell it.
