In financial crisis, Doutores da Alegria launches campaign for donations

Fagner Saraiva already had more than a decade of experience as a clown when he entered the children’s ward of a hospital for the first time wearing huge shoes, a rubber nose and a white coat.

What seemed like an adverse setting for a clown show to him became the most intimate and creative stage he has ever stepped on.

In activity for 33 years, Doutores da Alegria today is a reference in the humanization of hospital care. In the last year, however, the institution faced a 75% drop in fundraising, which affected part of the work. The entity survives on donations, the majority of which is collected via cultural incentive mechanisms, such as the Rouanet Law.

THE SMALLEST STAGE IN THE WORLD

The routine of a doctor of joy begins by visiting the nursing counters to find out how the previous night went: if there was a more delicate situation or a very anxious mother, for example. Then, the pair of clowns excuse themselves from the patients and enter the room without a ready-made script. The show is a story that will be invented on the spot.

“The hospital is the smallest stage in the world, where we have to listen to the children’s reactions. Out of nowhere, an IV pole becomes a microphone, the window becomes the spotlight, the hemodialysis machine becomes a machine of the future” , says Fagner.

Integrated into the interdisciplinary healthcare team, the clowns aim to make the daily turbulence and tension easier — both for patients and their families and for employees.

“The child is always waiting for someone to come in wearing a lab coat to pierce them, to cause pain. When we come in wearing a lab coat and a red nose, it opens up another look from the child to the doctor’s figure”, says the clown. “This figure who falls, stumbles, sometimes speaks incorrectly, who sings out of tune, who arrives at the hospital catching himself on a door, this thing of the inadequate has the power to be a mirror of the human being.”

BOND WITH PATIENTS

To make this wheel turn, artists need to establish a bond of trust with patients and staff. Each pair of clowns stays in the same hospital for a year, where they make two weekly visits.

With the institution’s financial crisis, visits were reduced to one per week. “I’ve heard that the hospital seems to be missing a piece. It’s sad that we can’t carry out our work as it is”, laments Fagner.

Consistency, he explains, is fundamental to opening the hospitalized child’s universe to the outside world. “There are children we knew when they were babies and are now seven, eight years old. There are patients who have never left the hospital and don’t know what the world is like out here,” he says.

“We’ve already transformed a room into a spaceship. We’ve done an eclipse, a political debate, a toboggan run. We’ve already done a circus and the child who was bedridden was the trapeze artist.”

To join Doutores da Alegria, artists go through a selection process and weekly training. Visits are paid per day. “A lot of people ask why we’re not volunteers. People forget that artists move the economy like any worker,” says Fagner.

DOCTORS IN CRISIS

According to the president, the institution’s monthly operation costs around R$500,000. In December 2023, annual funding, which used to be around R$6 million, was just R$1.5 million.

This decline resulted in the interruption of the entity’s expansion projects, such as the Miolo Mole Festival, a documentation and memory center for the institution and actions to promote local artists around the hospitals.

“We are coming from a succession of difficulties. The last government did everything to dismantle the cultural structures that worked”, he says. During the administration of Jair Bolsonaro (PL), who closed the Ministry of Culture and suspended the approval of annual plans for fundraising via the Rouanet law, the NGO exhausted its own resources, R$5 million, to cover this deficit.

Another aggravating factor has been a cultural change among companies, which previously used to make financial contributions annually and now do so every three months, diversifying investments in social projects. The entity is now launching a campaign to encourage donations.

Currently, Doutores da Alegria serves 18 public health units in the capital of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Recife, giving priority to large hospitals serving peripheral regions.

In São Paulo, for example, Santa Marcelina, in Itaquera, the municipal hospitals of M’boi Mirim and Campo Limpo, the Regional Hospital of Ferraz de Vasconcellos and the General Hospital of Grajaú are covered.

The entity has also maintained, for twenty years, a clown school aimed at young people in vulnerable situations.