Natalie Porias never planned to lead an organization of professional clowns working in earthquake zones and hospices -- she just Googled "fundraising" and applied for an open internship in that department. Twenty years later, she's CEO of Red Noses International, and one of her greatest lessons involves a single conjunction: replace "but" with "and," she says, and watch how the world shifts. In the 2023 rubble of post-earthquake Turkey, sleeping on a bunk bed behind a curtain from three snoring colleagues -- a Slovak, a Croatian, and a Palestinian -- Natalie watched a clown playing ukulele with a kebab vendor while a small crowd gathered in the ruins. There was no agenda, and no transaction. Later, a woman who had lost her son to a motorcycle accident, and then her family to the earthquake, sat for forty-five minutes engaging with a clowning artist who kept dropping things. "Maybe we can put in a little sparkle," Natalie says, "so that she feels it's not all dark." The clown's art, she has come to understand, is precisely this: to walk into a room seeing only the human -- all while being curious, present, and never judging.
