Like Sesame Street’s the Merry Monster, Tonton has wild orange hair, and like Elmo, she prefers to speak in the third person. But this pint-size Muppet with the outsize personality, known for being somewhat disorganized and prone to fits of restless curiosity, doesn’t live on Sesame Street. Well, not exactly. She lives in a place called Hikayat Simsim, the Jordanian version of Sesame Street that premiered in 2003, when Tonton was just 4 (she hasn’t aged much).
Brought to life by puppeteer Fatima Amaireh, Tonton and her best pal, Juljul, along with Jiddo Simsim (Grandpa Sesame, played by Issa Sweidan), made the show one of the most popular in modern-day Jordanian television — and that was before the International Rescue Committee decided to bring Tonton and her long-distance neighbors Elmo and Grover to refugee communities across the Middle East. This past December, the MacArthur Foundation announced that it was awarding the IRC and the Sesame Workshop its 100&Change grant — $100 million for “bold solutions to critical problems of our time” — to create a comprehensive early childhood education program for displaced Syrians throughout the region.
The IRC and Sesame Workshop have begun the initial planning of Sesame Seeds — the working title for their initiative — but already the organization promises to take aim at the toxic stress faced by refugees. “We’re known at Sesame Street to tackle the tough issues generally, but we couldn’t help but open the papers and see every day the situation of refugee children,” says Sherrie Westin, vice president of global impact and philanthropy for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization associated with the PBS series.
[For more on this story by Adrian Brune, go to http://www.ozy.com/provocateur...yrian-refugees/83524]
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