Upside down. It's the best way to describe Carnival! Nairobi, a project that aims to give street children in Nairobi, Kenya, a new opportunity by turning the order of things on its head.
The house is dilapidated and the garden is covered in burning rubbish. Tall buildings surround us, shanties stand before us, and beside me is a group of thirty-five boys and girls who live on the street. I went to meet them to involve them in a crazy idea. To build a new path, together.
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The girls are always the ones who strike me most of all, because they are young, because they almost always have a baby in their arms. Everyone treats them badly, demands favours from them, speaks to them without respect. And they respond.
"Girls on the street need to become tough — that's how they survive" is one of the most important lessons I've learned here in Nairobi.
So the girls respond to the shoves and threatening glares that hit them in the face, but their faces are proud, the stares are met head-on, and in this way they assert, as best they can, their desire to fight.
A young girl spots me and recognises me straight away. I see her and recognise her straight away too; she runs towards me and we hug. I've known her for about two years — when we opened the new first-reception centre, she was part of the first group of children we welcomed. She stayed with us for a couple of months, then she ran away to go back to her life on the street. Why did she do it? I have no idea.
Once again since I've been here, I take a step back and accept that I don't understand, that I can't explain a choice like that to myself. When I meet her I set aside the judgement, that "Why didn't you stay with us?" that has invaded my thoughts so many times before and led me astray. Today I just want to smile at her, hug her and simply be glad to see her again. The way you are with a friend you haven't seen in a long time.
My gaze lingers on a baby girl that another young girl is holding in her arms. She is six months old, her expression serious, softening only when she catches someone's eye. She is passed from one person to another, and before her even the guy whose gaze challenges everyone becomes gentle, draping a blanket over her and making her laugh. What fate awaits this tiny girl? What is she doing in the middle of these people? What future? What choices in life?
Over the years we have supported so many children we met on these streets of Nairobi in their studies. So many boys and girls have left the street and chosen to go back to school and start studying again.
With children it has in some ways become almost straightforward: we know them by now, we know what they're looking for, we know how to persuade them to stay with us and to choose a different path from the one they're living on. Only the most difficult cases run away and return to a dark and hopeless past. Some of those who ran away sometimes try to come back to us, asking us to try again. And we try again, hoping that this time the child is strong and determined enough not to give up. But sometimes it's too big a choice for a child to make.
And what about the older ones? With the twenty-year-olds, the thirty-year-olds who look fifty, what do you do with them?
The mother of the six-month-old pulls us aside and asks us to help her take her daughter to her grandmother's, in the village: "Here people shout all the time, she can't even sleep."
This young woman is right. The answer is there, for me too: family.
With the children we are trying to do just that — we seek contact with their family of origin, we are willing to track down a relative even when they live in some remote corner of Kenya, we give these children back the roots they have lost — because, tell me, how far can you go if you don't even know where you started from.
That's where we begin again: if you reach the families you reach on average five children instead of one, if we support the family we will prevent finding on the street in future the younger siblings of the child we had welcomed into our centre a few years before, and little by little we will break the chain that keeps putting children on the street.
That's the dream. Does it work?
Perhaps, because families are a gamble: every family is different and every family's challenges are many and difficult. First of all you have to understand them, then imagine solutions together, then move to action, then make mistakes, try again, start over and never give up. Like that for years.
When I think of the children we have welcomed into our centres, I think that the centres were never the solution, only a temporary alternative to what should always be guaranteed to every child in the world: the warmth of a solid, lasting bond, such as that of a parent or a family member.
And these young people I met today — do they have a solid, lasting bond to lean on?
Thoughts of them have been beating in my head for a long time now; I wish we could think of alternatives for them too, I wish they could come to believe that another world is possible.
But let's put ourselves in their shoes… In their shoes, I don't know whether I would believe in anything different from what I had lived through for so many years on these dirty, dangerous streets. As we walk the young mother to the bus that will take her and her daughter to the village she comes from, I hope with all my heart that she too will choose to stay. I hope she decides never to return to a wretched life like that of the dilapidated house with the rubbish garden, but stays in the village with her family.
Perhaps the village really would be the answer to leaving behind a city like Nairobi that takes everything from you and doesn't even offer the promise of an illusion.
Today I went to visit this group of boys and girls because we are developing a crazy idea, and we would like to involve groups like the one this morning in a new path to build together.
For us at the NGO Amani, the crazy ideas come above all when we let ourselves be accompanied by some friends called Cherimus.
Cherimus in Sardinian means "we want", "we desire", and perhaps that is why in their company we let ourselves be carried away by dreams.
This time the (crazy) dream is to bring to life the first Kenyan carnival. The project is called Carnival! Nairobi. And we want to make it happen alongside the young people who live on the street.
Why them? It would frankly have been far simpler to organise a lovely fancy-dress carnival with the children who live in our centres, involving local schools, inviting people to a wonderful parade and having fun together.
But no, we want those children, not others.
They are the ones who must lead the parade.
We want to give them the opportunity to turn the order of things on its head, to dissolve the rules dictated by a society that corners the children I met today and calls them "animals". We want to unleash chaos in order to overturn a wrong order and build a new one. To renew ourselves all symbolically, and then pick up the threads of our lives — now changed — and wait to see what happens next.
This is what lies behind carnival, and we would like the children living on the streets of Nairobi to invent a carnival that is entirely Kenyan.
That is why we went to meet them this morning. That is why the artists from Cherimus have been here for a few days now, and since this mad idea was born, once again, together with Koinonia community, I am certain we will build something wonderful.
Who knows — perhaps being together, getting to know one another while wearing masks that better tell us who we are, will also help us understand each other more. And from there we can start again: dreaming up new initiatives, entrusting ourselves to new ideas (perhaps even madder ones), building a different path together. One of real change.
And that, that is what together we "cherimus".