My mind is whirring while the sun beats down. I think about the reports I need to submit, the backlog of work, as my feet sink into this wet grass and in front of me about thirty young people are lying across this long banner filling up with drawings and colours.

I watch the artists from Cherimus, who have come from far away, reasoning with the young people of Kawangware about what they want to be when they grow up, while dreams take shape, houses are built, and cars are drawn.

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One boy copies the flower I drew but makes it bigger, more colourful: "I like how you mixed the colours, but my flower is more beautiful!".

Another boy draws a hardware shop with tremendous precision, putting everything inside it, and frames it with a border.

Yet another draws a lovely courtyard with his car, his house, an outdoor kitchen beside it; he laughs when I tell him to invite me for lunch and I draw myself outside his gate asking to come in — "Then draw yourself inside!" he tells me, and I draw him welcoming me too, and we laugh together again.

I step back from the scene for a moment and everything seems absurd and beautiful, as absurd as it is beautiful.

My three companions from Cherimus are bringing a gentle attentiveness and particular care to this strange story; catapulted into another world, they sit on the ground and reason pencils-in-hand with young people so far removed from their everyday lives.

And the young people sit with them, other pencils in hand, and follow them into conversations so far removed from their own everyday lives.

I wonder what the young people think of us; I would love to get inside their heads, to understand their unfailingly courteous manner, to know what they expect, if they expect anything at all.

I don't think it's a given that a group of young people like the ones in front of me would choose to stay with us for an entire morning and let themselves be carried along by the requests of three strangers. And yet they stay, they follow us, they leap to their feet when Matteo asks them to invent a matatu — a bus, complete with speakers and a driver — or when Derek asks them to draw a large hammer and try to imagine with him that this hammer is magical: what powers could a magical hammer have?

I wonder how much part this abstract world plays in their lives — they who every day must face very concrete challenges, far too concrete, so concrete that I cannot even begin to imagine them.

And here we are in front of them, asking them to think about a more beautiful future, a bigger dream, promising that together we will give it shape.

I hear one of the street educators accompanying us say to a boy: "That's fine, you want to draw a hammer, so draw it big, almost as if you could wear the whole thing. Then try to think about what material you could use to make it real, and picture yourself walking down the street dressed as a hammer… going around bumping into everyone… am I right, Chiara? Can something like that really happen?".

Yes, it can.

But are we perhaps too ambitious?

We bring the abstract and the dream into an environment that, when you think about it, has absolutely nothing abstract or dream-like about it. There's a young boy lying on the grass beside me sniffing his drugs, indifferent to the rest of us; other young people wander off to try to find something to eat and then come back; a child cries because he is hungry; everything seems so distant and incredibly abstract to me — yes, how can anyone think about a magical hammer in a place like this?

Then the boy with the hammer smiles and says: "Right then, mine is a boomerang hammer. I throw it and it comes back. So I can reach the people who hurt me and they don't even notice. Yes, my hammer is also invisible — I throw it, it hits whoever it needs to hit, and then it comes back. Actually, do you know what? It goes right into people's bags and brings me back some good money, so I can go and eat!".

At that we all burst out laughing, he laughs with us, and at this point I ask myself: what harm is there in planting in these young people the thought that somewhere in the world there is a little magic? What harm is there in imagining together a slightly different world, one that doesn't treat them badly, one that takes care of them?

After all, my three friends from Cherimus sit in the mud and reason together, showing an attentiveness that these young people are not used to experiencing — so here, already in front of me, is a small piece of a world a little different from the one that exists all around here. No one forced my friends from Cherimus to come all the way down here to create with these young people a carnival unlike any ever seen; no one forced them to realise together with these particular young people — and not others — a project as abstract, and absurd, and ambitious, yet also as beautiful, as Carnival! Nairobi. And yet here they are. They are enjoying themselves and they want to be here, and they want these young people to be the protagonists, at least of this story.

At this point, do you know what I say? I hope that on the day of the 14 April celebration I will see in the sky an invisible flying hammer, striking all those who do not believe in the possibility of change, and all those who do not believe that somewhere in the world there is still magic — and that there can be magic especially in a place like this in Kawangware.