When you walk the slums of Nairobi these days, you'll often come across a troupe of acrobats practicing their pyramids in the small grassy areas that serve for public parks between people's homes. In these places, people no longer write off these human missiles with the derogatory terms once common to their trade: 'street entertainers', 'dropouts', 'artists of the poor'. Much of this attitude change can be attributed to the success of various acrobatic troupes, whose professional success on the festival circuits of Europe has led to a re-evaluation of the potential of acrobats in modern-day Kenya. As one of Sarakasi's trainers says: 'A lady came up to me in Korogocho the other day and told me she'd told her son, 'If you want to get ahead, you'd better become an acrobat'. I'm sure she wouldn't have said that four or five years back!'
Over the past five years, Sarakasi's training programme has become a prominent force in at least 10 of the city's largest informal settlements - including Korogocho, Mathare, Dandora, and Africa's largest slum, Kibera where our acrobatic trainers provide a programme of free weekly training in local orphanages, community halls, public grounds, and five primary schools that have made performing arts a regular fixture on their syllabuses. In 2005, we added nine new public venues to our list of free training sites, which now reach an estimated 800 children and young people each week.
According to latest estimates, at least 1,500 young people have either been directly trained or influenced by Sarakasi's trainers since the programme began in 2001, including homeless families, unemployed youths, and children working at dumpsites close to the training grounds. Once these youngsters join Sarakasi's formal training programmes, they also benefit from open-door 'classes' in practical lifeskills such as reproductive health and income-generating activities. In 2005, Sarakasi began an innovative programme with Kenya's Ministry of Gender, Sports and Culture and the Chinese Embassy to send seven promising young acrobats from Nairobi's slums to China for a year-long exchange with the famous China Hebei Wuquaio Acrobatic School. Now back in Nairobi, the teenagers have become full-time 'ambassadors' in Sarakasi's residential programme, passing on their unique knowledge of the Oriental arts to other young Kenyans.
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