In a fantastic little school in Kabul, girls and boys leave behind their impoverished, war-torn world and enter a utopia where they laugh, sing, juggle and ride unicycles.

At the Mobile Mini Circus for Children, more than 100 Afghan youngsters mix regular schooling with art and acrobatics. Set up by a Danish performance artist, the aim is to bring fun, hope, laughter and colour to the lives of those more used to poverty and conflict.

‘Nothing negative should come here. We try to cut off the misery,’ says 42- year-old David Mason, who moved to Kabul and founded the school in 2002, just months after the fall of the Taliban. ‘The circus makes children enjoy life. It shocks them, moves them and makes them see how life can be.’

The school’s bright-coloured buildings are a stark contrast to the drab, brown mudbrick of Afghanistan’s capital, where menacing armored convoys travel the streets, and women and children often have to beg in order to survive.

At the school, any visitors carrying guns, including foreign soldiers and Afghans with armed bodyguards, are absolutely forbidden, as are their donations. All the classes are free and the place survives on money raised from its performances, as well as donations from 15 countries.

Seventeen Afghan teachers instruct in subjects like maths, English and religion as well as theatre, painting and circus skills. There are about 120 permanent students, aged from 4 to 13 years, but the number swells to 350 when all the state schools close for their winter holiday.

One schoolroom ñ a circular glass greenhouse ñ is filled with a gaggle of girls, juggling tennis balls and bowling pins. And in another room, boys stand on their hands and do acrobatic flips. Habeda, an 11-year-old, walks three miles to attend the school with one of her brothers. Although grown-up female performers still cause something of a stir in this conservative Islamic nation, she dreams of becoming a singer one day. ‘I went to Germany, Denmark and Japan. I sang Afghan and Japanese songs there. Everybody was clapping for me. I was very happy,’ she says. ‘I want to show to the world the real face of Afghanistan.’

‘When a seven-year-old boy is on that stage and 2,000 people are clapping for him, it gives him something that war and misery can never take away from him,’ David Mason says.

Recently David’s school sent troupes of about a dozen boys and girls to spend two months in Germany and Denmark, performing acrobatics, theatre, music and Afghan national dance for children in schools and at cultural shows. Last year, a troupe also toured Japan. ‘I went to Japan and I performed acrobatics and theatre for the children,’ says Mohammed Ansar, aged eight. ‘There were 5,000 children looking at me. I was surprised and happy. I want to go to as many countries as I can and show them what I have learned.’

The school’s teachers and pupils also put on circus shows and do educational theatre around Afghanistan. They teach the audience about landmine awareness, malaria prevention and the importance of brushing their teeth.

Afghanistan has a long-held tradition of theatrical storytelling, but the circus is an imported art form, previously seen only by visiting troupes from Russia and neighbouring Tajikistan. The fun side of learning is also new for most Afghan children, where education is often done by rote. And according to the aid group, Oxfam, more than half the country’s 12 million young people still do not go to school at all. This is, however, a great improvement from Taliban times when it was completely forbidden for girls to attend classes, and children were banned from playing with marbles and kites. Even music was off limits.

Before coming to Kabul, David was travelling the world, teaching salsa and tango. After the September 11th attacks led to a United States offensive against the Taliban for harbouring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida camps, he changed his mission to help the country’s under-privileged children. ‘For us,’ he says, smiling in his warm, sunlit, yellow office, ‘medicine is jumping and laughter, and education is balancing and juggling.’

In January 2008, 17 young Afghan

artists will perform in the San Francisco Bay Area and in California

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Contact: www.afghanmmcc.org

Photos: © Seth Bloom

www.fullbloomtheatre.org

Story by the Associated Press