An Italian theater director and author in the silent, remote daily tragedy of Africa's largest and most populous refugee camp.
Laura Sicignano, a Genoese former founder of Teatro Cargo and former director of the Teatro Stabile di Catania, with several shows behind her on themes mainly related to social issues and the condition of women, traveled to Kakuma, on the border between Kenya and South Sudan, to experience firsthand the harsh reality, amid despair and glimpses of humanity, of more than 200,000 men women and children who have left their homeland to flee war and famine and the humanitarian workers who assist them.

The experience Laura told Malindikenya.net will become a play titled "Kakuma, the pursuit of happiness," produced by the National Theater of Genoa, which will be performed in the upcoming theater season.
"Kakuma is one of those experiences that each of us Westerners, who often forget how privileged we are, should have once in a lifetime," the director admits, "because in what I can call a 'human dump,' the extremes of our essence meet: on the one hand, the human qualities of caregivers and volunteers, whose generosity and efficiency I appreciated not only, but also their intelligence, culture and preparation; on the other hand, the refugees, their permanent condition of being confined, outside of everything, with a terrible past you read in their eyes and a future held up in precarious balance by faith and hope. With a special woman's look at the female condition. Even among refugees and outcasts, women are the ones who suffer the most."
Laura Sicignano landed in Nairobi just on the heels of International Refugee Day, and thanks to the Jesuit organization JRS and compatriot Angelo Pittaluga, Country Director of JRS in Kenya, she spent a few days in Kakuma, collecting stories, shooting images and interviewing those who work and frequent this world on the edge of human dignity.

"However, mine was a vision and will be a partial narrative," Laura explains, "it would be impossible to decipher and at the same time explain such a complex reality in a single play. I chose as a form of storytelling the travelogue, which is then partly the experience I lived, between popular reportage and poetic moments. I was particularly struck by the humanity of those who work trying to establish contact with the refugees, despite the almost irremediable gap between people seen as privileged transients and those who are aware that they will still have to stay, who knows how long, in a hostile environment far removed from any concept of home. These are relationships based on fleeting glances, half-words, hinted gestures. All in the middle of the Turkana Desert, while already a few hundred kilometers away, Kenya continues to grow with its contradictions, hypermodernity and Nairobi slums, savannas and Chinese presence, global economy and hunger. On stage, the jumble of human and emotional abysses, silenced expressions and feelings, will be represented by an Italian actress and an African dancer, and I will help myself with emblematic objects that have stuck with me: dust and dirt, barbed wire, jerry cans. There is little else in Kakuma, other than humanity on the margins, that can give us a great lesson about the meaning of life."