Yaaku Trust

Yaaku Heritage Trust

Aims

YAAKU

To promote awareness of Yaaku culture (unique Cushitic language and hunter-gatherer heritage in general – including all aspects of their traditional lifestyle).

To help people all on Earth to have a better understanding the complexity of Kenyan Heritage and endangered languages (especially Yaaku and related Cushitic languages).

To introduce Kenyan Heritage into public education in complexity focusing on endangered small communities (especially ndorobos like Yaaku).

To safeguard the tradition and the traditional practices in Yaaku areas for all of us and for all our (Yaaku’s) future visitors (discovering ancient human survival traditions).

To help people in Mukogodo and South Turkana area (in Kenya) saving their culture and have a better understanding of challenges of the modern world.

To educate children and young people in Mukogodo (and South Turkana) area for all their traditions, and enable them to respond to the challenges of modernising Kenya.

To combine traditional Kenyan Education standards with local heritage and values as human anthropology (local dances and folksongs and other aspects) must be tought by skilled native teachers. To support future’s teachers studies.

To develop a balanced mental, physical and psychological education, widely based on Yaaku culture, alongside official Kenyan education, with modern views and modern subjects as well.

To run school(s) in Yaaku language (as mother tongue) in addition to the two state languages creating also bursary fund for the Yaaku pupils.

To educate confident Yaaku citizens in Kenya prepared for the challenges of the future.

To improve the local health system based on local Yaaku students becoming nurses and doctor(s) forming a local polyclinic which can serve also the the visiting tourists. This polyclinic must be partly based on „western” science and also traditional local healing methods saving local knowledge forming a satisfactory way of treatment.
Similar to neighbouring Kimanjo Hospital but far more traditional (in treatments).

To save the elders (last speakers) by improving the local health care system.

To achieve a status being declared ethnic minority and endangered community by the High Court in Kenya with an option to regional autonomy.

To reclaim the ancestral home, the Mukogodo Forest saved by Yaaku community from being destroyed like other surrounding forests (Lol Daiga) by pastoralist.

To form a Natural Reserve(s) in Mukogodo and also in South Turkana region (around Teleki Volcano) managed by the Yaaku Trust and the local community (similarly like Masai Mara) as it has been well looked after for the last 4000 years…

To reduce and alleviate poverty of the Yaakus, improving the economic way of living mainly based on future ecotourism.

To serve an excellent example for other communities how to preserve heritage and represent heritage saving ecotourism.

Dr. Laszlo Szabo
Founder
www.yaaku.org