Landing into an Oasis Game
- Dec 17, 2014
- 2 min read
As I arrived at Kufunda I felt completely lost. Coming from the quiet, punctual and already cold Germany I was feeling as a fish out of water. Yet Kufunda looked to me a very beautiful and welcoming place, a village situated in the ancient forest with its little typical african round huts. The 18 youth of the leadership programm welcomed me warmly and I was introduce straight on to the Oasis Games, since my arrival was casually combined with the beginning of them. I could not really understand what kind of a game they were untill I experienced them directly.
Something I´ll never forget are the trips to get to Chitunguiza!! Squeezed in a combi the youth were singing and dancing for the whole trip every day. From outside it was possible to see the combi bumping up and down at the rythm of the drums!! Such a vitality and joy of living I never experienced before in such a little space!! In Chitunguiza we went through a very interesting and intense process. Divided into groups we walked in the community to discover and collected the dreams and wishes of the members of Chitunguiza. Together with them we analyzed what we could achieve together in 3 days and which resurces wereavailable. The final decision fell on the cleaning up of a little park, that more than a park at the beginning looked like a dump... The encouragement level at the beginning was not very high. It was hot and some bureaucracy and permits were not completely through. After the first challenges the work-game started and after 3 full days we managed to see results!
At the end we were satisfied of the work done, and also the kids showed their apriciaation by playingin inthe new area! I enjoyed the process and for me it was a wonderful oportunity to discover the surroundings and meet people. I also had the oportunity to be part of the conclusion of the Leadership programm and for me was really beautiful to hear feedbacks of people who learned and who apriciated the change, altough sometimes challenging but at the end good and enriching changes. I had a little quick taste of the process the youth went trough from the flowgames, the daily worldcafé and open spaces, and from the practical works as permaculture and herbprocessing.
The youth left and the village got quiet and as a couclusion of the year the Kufundees met to evaluate, apriciate the ending year and plan for next one. I experienced the retreat as an oportunity to really meet the Kufundees together as a village, as a community, and to discover the many and interesting projects that are going on on a regular basis here. Now is christmas, a quiet moment to recover energy and to stay with the family! I´m looking forward to experience, explore and learn here at Kufunda.
Rebecca
What a beautiful reflection on community and co-creation! The Oasis Game sounds like such an inspiring tool for bringing people together, listening to shared dreams, and turning creative ideas into tangible physical spaces. For instance, when working on hands-on restoration projects or automotive repairs, taking time to properly prep and apply a reliable Car Base Coat is what ensures the final product turns out durable and vibrant. Thanks for sharing such a uplifting story of connection and community power!
What Rebecca's account ultimately conveys — and what I think makes it such a valuable piece of writing despite its brevity and its honest acknowledgement of its own incompleteness — is the particular quality of openness that genuine community learning requires. Rebecca arrives not knowing what the Oasis Games are. She cannot understand them until she experiences them. She gets a "little quick taste" of processes that the youth have been living for months. She is, throughout, a learner in the most fundamental sense: someone who does not yet know, who is willing to not yet know, and who trusts that the not-knowing is the beginning of something rather than a deficiency to be quickly remedied. This quality of humble,…
The World Café and Open Space methodologies that Rebecca glimpses at Kufunda are two of the most powerful tools in the contemporary community facilitation toolkit, and their presence at Kufunda speaks to the organisation's commitment to participatory, emergent processes rather than top-down, pre-determined ones. World Café creates conditions for large-group conversation that is simultaneously intimate and wide-ranging, allowing ideas to cross-pollinate across different groups and perspectives in a way that more conventional meeting formats simply cannot achieve. Open Space goes even further, inviting participants to set the agenda themselves and follow their own energy and curiosity rather than a facilitator-determined programme. Together, these methodologies embody a philosophy of collective intelligence — the belief that the wisdom needed to address a…
The permaculture and herb processing work that Rebecca mentions in passing deserves more attention than the brevity of her account allows, because these practices are not incidental activities at Kufunda — they are central to its philosophy of learning as a whole-person, whole-community, whole-ecosystem practice. Permaculture is not just a set of gardening techniques; it is a design philosophy that applies the principles of natural ecosystems to the organisation of human communities and economies. When young people learn permaculture at Kufunda, they are not just learning how to grow food — they are learning to think in systems, to observe before acting, to work with natural processes rather than against them, and to understand that the health of the soil…
The year-end retreat that Rebecca describes — the gathering of the Kufundees to evaluate, appreciate the ending year, and plan for the next one — is a practice that I think every community organisation, every team, and every family would benefit from adopting in some form. There is something profoundly wise about building structured moments of collective reflection into the rhythm of community life — moments that are explicitly dedicated not to problem-solving or planning but to appreciation and honest evaluation. The distinction matters: appreciation is not the same as uncritical positivity, and honest evaluation is not the same as complaint. Together, they create a container for the kind of genuine reckoning with collective experience that allows a community to…