Rooting and Rising

8 hours ago

5 min read

The two weeks of Rooting and Rising at Kufunda this August have been truly Amazing. Amazing!

For almost two weeks, we lived and learned together with a beautiful group of young over 70 people mainly from across Africa. And somewhere in these twelve days, something profound shifted in our group. There was such a sense of Future Possible coming out of our time together.

What time is it that makes it important for me to be here?

This is where we began. There was no avoiding the harsh reality of the times we are living in. The world is dark in many ways. There are enormous challenges, uncertainty and suffering. There are reasons to feel overwhelmed by the scale of what is happening around us. And yet, as we listened to one another, something else became clear:

We each carry particular gifts for these times.

The darkness does not mean that we are powerless. Quite the opposite. Perhaps the very fact that we are alive now, and that we have these particular capacities, questions, sensitivities and longings, is part of what is needed.

We took several days during the first week to work with the fourfold practice: To host myself, to be hosted, to host others and to co-create.

What does it mean to take time for ourselves? To nourish ourselves? To listen inwardly? To make space for the future that seeks to come through me, rather than constantly trying to make it happen?

What does it mean to deeply enter another person's world. How do I really listen to another? How do I meet them with reverence and attention? How do I become a vessel through which something in another person can emerge? This relates to the African greeting of Sawubona - which has shared roots across the continent.

Hosting Others: How do we call the conversations that really matter? Continuing to ask questions and find our way through these. We invited the young people to connect with their own questions. They were mostly deeply personal:

How do I learn to trust my voice?
How do I bring my voice into the world?
How do I build my confidence? How do I trust my gifts?
How do I discover my gifts?
What is my purpose?

The fourth practice is co-creation. The first week had laid the ground for the Co-creation that was going to take place during the second week with the Oasis game.

We haven't played the game at Kufunda for some years, and I think we had forgotten just how extraordinary it can be. It is a hands-on appreciative game of community transformation.

We went out into the nearby community and together we looked for beauty. We looked for dreams. We looked for gifts and talents.

We listened to what people longed for. We were practising everything we had been learning during week one: How do we listen? How do we see? How do we honour what is already alive? How do we host another person's dream?

And then we gathered the community together. There was a talent show where stories, music and dreams were shared. And we asked: What is missing from our harvest of dreams? And most importantly:

What would you love to see happen here in the next 2 days of co-creation?

The young people and the community had two days to turn some of those dreams into reality.

Two days.

And what they have done feels almost miraculous.

They transformed the local high school, which had felt so bare and lifeless. They painted. They planted. They brought colour and life into the school grounds. They rebuilt the fence around the garden so that it could actually be used, protecting it from the cattle that had previously wandered through.

They created a beautiful new playground at Kufunda. They painted our hall. They built benches in the spaces around the football and volleyball pitches.

And there is still more to come. Because as this began to happen the community stepped up - a church group contributed more fencing, a landscaper offered 1000 bushes for the school that will be planted as live fencing.

This is the gift economy in action.

It reminds me of a question Edgard Goveia Junior from Brazil shared with us at the beginning of the Oasis game:

What if creating the world of our dreams could be fast, fun, free and fantastic?

We usually imagine that creating change has to be difficult. That it needs a big budget, a long plan, an expert, a programme, a donor.

What if we start with what is already here?

What if we look for the gifts?

What if we find the people who care?

What if we ask what is possible in the next two days — something realistic, but still a stretch — and then simply begin?

We worked very hard during these days. Getting up early and working full days to build the dream - to complete the playground, to build the fence, to paint the mural. And somehow, through the tiredness, there has been enormous joy (even through the mini flares of conflict that always rise with co-creation).

There is a particular feeling that comes from doing something difficult together and then looking around and seeing what you have created. A kind of: How is this possible?

At one point someone said that a little surprised that while in the gathering they felt that the internet is boring.

Perhaps because in the heart of Kufunda there is no internet. (you literally have to leave the hearth to go to the wifi)

And actually, there is so much more to do.

More conversation. More music. More making. More laughter. More work. More being together.

For two weeks the heart of Kufunda was filled with these young people.

And perhaps this is one of the gifts of these two weeks: we have not only been talking about creating a different future. Together young people from 12 different countries have experienced, in their own bodies, that they can create something together.

They arrived asking: What time is it that makes it important for me to be here?

And perhaps they are leaving with another question: What will I do with the gifts I carry for these times?

What surprised us most in the reflection on the 12th day was how little it took. How easily we worked with people we had never met and how much was accomplished with so much enjoyment.

"What was done in two days would normally take so much time — that was a miracle,"

one reflection read.

And maybe.....

Maybe creating the world of our dreams can be fast.

Maybe it can be fun.

Maybe it can be free.

Maybe it can even be fantastic.

Thank you to everyone who came, everyone who worked hard, and everyone who made this possible:

Iona Stichting

Mahle Stiftung

Stiftung Evidenz

and our collaborator Planetary Services