Potentials of OASIS process working with diversity
Generally, i see in the Oasis game a strong potential of working on the diversity, especially with people with a refugee background:
The OASIS process create spaces where people can show their talents to people that they don’t know, it’s a very challenging step, but offer a possibility to appreciate diversity and to celebrate unicity of peoples. Dreaming together, let the people feel that everybody have a feeling of common good, also if we desire things differents, and at the same time make come out a sort of natural human hability: we enjoy and we feel good supporting common dreams, this make us stand up and get out of our prejudices and feel near others.
In the action, working together, help to enhance the differences, to appreciate diversity as a richness. Change our point of view on people that we don’t know and with whom we never imagined doing something together; especially with refugees, with distance it can happen that we start to see them as objects or even problem and not more as people who have dreams and needs.
An another strenght of the Oasis Game is that everybody can find his places in the process, especially in the action, everybody can contribute as he/she wants, even just by lending a tool, and this help people to feel safe and in the same time part of something big. This, for me, support diversity and integration, because create bonds of trust and gratitude.
The other side of the process Oasis Game, especially working with refugees, for me, its that in this energy of enthusiasm, following the dreams, especially if facilitators and the most of the peoples involved are mens, whites and occidentals, there is a risk in not seeing, marginalise and not take care about the rank and priviledge issues, the pain and the difficulty that people that arrived here, with their history and their trauma, their fear and their hopes. We are not in the same place, and if we don’t take care about it, we may develop anger, feelings of exclusions and feeling of not being seen and hear. I think that if we want to support a community to became more awareness about human relationship in order to build safe spaces where people can have a deep opening, we have to include in the process moments and places that may contain and take care about these topics. That’s why Godeep Game was created from organizations that work with Oasis Game and Processwork, to support the Oasis Game and integrate the process. But i think that also in the Oasis Game it’s possible to open spaces for that.
My opinion it’s that stay with the pain, just listen and be present with love, soustain the hanger without feelings guilty, it’s very hard, but it’s possible, and it’s a way to create new opportunity for a real human community.
That it’s very different from focus on the problems, look at the scarsity, stay in the hopeless, that prevent us from doing things together. For this it’s very important to keep the quality of Oasis Game, to bring an earthquake on usual way of thinking.
A last consideration it’s about the time: how to find the balance between pushing the process to the goal, and the sustainibility. Somethimes i saw people and facilitators really tired and a beat stressed during the game. This is a very challenge, and i’m asking to myself, because our occidental culture are going faster and faster, how to develop the ability to understand when the process need to slow down, also if thats mean, maybe, let go some of the goals. Because we need achieve, and we need to take care. Maybe we can considerate to take care of the process and the people involved, a goal.
Regarding revitalization of rural space I think that for this kind of spaces it’s very powerful to play an Oasis Game, because people that live there are already a community, but most of the time they do not perceive themself as a community. A village or small town have possibility to create common space and meeting opportunities easier than a big cities. i have the feeling that people there needs more care of relationships, and proximity, that’s why this kind of process could be more durable and sustainable with the time.
Giulio Participant OASIS Learning Village