One city down, many more to go for this summer. I'm waiting in the Amsterdam train station to book my reservation for Interlaken, Switzerland later tonight (so I'm sorry if this post doesn't flow very well, it was typed up quite quick).

The past three days have been great and a much needed break from the student schedule of the last year. For the last two days, I have been involved with the Oasis Game, which is a process for bringing individuals together and realizing their dreams within their communities. Oasis was created in Brazil a few years ago and has since been expanding around the world. The idea is that a group of people come together (in this case, all over the world) and work alongside a community to make their dreams a reality. For our week, the community wanted to create a garden and a greenhouse, paint some murals and build soccer goals and a zipline for the kids. I was involved with building the zipline and greenhouse, and throughout the week dabbled in many of the other projects.

By far the biggest challenge was not being able to speak the language, and as a result, I had a very hard time interacting with the community and kids. Eventually you overcome that barrier and learn to interact in other means, but I was unable to go up to community members and ask them to join in or learn more about their life stories. But not being able to speak much meant that I was able to observe what was going on around me much more.

I was involved with the community for two days, but the entire event had been going on for a week before I arrived. The first day I was there, Saturday, was a bit of a learning experience for the group. We weren't able to get as much of the community involved as planned, we mostly had kids, and the organization for the different tasks that needed completed was lacking a tad. But with any project like this, you need those learning moments to know how to improve for the next time. Fortunately, we had a second day on Sunday, so at the end of the day on Saturday we talked as a group on how we wanted to engage the community more effectively and planned our working for the following day. The talk was quite helpful because Sunday was a huge improvement.

A large proportion of the community came out to help on Sunday and people were constantly bringing food and drinks if they weren't directly helping with the building, painting or gardening. In addition to the bonding with the community, it seemed that the core group for Oasis had begun to bond more tightly.

It was a whirlwind to get everything finished, and the greenhouse specifically took a lot of finishing details to get up and running. One of the keys about Oasis is that it uses only donated or recycled materials from the community. Most of the projects similar to Oasis I have been involved with (Jamaica, Lousianna, Tanzania) tend to have a more planned out system for obtaining materials, but in Oasis, we simply wandered around the community looking for anything we could find to use. For example, one group went to a shipyard and after talking with some people there, were able to find a large pulley to use for the zipline. For the greenhouse, we found some large metal poles, a lot of zipties and some plastic that we were able to strap up into something that surprisingly resembled a greenhouse.

One of the key things throughout the process was to ensure that the community was involved so that they would feel ownership and pride in continuing the project in the future. I wasn't sure how exactly this would turn out but I think it was most evident in the last two hours of our build time. Suddenly, people were coming out of their homes with hanging baskets for the greenhouse, different materials to make windchimes, and even an old rabbit house to place in the garden. It was neat to see how excited they were and willing to contribute.

The beauty behind Oasis however was not in the greenhouse that was built, the zipline that was created, or the murals that were painted, but rather in the community that was formed. It's amazing how little we tend to interact with our neighbors, and sometimes we just need a common activity to unite behind and hang out on the street corners talking with one another. It was almost like creating a mini Fourth of July in the community - just another reason to throw a party and BBQ.