HUJAMBO

The creation of HUJAMBO is a story in several chapters:

The chapter was written several years ago when the youth pastoral group decided to write down the vision of the Don Bosco Youth Organisation in Flanders, Belgium (Jeugddienst Don Bosco). What distinguishes us from other organisations? Which values do we find important in our organisation? Where do we stand for? Those values were collected and defined. Some people brought up the idea of "a house full of values".

Couldn't we do more with these values? This next chapter was written very carefully. We wanted to create a game that was based on those values. This way, people taking part in one of our courses could experience which values are important in our organisation. Through the game, they would also be able to express what those values mean in their lives. The game would also answer a trainer’s old question: how do we organise a "meaningful" evening activity about "values in life" ?

The third chapter was written by "others", from outside our organisation. They pointed out the possibilities such a game would have outside the Don Bosco Youth Organisation. Schools, youth movements, parish groups, ... were also looking for a game concerning values. The decision was taken : the project had to go beyond the walls of our organisation. The project was broadened and became a lot bigger at the same time.  The end result was the board game including an interactive CD-rom.

However the story doesn’t end here yet.  The next chapter was written by another organisation: Don Bosco Youth-Net ivzw.  This is an international network to which the Belgian organisation belongs to.  At our intercultural exchanges we were looking for an ideal method to discuss about values.  Most values are culturally determined, and often conflicts between “cultures” are the result of conflicting values on which these cultures are built.  As dialogue is the best solution to solve conflicts, we were looking for a method we could programme into our intercultural exchanges to facilitate the dialogue on values between the young people taking part in the activity.  Through our Belgian trainers HUJAMBO was introduced into the network.

However we realised that the original game needed to be adapted to the specific needs of international youth work.  To solve these questions we needed to write another chapter.

This next chapter was co-authored by the European Youth Foundation.  Through the financial support of the European Youth Foundation our trainers could get to work on updating the values and methods included in the game.  We wanted to make HUJAMBO available for everybody who could use the game, who could be inspired by it, who could create new extensions to the game.  The best way to do this was by creating the www.hujambo.info website.  This makes the game available to all who have access to the internet.  Making the game available as a download created some limitations as well.  We had to eliminate the cd-rom and the use of the die.  Luckily there are 2 sides on every coin.  The use of internet technology makes it possible that extra games sets can be added infinitively.  Therefore we would like to ask you to write the next chapters of this story, by playing the game and using your experiences to add extra game-sets to HUJAMBO.