International Festival

One of the cool things about working in our school is how different all of the students are. To clarify, in our last school we had a very multicultural student body. We had quite a few Haitians, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and people from a dozen other places. However, the mere nature of this school and the classification of “International” really brings the multicultural aspect to another level.

The biggest difference among our student body here vs what we experienced in the states is that in the US, everyone from another background was trying to fit in. There was a mainstream culture and expectation and here it seems that everyone has a huge sense of nationalism and pride in their differences. It’s pretty refreshing.

The embodiment of thi

s sentiment took place about two weeks ago when the school held its 48^th (or something) annual international festival. The festival was a series of carnival games ran by students, cultural dances, and of course food tents.

I was elected among the high school students to a position manning the dunk tank. Having previously been the object of scorn and tongue biting focus while sitting on a dunk tank platform before, I knew the one key to being the bag of tea to a dunk tank is to go early. There is a trade-off of course. If you go in too early, you get a bit of biting cold hose water to cushion your fall. If you go later, the water is warmer (who knows why…) and there is often hair and other undesirable stuff floating next to you. 

Some friends of ours taking aim after I
was off of the tank

Armed with this wisdom I chose the early time slot and seemingly forgot to account for altitude and cold frigid mountain weather. After a line of kids dunked me in the frigid water for about 40 minutes, I retreated to my classroom to put on dry clothes before the wet ones turned into a frozen sheet. Also yes, Shannon dunked me.

Food, glorious food!

After putting on the dry clothes I went up to the main stage area. Allow me for a moment to paint you a word picture. The whole setup is outside in a large flat tennis court style area. There is a stage up front where students are performing a variety of cultural dances, songs, and rhythmic interpretative shadow boxing. First, the 6 year olds perform an adorable rendition of a flamenco dance. Then the 16 year old boys play some fancy song on their guitar. Most of what is happening is in a variety of languages that I didn't speak but the feeling of pride and communal bonding and respect was omnipresent.

So many options!

Surrounding all of this extravagant celebration are tents. Many many tents. Each tent is selling food or goods from their local area. The Ecuador tent is selling llapingachos and hornado along with Ecuadorian chocolate. Canada was selling Maple Bars. Mexico had tostadas and burritos. China had pork and egg rolls. Indonesia had some sort of heavenly curry/soup/mush of delight. My absolute favorite however was Argentina. Argentina was selling sandwiches of thick cut Argentinian beef. Simple yet divine.

Young flamenco dancers

All in all, I caught a cold, Shannon dunked me, kids played games, and we stuffed ourselves with food from all around the globe. It was truly a unique and great experience. I eagerly await next year’s 49^th (or whatever) edition.