By Danilynn Weiniak/ne news editor
In 1986, NE Campus hosted the first-ever TCC International Festival, which lasted a single day. In 2007, department heads collaborated to reinvent the idea but wanted it to be five times bigger.
Now, the International Festival returns to NE Campus.
For five days, April 13-17, multiple departments, faculty members, clubs and students will express their cultural diversity through presentations, interactive activities and movies.
Spanish faculty members Modesta Lopez-Tollison and Maria Jimenez-Smith, who co-chair the project, said it took two years to organize and plan the festival.
“We wanted this festival to bring cultural awareness to the entire student body and our community through informational seminars, art, music, food, games and other exhibits,” Tollison said. “We wanted this event to be educational as well as entertaining.”
Tollison and Smith want this festival to involve everyone. The goal was for the faculty to make it part of the curriculum for the spring semester, and the faculty provided a great response, Tollison said.
The Cornerstone honors program assigned its students to take part in the movie panel discussions. The art department will have its students work in an exhibit. A ceramics class added a project. The music and dance students will perform. And the English for Speakers of Other Languages program assigned students to do projects on other countries.
“We hope that our students, faculty and staff and the community at large will embrace and celebrate the diversity that we have in this area,” she said. “Our theme for this event is Communication Brings Us Together, and that is what we hope to achieve with this festival.”
Each day of the festival will have a cultural theme that centers around an area of the world. Monday will feature the Americas. Tuesday will host Africa. Wednesday will show the Middle East. Thursday illustrates Asia, and Friday will portray a culmination of all countries with an emphasis on Spring Fest.
Local vendors, clubs and universities will attend Spring Fest, said its coordinator, Amity Womelsdorff.
“Each club and vendor will feature a different country as a part of the International Festival,” she said.
Most of the campus will take part in the festivities. The cafeteria will feature different plates in accordance with the area of the globe represented that day. Faculty and staff from every TCC campus will give presentations as well as offer guest speakers from as far as Lebanon.
“Everything is a must-see,” Tollison said. “I could not recommend one event over another.”
One of the highlights, the Human Race Machine, will be accessible to anyone in the Student Center.
Much like a photo booth, students can step inside and have a picture of their face changed to see what they would look like as another race. This machine, along with a movie Race the Power of an Illusion, provides facts about race and an insight into what different races have in common, director of student services Paula Vastine said.
“We decided to make it a five-day event because we have so much to work with and so that everyone can choose to be a part of it no matter how hectic their schedule,” Tollison said.
Scattered both inside and outside throughout NE Campus, the events kick off at 9:30 a.m. and the last event occurs at 7:30 p.m. daily. The exceptions are Monday, which hosts the opening ceremony at 9 a.m., and Friday, when the events close after Spring Fest.
“It was such a huge undertaking that I know it’ll be very successful and fun,” she said.
Posters with all of the events are posted in most buildings on every campus, and most of the events are free.
