Students gathered in the Mayer Campus Center to take part in Culture Fest 2005 on Saturday - the second annual celebration of diversity and community on the Tufts campus.
The all-afternoon event featured traditional food from a variety of nations and ethnicities, ranging from Israeli to Puerto Rican, as well as colorful dance and music shows.
In addition, student participants read stories or poetry to highlight important aspects of their cultures.
"We have so much cultural diversity that the whole campus is not always exposed to," said Dave Baumwoll, president of the Tufts Community Union (TCU) and Chairman of the Culture Festival Planning Board. "This event is a celebration of that diversity. It will be a new Tufts tradition, something that brings the whole community together."
This year, according to Baumwoll, the event focused on making sure that all the students who came to Culture Fest received a little taste of every type of culture present at the show.
The reason the event did not occur in previous years, Baumwoll said, is due to the huge amount of planning necessary to make an event like this run smoothly.
"A lot of administrators said that events like this failed because it was challenging to get all the groups together. It was big obstacle to get 25 cultural groups working on the same page for this event," Baumwoll said. "We had to organize the food and anticipate how many people would show up. We had to plan all the shows during the
afternoon."
Despite the difficulty, Baumwoll said, "it was an overwhelming success."
Each participating group was given a $250 allowance to buy their food and were designated to specific areas of the campus center to set up their information and food plates.
Attendees received a Culture Fest booklet listing the groups represented at the event as well background information on the various cultures.
Apart from educating students about the various cultures represented, the booklet also gave participants the opportunity to participate in a raffle. Group representatives would stamp the page of their corresponding culture in their visitors' booklets, and students who filled the books with corresponding stamps were entered into the raffle.
The raffle was added in order to "encourage students to go to all the tables," Baumwoll said. The prize for the raffle was a mini DVD player.
"It was a great initiative on the organizers' part to present this event to bring in cultural awareness," said freshman Amod Rajbhandari, whose band Moksha performed at the exhibition for the International Club. "It really brings out the cosmopolitan nature of Tufts."
"I thought it was exciting to see all the performances, and at the same time all the food upstairs," said freshman Charles McClean, who worked at the event for the Japanese Culture Club (JCC). "[The JCC] did not have to do much set-up when we got to the campus center because everything was already set up for us. It was very well-planned and a success."
Due to its success this year, the Programming Board plans to bring Culture Fest back next year.
Culture Fest was sponsored by a variety of organizations, including the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate, the Arts, Sciences, and Engineering (AS&E) Diversity Fund, the Office of the President, and the Programming Board.
