An entire day of cultural programming began on March 29, with the International Fair hosted by the department of Student Development and Orientation. About 40 students attended the fair to see the culture booths and presentations, but the majority of attendees left after the free food samples like Mexican flan and Indian curry had been given out.
According to Cammie Dean, director of student development and orientation, the lack of attendance at last Saturday’s International Fair may have been a good thing, though. She said her office was using the event as a test run for next year’s International Fair.
“We weren’t really shooting to make it huge this year. Next year we’re going to really open it up, but we wanted to kind of get a feel for how much interest we would get,” Dean said. “Next year we’ll look at planning further out and getting more people involved and getting the community aware because people love to bring kids to these things. It’ll be a good opportunity for that partnership with the community and invite them onto campus and celebrate with us.”
Dean said her department wants to expand the International Fair because 45 different countries are represented at the university, but Dean also said there just aren’t enough events for the students in spring.
“It’s a combination of things, particularly that the bulk of students graduate in May. This is, for a lot of students, a last semester so there’s lots of that final capstone project thing going on,” Dean said. “So there’s a somewhat greater time commitment academically, but it’s also a time when the student organizations who are really just kind of coming together in the fall are now seeing their things kicking in. We like to make room for that so that they can do their own thing.”
Dean said attendance was also hindered by holding the fair on Saturday instead of a school day, but she and other fair organizers will discuss moving the event to a weekday next year.
“We’re probably open to discussion on that one. We don’t do a lot of weekend things on our campus. It kind of goes both ways. Because we don’t do a lot of weekend things people aren’t accustomed to come to weekend things,” Dean said. “With every event that we do we’ll get feedback from the students who participated and we’ll pull the committee back together and talk about what worked well and what didn’t and what we want to change.”
Dean said the most successful event, as well as her favorite, was the cultural expo that kicked off the fair and featured culture booths, crafts and the ever-popular free food.
“The expo itself is kind of that sight, sound and taste, even, of various cultures, and then some of the presentations that went on were very exciting. There was some broad overviews and then there was some really specific interesting things,” Dean said. “From China she showed how they take the Chinese characters and make words with them. So she showed like ‘man’ and something else combined to make the word ‘crowd.’ It was really fascinating.”
After the expo, smaller sessions were held to display more specific aspects of the cultures on display. In Wichita 1 meeting room, music and dance from various cultures were shown as audience members recorded it all on their phones.
Mechanical engineering sophomores Pubuditha Jay, Janith Ambewela and Tharusha Wanigasekera performed Indian love songs for the audience.
“It is a love song so it talks about how a couple gets to know each other and how they live their life. It has a good melody,” Wanigasekera said of the first song they played.
That song was a classic from the 1950s, Wanigasekera said, but they played a song written in 2009 next in order to display a wider range of Indian music, and they did it all with no rehearsing.
“Actually, this was the rehearsal,” Ambewela said of the performance as the others laughed. “We were very busy the week before.”
A parade of flags was scheduled for 3:30 p.m., but Dean said it was canceled because there weren’t enough participants. Instead, a slideshow featuring flags of all 45 countries represented at the university was displayed.
“As of Wednesday we only had five countries signed up so I didn’t think we could pull it off, so I kind of pulled back on that one because I didn’t want to do it and not do it well,” Dean said. “Next time we’ll solicit separately for the flags cause we kind of solicited with the people who signed up.”
Dean said she wants to develop more events like the International Fair as part of something she calls “edu-tainment.”
“We don’t want it to be too much like class, but we still want there to be a beneficial message. In this day and time, for your generation heading out into the work world which is more and more global, there really is a benefit to knowing others, understanding others from different backgrounds and from other countries because we’re increasingly working across borders,” Dean said. “So there’s an advantage to that, professionally, but it doesn’t all have to come from a textbook. It’s the practical experience that’s really nice.”
