Harrisonburg International Festival celebrates culture

When was the last time you played with a dreidel from Israel? Saw a Kurdish band perform? Experienced Venezuelan cuisine?

If you attended Harrisonburg's Annual International Festival on Saturday, you could have easily experienced all of this and more.

For the past eight years, the International Festival has taken place in September at Hillandale Park. The festival is a community-based, volunteer-driven non-profit event that has grown greatly since it began. According to the festival's website, it is an opportunity to "celebrate the diversity of Harrisonburg and the nearby communities" through a "forum in which cultural groups can display and celebrate their rich and important cultural and linguistic values as a means to educate the larger community and to support awareness for their presence and contribution."

EMU's Community Learning Coordinator Deanna Durham considers diversity a benefit to both the city and EMU. After spending the beginning of their professional lives in El Salvador and Washington, D.C., Durham and her husband returned to Harrisonburg when her mother-in-law became ill. The culture shock set in quickly when they saw that there was not as much diversity here as in their previous settings.

Durham was challenged as she attempted to resettle into Harrisonburg, as she craved the diversity once present in every aspect of her life. However, she says, it was only a few days into her job that she was asked to join the committee for the International Festival. She is now the lead volunteer coordinator and estimates that there were approximately 4,000 attendees at the event this year, including over 50 first-year EMU students, as well as 150 additional EMU students and staff.

Diversity is the common thread that draws Durham to the International Festival and to EMU. She treasures both the celebration of diversity and the difficulties diversity brings, including the stresses and concerns. She said that experiences with diversity, such as the festival, allow her to interact in a way that is "whole."

Billy Seidle was one of the first-year students volunteering at the festival to fulfill service requirements for the First-Year Seminar class. He worked on the playground, attending to children and ensuring they were kept safe. He also got an opportunity to walk around the festival and observe all the cultures and ethnicities that were present. The diversity was particularly noticeable in the attire of festival participants, along with the music and activities that represented each culture.

"There was an incredible amount of diversity," Seidle said, "and it promotes a better understanding of the people around you - a better understanding of culture." He sees EMU as a culturally diverse place to live and loves meeting people from different backgrounds than his own. He said he would definitely be back at the International Festival next year, and encouraged the rest of the EMU community to attend as well.

Harrisonburg is the largest refugee resettlement area per capita in the state of Virginia, which makes it a very diverse area. While an "immigrant" is classified as someone whose journey to this country comes by choice, a "refugee" comes because there is no other option. Refugees are brought to the United States by the American government, usually for security reasons such as potential for loss of life. Harrisonburg's New Bridges Immigrant Resource Center and their Refugee Resettlement office provide services for refugees in the Harrisonburg area.

More information about the festival can be found at http://www.harrisonburg-international-festival.org.