On Friday, April 11th, NHS hosted a rich and colorful multicultural festival that brought students, staff and families together to celebrate everyone’s culture. Running from 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm, the festival showcased many of the cultures that make up our school through performances and food. The festival was also a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders, meaning every ticket and food purchase contributed to life-saving medical efforts in crisis zones across the globe.
The advisor for the multicultural festival, Ms. Singh, has a big role in the inner workings of the event. “ Well I’m the advisor, I meet with the committee from the very beginning, I help organize, I do a lot of background stuff, it’s like a million different things.”
Mrs. Singh has a unique inspiration for her involvement in the multicultural festival. She explains, “This is our second annual year hosting it, it went really well last year so we thought we would continue and improve and make it better. Multiculturalism, diversity, just learning about other cultures and supporting our students in expressing themselves has always been something I was passionate about. In my last school I also helped out with the multicultural festival, so I wanted to bring that to our school as well.”
Doctors Without Borders is an independent medical humanitarian organization that provides medical care to people affected by conflict, disease outbreaks, natural and human-made disasters, and exclusion from health care. MSF operates in over 70 countries, focusing on delivering emergency medical aid and humanitarian assistance to those who need it most, regardless of race, religion, gender, or political affiliation. MSF(doctors without borders) is also often among the first on the scene in conflict zones, disaster areas, and places where people are excluded from healthcare. “We put it to a vote with the NHS students and this is the charity they chose, it’s the second year they’ve chosen the same group” Ms Singh noted.
The festival also highlights just how active the NHS chapter is throughout the year. “We do things typically every Friday,” Ms. Singh explained. “We go to the senior center, we do a women’s shelter dinner every quarter, we help with all the STEM nights at elementary schools, we do teacher childcare. To this date this year, we’ve done over 100 events.”
Although the multicultural night in particular is quite difficult, “The hardest part is definitely all the moving parts, because we work with a lot of different clubs and organizations, just everything in on time is difficult because, I think a lot of times people don’t realize that if there like a day or two late, that pushes another thing back that pushed another thing back and another thing back, so just keeping on a timeline, is tough.”
One of the biggest questions students had was: What was the goal of the multicultural night? “I hope people had a good time. I hope they saw a piece of their culture or a place to add their culture. Maybe they learned about another group they didn’t know as much about—or a type of dance or music,” Ms. Singh said, “Ideally, everyone walks away feeling like they either learned something new or saw themselves represented, or both.”
