By Alexandra Pedrini

Rakesh Alluri, left, a graduate student in industrial engineering from Vizag, India, and Orada Lelanuja, a graduate student in theatre from Chiang Mai, Thailand, play maag geb, which is similar to jax but is played with rocks, in front of the Thai Student Association booth at the Festival of Nations on Tuesday in the United Spirit Arena.

Taking a trip to countries around the world, students and Lubbock community members attended Texas Tech’s Council on Family Relations’ Festival of Nations on Tuesday night in the City Bank Conference Center in the United Spirit Arena.

Starting in January, the group has been working with people and groups from around the community to find people who wanted to host a booth to help teach people about their country, said Ashley Osborne, a junior human development and family studies major from San Antonio. The group sought to find people who wanted to help educate others on their countries’ culture.

“They’re just representing their countries in any way they want,” she said. “We’ve been coordinating for the past few months figuring out what they want and how they want to present themselves to the community.”

Osborne said the event was formerly hosted in the Human Sciences building, but because the group expected a larger turnout than the 200 guests that came last year, they decided to move the event to the USA.

“It was pretty good, but I expected it to be more crowded,” said Shahre Kheyri, a master’s student in interior design from Tehran, Iran. “It’s not a big town or big city so there aren’t a lot of international people here so I think that’s alright for size.”

About 100 people representing 25 countries created different booths that taught people about different cultures.

“People can come in from Lubbock and the Tech community to learn something new about different cultures that they might not have known,” said Pardis Safadel, a German and political science major from Essen, Germany.

The booths had flags, dolls, books, crafts, PowerPoint presentations and numerous other artifacts and objects from the countries. The International Cultural Center has many of the artifacts and let the group borrow them for the event.

“They’re just helping us with different artifacts and different cultural things we might not know, so it’s really helped us learn about all the different cultures,” Osborne said.

During the festival, two groups chose to represent their countires by performing songs and dances from their countries. First, Team Zumba performed a song and traditional dance numbers followed by Irish dancers. Because people may not know about the traditional dances, Osborne said she expected it to be interesting.

“This is all stuff we’ve performed before and found out about this event and thought it’d be a good opportunity to participate,” said Adam Smith, a graduate piano major from Kendallville, Ind. “Out mission is to give people performance experience in different cultural exhibits, this kind of works in the way this is working and presenting different cultures.”

Elizabeth Da Silva, a junior international business major from Luanda, Angola, and Nina Banana, a senior petroleum engineering major from Huambo, Angola, said learning about other people’s cultures is important to them.

People should know about other countries, and learn about their cultures and businesses as well, Banana said.

“People want to go, maybe on spring break, to some of the countries and they will have some ideas of some countries they can go visit,” Da Silva said.

http://www.dailytoreador.com/la-vida/festival-of-nations-takes-students-around-the-world-1.2233504