On Wednesday afternoon, an interest meeting was held amongst representatives of MSMS’s humanities clubs concerning plans to host an International Culture Festival at MSMS.

Seniors Peter Nguyen, Helen Peng and Morgan Emokpae plan to start this International Cultural festival in order to celebrate the diversity of the MSMS campus. Modeled after similar festivals, the MSMS International Culture festival will represent several countries, each led by club members or student. Nguyen, Peng and Emokpae  intend to plan two festivals with booths celebrating international cultures and providing demonstrations of some key identifiers of those cultures. The first, to be held on November 3, will be a “test run,” according to Nguyen, president of the Asian Student Association, and will be limited to ten booths and open to the MSMS community. The second, to be held sometime in the Spring, will be an expanded event, open to the public and containing a number of booths only limited by students’ interest in running them. Both events will take place in the “W” room of the Hogarth Building.

“We are planning on individual countries having their tables, and you and other club presidents will have worked on giving presentations. Maybe making a dish, maybe performing a song. It’s really up to you in how you represent your country,”  junior Esmond Tsang, who also helped plan the event, told those present. “There’s plenty to talk about: history, music, food, arts.”

While the main purpose of the event is to help members of the community learn about cultures they may not be able to experience themselves, Nguyen hopes that it could have a much larger impact.

“The idea is to get a spotlight on MSMS, and then, maybe, the state of Mississippi because we do have a reputation and stigma,” Nguyen said. “We want to try to let the world see that Mississippi isn’t unilaterally racist.”

Peng, co-president of Interfaith Dialogue Club, was able to share some insight into how the event started being planned.

“When Peter, Morgan and I started talking about this, we didn’t know that the school had run a cultural festival before, so this was just us thinking about fun things we could do for our senior year,” Peng said after the meeting. “The more we thought about it, the more we thought, ‘Wow, this is something that can be fun, and can be good for the community. Then we talked some more, and details started falling into place.”

The clubs involved include those from MSMS’s foreign language classes: Spanish, Russian, German, French and Latin, as well as other clubs that have been started by students, like the ASA or Finnish club. They are also planning to reach out to cultural clubs at the Mississippi University for Women in hopes of gaining their participation as well.

The sponsors for the event are Ms. Lori Pierce, who teaches German, French and Latin and sponsors a number of cultural clubs, and Ms. LeAnn Alexander, the Director of Student Affairs.