Anjani Hodgkins at last year's Festival of Cultures. (File photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

The third annual Festival of Cultures, sponsored by the Harvard Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO), is coming to Hildreth Elementary School this month.

Belinda Friedrich, one of the event’s organizers and a member of the original Festival Committee, says that a group of mothers watching a soccer game came up with the idea of a Festival of Cultures. The idea came from similar festivals in other towns and an eagerness “for more cultural sharing to be promoted.”

“The Festival of Cultures is an event with the goal to embrace, celebrate, and value the diversity that exists in our community,” Friedrich adds.

Herself of Czech heritage and married to a European, Friedrich joined the effort to publicize the event. The committee asked the PTO to sponsor them and came up with a theme for the festival. The committee, which every year is made up of only four to six Hildreth Elementary School parents, began holding a silent auction at the festival last year to cover the costs of the festival and to allow the PTO to keep its own funds for educational spending. “Any additional earnings would be used to cover a cultural event at school besides the festival, through the PTO,” says Friedrich.

At the festival adults act as “ambassadors” for countries to which they have strong connections. Friedrich and the committee have high standards for ambassadors. “We didn’t just want people talking about a country after visiting it on vacation, or studying about it on the Internet,” she says. “We wanted to hear from people who knew a country from a deeper place.”

This year, there will be 18 ambassadors from all over the world, including Haiti. HES held a fundraiser for the Haitian relief effort earlier this year, so “the Festival of Culture’s goal is to have an opportunity to hear more about this country [from] beyond the borders of its tragedy,” says Friedrich. Among the other ambassadors is Judy Lorimer, a former kindergarten teacher at HES, who has strong ties to the West Africa region and helped build a school there.

Arjun Khurana in last year’s festival. (File photo by Lisa Aicukewicz)

The children at the festival receive “passports,” which the ambassadors stamp, to track the countries they visit. Last year, the festival theme was “Say Hello.” To receive passport stamps, children would learn how to say hello in the languages of the countries they visited.

The theme this year is “What do you have for breakfast?” The festival, by incorporating a theme, aims to “help engage our community in thinking about how things are seen differently depending upon where you are in the world,” Friedrich says. “How you speak, what you eat, simple things are different.”

The festival begins in the auditorium, with the different ambassadors and their country displays and the silent auction. There is also a large map where visitors can pinpoint the countries of their families’ origins. Afterward, everyone at the festival moves to the HES cafetorium for live presentations and performances, like Chinese and Indian dances and African drumming.

Says Friedrich, “In the course of running this Festival of Cultures, committee members have all been deeply moved by the pride that families bring when sharing the country of their origin and the traditions and performances of these cultures.” It is no small feat that, despite the small size of the community, more than 18 countries have been represented at the festival every year.

“We have been awed by our town,” Friedrich adds, “as on the face it seems not to have much diversity, but this event really says otherwise.”

The event will be held on March 12 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Since no food is served at the festival, guests should eat before coming, Friedrich advises. And she strongly encourages guests to come for the entire time—for both the ambassador-and-auction time and the performances.