  {"id":32022,"date":"2018-04-16T16:39:35","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T21:39:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/?p=32022"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:39:35","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T21:39:35","slug":"lakeland-ptv-in-focus-bsu-hosts-49th-annual-festival-of-nations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/2018\/04\/16\/lakeland-ptv-in-focus-bsu-hosts-49th-annual-festival-of-nations\/","title":{"rendered":"Lakeland PTV: In Focus: Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ Hosts 49th Annual Festival Of Nations"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"ratio ratio-16x9 clearfix my-4\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"In Focus: Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ Hosts 49th Annual Festival Of Nations\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lqvo5xCsqkQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ celebrated the different backgrounds of all their students with the 49<sup>th<\/sup> annual Festival of Nations. The Beaux Arts Ballroom at Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ was packed with the song, dance and food of more than 30 different cultures Friday evening.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;The students and I met together and [thought], &lsquo;how can we represent the diversity at Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ when we have so many students from different countries, from different cultures and from different ages?&rsquo; And we said, &lsquo;Okay, maybe this year, the theme should be One Festival But Many Cultures,&rsquo;&rdquo; says Dr. Brian Xiong, the director of the Center for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ and Northwest Technical College.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;This is a platform where they can come in and show their cultures; show their talents, food &ndash; if anything they want to represent their country,&rdquo; says Jelina Basned, the president of the International Student Organization (ISO) at Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ.<\/p>\n<p>ISO has been working on the festival for the past month, encouraging everyone at the school to show what makes them special.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;We had a flag show where all the countries of the students were represented, and then we are doing songs from different countries, dances and also, we have food which represents different countries,&rdquo; says Basned.<\/p>\n<p>Another big part of the evening was the fashion and room d&eacute;cor.<\/p>\n<p>Alisha Ghaju, the secretary for ISO, says, &ldquo;We have a lot of international people wearing their cultural dresses from Malaysia, from Uzbekistan, from Pakistan.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;This year was different because we are doing different things. Last year was our first year, so we had no idea what we were doing, but this year, we had a theme and we did little hot air balloons and big hot air balloons and we did a lot of origami, and we just wanted to make it look colorful like a party of like a festival so everybody feels welcome,&rdquo; says Sarvika Shetty, the vice president of ISO.<\/p>\n<p>Next year, the Festival of Nations will be celebrating 50 years. While this year&rsquo;s ceremony was extremely extravagant, ISO has a few more tricks up their sleeve to celebrate half a century of Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ diversity.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;I really want it to be grand and I think we need to get more people, more cultures, more shows,&rdquo; says Shetty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ celebrated the different backgrounds of all their students with the 49th annual Festival of Nations. The Beaux Arts Ballroom at Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ was packed with the song, dance and food of more than 30 different cultures Friday evening. &ldquo;The students and I met together and [thought], &lsquo;how can we represent the diversity at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","category-uncategorized","post_format-post-format-link"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32022"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32023,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32022\/revisions\/32023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}