As the rain sprinkled outside Saturday, Muncie residents assembled inside the Cornerstone Center for the Arts to celebrate the diversity of their city at Unity in DiverCity 2006: The Many Faces of Culture.
Organized by The DiverCity Group of Muncie, the event's goal was to open minds to the idea of diversity.
"It's not really trying to resolve anything," Kevin Harris, who is on the advertising committee for the DiverCity Group of Muncie, said. "It's just getting people to talk about it and to bring stuff out in the open and to have some kind of contact in a different kind of setting that's not like a boardroom or a city council meeting or something like that."
The festival featured booths that represented other countries and performances by various cultural groups.-á-áOne of the performances aimed toward enhancing awareness of other cultures was a Japanese tea ceremony that was presented to a small, quiet audience.
"To let the people know other cultures, you open your horizon," Yoshiko Kendall, the performer of the Japanese tea ceremony, said.-á-á"Coming from another country, I think [diversity] is important."
Events like this helped the festival in providing exposure for diverse religious groups, nationalities, and languages.
"It's like bringing places from all over the world to a tiny little place called Muncie, Indiana," Christy Ngo, junior at the Indiana Academy and participant in the tea ceremony, said.
Aside from presenting diversity to Muncie, the festival provided entertainment for those who attended.
"It seems like a good way of getting a bunch of people together that ordinarily wouldn't be all in one place," Harris said, "and kind of just a way of putting it out there that Muncie is a diverse city even though it might not look like it."
Many of the people who went to the event agreed that diversity awareness in general broadens their view of the world.
"I think it's great just to bring awareness because we're so used to living in one spot that when we go other places, it helps us realize that we're living in an actual world," Ellie Fye, a senior at the Indiana Academy and another participant in the Japanese tea ceremony, said.-á-á"We're not just living in one area."
The DiverCity Group of Muncie provided a medium for Muncie residents to learn about other cultures, ways of life and other people with Unity in DiverCity 2006.
"You get realization from it," Ngo said.-á-á"There's an actualization seeing all these different people and how we're all made to be special."
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