All Roads Lead to DMPS at World Languages Festival
Japanese drums were just one of many activities at the first-ever DMPS International World Languages Festival.
Central Campus hosted the district’s inaugural International World Languages Festival on Thursday. A more informal name for the event would be Around the World in 80 Minutes, Give or Take. The Iowa International Center was a co-sponsor of the bazaar that, for all its diversity, was but a tasty tip of the cultural iceberg that is DMPS, a school district that’s home to nearly a hundred native tongues and dialects.
The student commons was converted into a mini-cosmopolis as the main staging area for the festivities. There were Chinese dumplings, Latin American fruits and French cuisine, for appetizers. The Soten Taiko Drummers from the Japanese American Society were thumping away. Salsa Des Moines demonstrated some spicy footwork and there were French folk dancers, too. More quietly, in the library there were presentations on the art of furoshiki or Japanese fabric folding, and topping it all off, literally, was a nearly completed Japanese tea house that’s been erected on the 5th floor in part of the space that houses the district’s home construction program. Giving it a distinct local touch are materials recycled from old wooden bleachers at the Roosevelt High School gym and Drake Stadium and the walnut tree in the backyard of Central Campus teacher/foreman Ben Molloy and his wife, Yurika. There isn’t a nail in the place and once it’s finished the tentative plan is that it will be disassembled for permanent relocation to the gardens at the Des Moines Botanical Center.
Countries and schools with display tables in the commons included Germany, Italy, France, China, Spain, East High School, Walnut Street School, Hoover High School, Meredith Middle School, Goodrell Middle School and, the hosting venue, Central Campus.
Getting a kick out of watching a troupe of fellow students perform a loosely choreographed Chinese cultural routine were Corrin Hicks and Bryan Rico. She’s a sophomore at Lincoln and he’s a freshman at Roosevelt and they’re both first-year Japanese students at Central Campus. How much have they learned so far?
“Enough that we can understand each other,” Corrin said, smiling. Dared to prove it, they faced each other for a brief exchange that made them both giggle. What was said? “I told her she looks pretty,” said Bryan, “and she told me I’m smart.” They were both right. Corrin was wearing what she described as a Chinese-style kimono, a gift from her grandfather and Bryan, well, he just sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, in whatever language. Both of them hope to travel to Japan on a school-sponsored trip next year. In the meantime they go out for sushi and keep mastering the Japanese alphabet(s) which contain forty-some characters, seventy-some if you count the diacritics and, well, it’s complicated – you just take their words for it.
Yes, it is a Central Campus indeed. Events like Thursday’s make it feel as though all roads lead to it, a place where the universal languages of food, music and goodwill are blended into another; world class education.
