COSTUME CHOICE
According to the United Nations website, the UN has 4 main purposes, the first of which is to keep peace throughout the world. No small task. I wonder sometimes if the UN Day celebration at our school has the same goal on a smaller scale.
After my first UN Day three years ago, I wrote these paragraphs about it in this post:
UN Day is the school’s celebration of the fact that its students hail from 34 different countries around the world. It is one of those events that make adults teary for reasons they can’t identify, while their children look on with bewilderment. The grown-ups see it somehow as the reason that they have chosen this life for their families. To live every day with this much diversity of color, thought and language is truly a gift and an irreplaceable adventure. As adults we can appreciate this hodge-podge in a way that perhaps children cannot, catching a glimpse of the utopia of nick jr. and undergraduate liberal arts classes.
For the parade of nations (this whole thing is much more akin to the opening ceremonies of the Olympics than any ritual at the United Nations), students get to choose which country they will represent. For the vast majority, this means the country of their ancestry (although, not for my eldest, who chose to represent Costa Rica because it meant she got to wear the traditional dress, a fancy, frilly affair, and much more glamorous than the blue-jean clad Americans). It is both touching and a little sad to see children representing the Greece or Korea or Argentina of their heritage, when they have never actually lived there, as their parents have moved them around the globe every 2 to 5 years throughout their childhood.
This year marked our fourth UN Day. My girls ran out of the house in their denim shorts and t-shirts with American flags painted on their cheeks, no longer interested in frilly costumes. From my view on the top row of the bleachers in the gym, I noticed that costume choice often has little to do with family heritage. Two blond-haired, blue-eyed children marched in from Thailand. Poland and Brazil and Honduras had one lone boy each, each looking more Irish than the next. Then there was the girl from England; a good friend of my daughter’s who I thought was American. Turns out that while there is British heritage in the family, her choice of country was about finding a long-lost London t-shirt at the bottom of a drawer a few days ago. I considered my own daughter, who last year chose to walk in with Japan, solely as a way to wear some of the finery that my mom had picked up after years of working with Japanese college students.
So, if the kids make their choices based on a newly received soccer shirt, or on the country that they just moved from, or from routing around in their grandparents’ closets, the adults make theirs based on something else entirely.
I feel entirely privileged to know a group of women here who are bright, motivated, creative, thoughtful, and above all, independent in a way that living out of your home country requires. Some are not paid for their work, and some are, but all have projects in addition to their families. For example, feeding the local homeless, working at the UN, sitting on boards of large charities, managing multi-national corporations, and literally helping our school run. These are not women who are at a loss for things to do or things to talk about. Every single conversation I had this week included, “What are you going to make for UN Day?”
Every family is asked to contribute a snack for the post-parade celebration, ideally, something representative of the best their country offers. Something they can make themselves. Something their kids will be proud to explain to their friends. Truly, the final product is a spread to behold: hummus from Syria, scones from England, torta Espanola from Spain, cheese smuggled in from Switzerland, chicken satay with peanut sauce from Thailand. Americans generally contribute brownies or muffins or chocolate chip cookies, though as one mom joked this week, “We’re Americans, aren’t we supposed to just buy something?”
So while this all has the flavor of competitive baking, which I know happens all the time in schools, UN Day is different from Christmas or Valentine’s Day or birthday parties. In a place where we want to be a happy hodge-podge, this is our opportunity to contribute something good, something special to us, to make our community happy. Not to educate or debate or contemplate, but just to enjoy. Amidst the conflict of everyday international living we seek a way to prove the best of ourselves, of our heritage and history, and how better than through grandma’s pumpkin muffins or specially bought cheese?
After the parade of nations, the entire elementary school stood up to sing the song One Day. There is really nothing like a group of international children singing about ending war to give a parent a mean case of the goose bumps, I don’t care how cynical you are. It doesn’t matter which flag they marched in under, or if you stayed up all night making scones or bought stale Hershey bars on the drive to school. For a few moments, all you feel is love for all kids, great bubbles of hope, and maybe even, peace.