Attending the Columbus Greek Festival

The service event I attended was the Columbus Greek Festival, hosted at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church on Friday, August 31st. I was presented with the opportunity to volunteer at this festival because I am a member of a Greek cultural organization at The Ohio State University. I have grown up in a closely-knit Greek community and have volunteered extensively at my own church’s festival. This activity impacted me by causing me to realize how large the Greek community extends. Not only was the festival larger and run in an entirely different way, but there were several parishioners there that could identify members of my own church.
Initially, I was a little intimidated to start attending the Columbus Greek church because of its magnitude. I am from Pittsburgh, and there are about seven different Greek Orthodox churches placed throughout the city and surrounding suburbs; however, Columbus only has one church. To ease my transition, I decided to volunteer at the festival in order to meet some members before I attended a service. Unlike my previous experiences with festivals though, the Columbus festival had many booths (approximately twenty) where everything was broken up into different departments. All of the previous festivals I had attended typically have had everything more centralized. Unfortunately, I was only able to interact with one family—the booth where I was volunteering—because they have one family run a booth each. This is an especially rare trait because very few churches have enough volunteers to have this type of setup. Through observing how everything ran from an inside perspective, I was very surprised to see how many mistakes occurred. I expected a larger church to have better techniques and more organized processes, but I was completely wrong. It made me realize that though my church was very small and did not make nearly as much profit during our festival, we were quicker and much more efficient. Through volunteering, I gained experience in introducing myself to complete strangers and temporarily stepping outside of my comfort zone in order to have an easier transition in the future.
The Columbus Greek Festival relates to International Affairs because it is a celebration and appreciation of Greek culture and heritage. It is a perfect example of immigrants and descendants of immigrants celebrating their lineage and origins while also allowing others who may be unaware of Greek culture and traditions to experience it firsthand and also participate in the celebration. At the festival, Greek dancers, in traditional dancing costumes, were constantly Greek dancing to traditional music. It is a common part of Greek culture to know these dances is commonly used to bond with one another within your community. The dances that were performed have survived in America through generations of immigrants from different islands and represent the pride that Greek-Americans feel about their heritage. Even when the performance ended, the performers entered the crowd and began to pull different observers to teach them how to Greek dance.
My experiences relate to other classes in that all cultures need to have respect for others different from your their own in order to have a functioning society, which is something we discussed in my “Shattering Stereotypes” F.Y.S.S. (First Year Success Series) class. It was a great experience watching everyone come together to celebrate, regardless of their individual backgrounds.

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