THE BATTLEFORDS — Battlefords Trade and Education Centre's first annual Taste of Culture event was a success this year, welcoming the tastes, colours and styles of cultures across the world back into the Battlefords for a week in October.
"We've talked about doing a taste of people's home country foods [before]," Mona Leece, BTEC's executive director told the News-Optimist.
"We support a lot of staff that [have lived] in different countries. The Philippines, Ukraine, Korea, China, Pakistan ... and we had one staff that was really motivated in getting it done," she added.
"She came to us and said, 'can we involve the clients too and learn about each each other's countries?'"
Over the course of a week, BTEC's staff and participants dove into cultures around the world together. On Monday they learned about the colours and symbolism of the flag — colouring the country's flags together. On Tuesday they learned about the foods, flowers, national animals and population of each country before making posters. On Friday, they had international karaoke.
Overall, Leece says they celebrated culture from over 15 countries, culminating with the making and tasting of food from around the world.
"Yeah, so they would give them a taste of each little food of each country. So they had perogies they had ... kimchi, they had spring rolls, you name it. They had it. They had different kinds of rice from Pakistan," Leece said.
Staff were able to dress up in traditional clothing later in the week and share about their home country.
"It also helped with the staff and clients learning about that staff's countries, like their national flower ... what the population is," Leece said, adding that one of the workers from Ukraine shared her memories of Odessa Ukraine.
But Leece says it also speaks to the wealth of diversity in the Battlefords and how BTEC, (an activity centre for adults living with disabilities,) is seeing that in their organization.
"We're finding that more applications are coming in from different countries ... the diversity in the Battlefords is big.
"I think it does connect us ... and it's kind of opened up a can of worms now because now they want to do like, Canada week where they learn about the provinces. So I think it does tie into the community a lot, too."
