Unity & Diversity Day 2023 🌍

On October 6th, OSC celebrated its annual Unity & Diversity Day. Each student gets to dress up in their national attire and represent their country, as well as eat a ton of delicious food from all over the world (a multicultural buffet prepared by the parents). I always say I only come to Unity & Diversity day because of all the good food, but if I’m being completely honest, I do genuinely enjoy the day a lot, and it gives me an opportunity to celebrate my own cultures. 

I am half German, and half Mozambican, which does make it kind of difficult to choose under what flag I walk, or how I dress up. This year, I chose to represent Mozambique, wearing a dress made out of capulana. Capulana is a specific, common and very traditional piece of material in Mozambique. There are a bunch of “this type of material” variations all over Southern Africa, but capulanas are special to Mozambique. There is even a saying, “só és uma mulher Moçambicana se tems uma capulana com tigo”, “you’re only a Mozambican woman if you always have a capulana with you”. I think you’re getting the point, capulanas are pretty unique. The one I wore on Unity and Diversity Day, is also extra special to me because the dress was made in the province of Inhambane, which is where my mum is from and where I have spent a lot of my summers. Moving on, (sorry I got a bit off track), I “felt bad” that I didn’t represent Germany in any way; but it’s okay because my brother did that for the both of us. There was a flag parade, where one can really visualize the diversity of our school, which all in all is pretty amazing. On the day, I also had ceviche from the Peruvian stand for the first time, and let me tell you; wow. It was absolutely delicious. I went back a lot of times because yum. 

Additionally, DP1 (us) had to lead this year’s UN workshops. As I am also a member of COMUN (Model United Nations), we organized most of the workshops and assigned each DP1 student a grade to teach. This year we choose SGD #16, Peace Justice and Strong Institutions. I think this is a great goal, and relevant not only in the world of politics, but also in our everyday lives. Furthemore, I was assigned to teach DP2, where I, along with two other peers gave our presentation. We ended the workshop with a short debate on the pros and cons of the UN, which was extremely interesting to see; and is something that can help me with my global politics class. 

All in all, the day was really great (I even played football with my friends and younger kids, not the greatest idea in a dress, but still very fun). We, as COMUN, also got an opportunity to showcase our school a little of what we do, and from what I heard, all the workshops were extremely successful. Both teachers and students were all very happy with this year’s workshops.