Tucson Meet Yourself

This past week was crazy as we were preparing to take part in a major city festival in addition to other routine items. Tucson Meet Yourself is a 3-day folklife festival featuring cultural foods, dancing, crafts, and musical performances. Downtown was transformed into an area full of tents, stages, and food stations. Local people often call the festival "Tucson Eat Yourself" because of the great amount of food there.

Iskashitaa had a tent in the Heritage Foods section for all three days, where we sold our canned food products from 12-6 each day. These are the products that we make during the Food Preservation Workshops (which I coordinate.) We also had crafting demonstrators on Saturday and Sunday from 12-5. On Saturday we had some young refugee girls demonstrating knitting and crocheting, and on Sunday we had refugee women demonstrating Burundi basket weaving. We also sold our refugee-made craft items on Saturday and Sunday.

Volunteers and me at our tent at Tucson Meet Yourself on Friday morning.

I worked at the festival in our food products tent on Friday and Saturday. It was a fun experience despite being tiring and occasionally stressful. Not only are we trying to sell our products, we are also simply trying to let people know about our organization. We are always looking for volunteers and people willing to donate their trees by letting us harvest the excess fruit.

Our tent was right next to the Food Demonstration area, where a kitchen was set up for people to give cultural cooking demonstrations. This was wonderful because some of the refugee women we work with were giving cooking demonstrations. It was nice to be able to see them and support them, and some of them brought me samples of the food after they were finished!

The stage for dancing was also behind us. While I didn't see much of the dancing, it was still neat to see all the various performers getting prepared behind the stage while wearing their traditional clothing. It was a cool weekend, but I was so exhausted by the end of it!

This week Heather and I also lead our first Refugee 101 Volunteer Training. We are going to be running these monthly trainings from now on. One of my current tasks is to find a new location for the training; our current location is only accessible by car, which isn't good for Heather, me, or probably many of our potential volunteers. We were both extremely nervous, but I think doing the presentation showed me how much I have already learned. The main part I need to focus on now is learning more about the conflicts in each country and why people have fled their homes.

This week we have another food workshop. I'm hoping to get some pictures this time to share! It's a little challenging since I don't have a camera anymore, but I'm hoping to find a way.

To finish, here is a news article that was in the Arizona Daily Star about a family of Syrian asylees that we work with.