Celebrations in Mayfield 17
With the arrival of Thanksgiving Break, I finally have time to tell you all about what I’ve been doing! This is the first of a string of posts I’ve made to categorize my experiences; it’s basically what I did for the October set. This article focuses on what my Mayfield Project has been doing — let’s dive in!
A few days before Halloween, my Mayfield hosted an event called Something Wicked, which had a twofold goal: introduce international students to American Halloween, and show domestic students some Caribbean cultural traditions that relate to Halloween. (By the way, this is the same event I mentioned in my earlier Mayfield post.) We got most of the Mayfield community — twenty houses — to hand out candy for trick-or-treating; I can confirm because I filled my bag to capacity! Many people participated, with costumes ranging from SpongeBob to Star Wars!
For the Caribbean celebrations, we had some CSA members tell duppy stories — you might know them as ghost stories. All the storytellers were super energetic! The last thing we did was observe Nine Night, which is a wake celebration for honoring the dead. It was stirring emotionally to hear the people I live with share stories of their late loved ones, to honor those loved ones with a symbolic offering, and to watch them release their inhibitions by playing Just Dance afterward. Before you ask, yes, dancing and partying is part of Nine Night — you should look it up if you want to know more! Overall, it was a lovely time planning and participating in these beloved traditions.
Soon after that event, we were informed of our next project — the Mayfield Showcase. Think of the Showcase as our pitch for the Mayfield community: we show students all the incredible things we do, and we try to recruit new people! This hullabaloo is held in the atrium area of Commons. Personally, I’m excited that we have free reign to design our presentation however we like. Ours is still a work in progress, but we think we’re going to do an ~awesome~ tri-fold with a short board game for people to play through our cultural experiences! I’m really looking forward to it!
That’s all we have on our agenda right now, but of course we’re looking ahead to our next project. While we’re not sure about the details, we think it would be great to host a mini series of panels and discussions in which we would bring in students (and maybe other speakers) to talk about their experiences with their cultures. We also thought about pairing the panelists with groups of students for a more personal talk. There might even be a capstone celebration!
Things are sailing smoothly in this part of my life, and the horizons seem clear! As always, if you have any questions about Mayfield life (or questions in general), just send me an email at matthew.austin@vanderbilt.edu and I’ll be happy to answer!