Home.
For many students on Taylor Campus, it’s just a few hours away. But for some, home is overseas and across cultures.
On Nov. 4, students and faculty gathered to get a taste and a peek at the different cultures within Taylor’s community during Mosaic Night.
The night started with the Global Market where guests bought eight tickets to spend on different ethnic dishes.
Joanna Vasudevan (‘23) said that her favorite part of Mosaic Night is just that – the food.
“(I love) seeing the rush of people that will come through,” Vasudevan said. “I feel like food is a huge part of people’s culture. And so when you see other people trying different cultures and different foods, even me trying all these different foods from different parts of the world, (it) is just a very bonding experience.”
Before any guests arrived, the event started with the cooking.
The Office of Intercultural Programs (OIP) students gathered ingredients from Fort Wayne and brought them together to prepare home-cooked meals. They filled campus kitchens to cook for the multitude of anticipated guests for Mosaic Night.
Back in 2011, Mosaic Night would host approximately 50 people. This year, Maribel Magallanes, director of student leadership and cultural programs, said they expected around six to seven hundred people.
They had so many guests that they ran out of food at the end of the night, sophomore Kylie Roggie said.
After the Global Market, guests made their way to the Rediger Auditorium where the Multicultural Student Association (MSA) had put together a show, pulling from cultures all over the world.
The night included songs, dances and spoken words from different cultures and languages. Between each act, the two masters of ceremony, Serena Lee and Nicole Domene, provided colorful yet sensitive commentary. Mosaic Night was a celebration of cultures at Taylor University.
“Everyone who performed was sitting upstairs, and they were cheering for these people for the whole time,” Roggie said.“They were standing up and dancing when other people were dancing. When I say it was a celebration of culture, it literally was a celebration of culture – not just with the performance but with the audience as well.”
MSA students worked hard to put together an amazing night. Their motto for this year’s Mosaic Night was unity. Even though people have different backgrounds, they all have the same Creator, Roggie said.
MSA strove to welcome the Taylor community while sharing their stories and cultures. Mosaic Night was an opportunity to share a part of themselves with others.
“I feel like a big part of who I am as a person is my culture,” Sophomore Angelica Felix, secretary for MSA, said. “So you can’t see who I am entirely without seeing that aspect of me and seeing how big it is. So being able to share it with other people so that they can understand it – so that they can feel it – has always been a big part of me.”
The night was full of boisterous music, dancing and crowd participation. Roggie said that she laughed and cried throughout the night, moved by the performances and the hard work and history behind them.
MSA put on a celebration of the unique cultures on campus while promoting their theme of unity. Through each performance, students showed a different thread of God’s tapestry.
Magallanes quoted Revelations 7:9 as the ultimate hope of unity in Christ: “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.”
