Cultures from across South Canterbury are coming together this weekend to highlight the region’s diverse cultural landscape.
After a successful first outing last year, the Multicultural Aoraki Festival is once again returning and will take place at Ara Field on Saturday.
Event organiser Maturo Siaosi said the festival was incredibly important for displaying how multicultural South Canterbury really was.
‘‘For the families and the groups that come here, they don’t have the time or opportunity to showcase their culture, so by having this it brings all those cultures together.
‘‘It brings them all to one place to share their food, to share their crafts, their traditional dress and also share their performance.
‘‘The idea is to just bring everyone together, there are so many cultures here.’’
He said after the success of last year, he could not wait for people to see the improvements made for this year’s festival.
‘‘There are 86 stalls this year. We have stalls from Japanese, Filipino, Kiribati, Indian and Pasifika cultures.
‘‘We are going to have some really good performances this year as well.
‘‘There is going to be the Japanese dragon again, the drum boys from Oamaru are coming up and we also have a band that will play all day as well as other cultural performances.
‘‘The police, fire service and YMCA will all be there as well running activities, it’s just going to be fun.’’
It was a lot easier to arrange this year’s festival he said.
‘‘Last year was quite hard since it was the first time, we didn’t know what to expect.
‘‘We didn’t even have much to spend or put into the event.
‘‘Thankfully, we have had some sponsors get involved after they saw how good it was for South Canterbury, so this year has been a lot easier to organise.
The festival begins at 11am and is completely free to attend.
