Lynn schools celebrate cultural diversity

LYNN – They were worlds apart in their approach but Harrington Elementary School and Classical High School delivered the same message of unity when both celebrated cultural diversity this week.”This is good for the city of Lynn,” said Classical High School Guidance Counselor Fran Khuon. “These are new faces of the city.”Tuesday 6-year-old Willie Jones, with paper towel tube binoculars around his neck, drove a cardboard Jeep on safari through west Africa, down the Savannah, into the rainforest and on to South Africa and never left Harrington’s first floor.View a photo galleryHarrington Principal Debra Ruggiero said each grade level decorated one of the school’s eight hallways to represent a different country. Jones drove his Jeep through the pre-K and kindergarten wing passing large paper cutouts of rhinos, elephants, giraffes and a lot of monkeys. He stopped to read his description on gorillas, which hung on the wall, aloud.”Gorillas beat on their chest when they think they’re king,” he read.Around the corner first-graders celebrated North America and second-graders showed off all things Asian in the next corridor.Upstairs fourth-grader Lydia Splaine showed off the timeline she had worked on for San Juan, Puerto Rico.”Everything about (San Juan) is cool,” she said. “But I like how they rebuilt the church (San Juan Cathedral) two times because it was destroyed by hurricanes.”Her sister, Sarah Splaine, a fifth-grader, worked on Suriname as part of the South American wing. Third-graders covered Australia and the art, music and library departments tackled Europe.It was the gymnasium, however, that truly felt like an international marketplace. Ruggiero said families were invited to bring in food native to their homelands and they did so on a grand scale.The line to taste delicacies such as Puerto Rican pernil, Costa Rican bread, Cambodian egg rolls and dishes from another dozen countries including Guniea Conakry snaked halfway around the gym.The Dexter Street school has about 630 students and Ruggiero said it seemed most of them attended.”This is our biggest event,” she said.Classical’s Excel Club, comprised of English as a Second Language students, represented nine countries during its International Night Wednesday. Music poured out of classrooms representing Iraq, Sudan, Guatemala and Hondouras. Haiti, Nepal, Cambodia, Burma and the Dominican Republic were slightly more subdued but no less proud of their displays, dances and culinary offerings.Jackie Burke, who heads the Excel Club, said the event was important for students, many of whom are still struggling to navigate a new country.”They don’t get to participate in a lot of other things and they can feel a little isolated,” she said. “Here, not only are they participating they’re the stars of the show.”Dipika Sharma, a 17-year-old junior, wore a shimmering chestnut brown floor-length dress trimmed in gold with a matching scarf and bangles stacked up three inches or more on each wrist. She said it is a dress she brought with her when her family moved from Nepal four years ago.”It was weird,” she said about her initial arrival in the U.S. “The people were different, the language was different, I tried hard to blend in.”Today Sharma said she fits in just fine, “I know how stuff works.”Down the hall Emyliya Shamo, 19, was an all American teen in a T-shirt, sparkly hightop sneakers and skinny jeans but she happily served up platefuls of her native Iraqi cuisine while talking about the country she left only seven months ago.”It is beautiful,” she said. “People don’t realize that. War has destroyed some things and people think it’s bad but it’s not.”Shamo said life in the U.S. has been a big change but a good one. She is in school regularly now, where before it was sporadic at best due to the political climate.Josue Diaz, 15, who moved to Lynn almost a year ago from the Dominican Republic, agreed that although it’s been difficult life in the U.S. is better.”There are more opportunitie