On the lawn in front of Veteran’s Square, Fresno City College’s International Student Program hosted a color blast to celebrate Holi. This Hindu festival symbolizes the coming of spring and new beginnings, the celebration on FCC campus was held publicly on April 3 for anyone to participate in a color blast.
The international student program’s services coordinator Jesus Delgadillo set up a table on the lawn with student volunteers to hand out bags of colored powder for students to take part in the color blast. The colors used each represent a different pillar of the celebration, red for love, blue for the Hindu god of love and compassion Krishna, green for new beginnings, yellow for prosperity, purple for royalty and pink for youthful playfulness.
“Holi is a spring holiday that’s very popular in India, it’s a celebration of the start of spring. The colors represent the petals of flowers blooming,” Delgadillo said.
International student Jasmine Bains looks forward to further developments with the festival, this year has only been the second annual Holi celebration with plenty of room for expansion.
“Making sure the public is open to the knowledge of having this event here on campus. It is actually open to the whole of Fresno, but as you can see it’s mostly just students,” Bains said. “Maybe getting it to the whole of Fresno’s attention.”
Keeping a celebration like this open to the public for all students to attend spreads awareness and educates the student body on cultures of the world. FCC student Jared Lee saw his friends participating in the color blast and jumped in to join them.
“This is my group right here, my friends, my family, we came out here. It was just something fun [to do],” Lee said.
Nov. 18 through the 21 the international student program will host a similar event for the whole week called “International Education Week.” Every day will be a different celebration of other cultures from around the world. One of the days will feature a larger color blast where even more students can attend, learning more about Holi and other festivities from around the world.
“We’re trying to make sure that it’s a bigger crowd, we do have a good amount of students but we want to make it a widespread event,” Delgadillo said. “Where we could have maybe, a color war, like a turf war, where we’ll have big groups of students participating.”
