The service-learning students in Shahin Monshipour's introduction to sociology class at Monroe Community College have started to bond.
"We hang out together after class; we've even been bowling," says Samir Saad, an immigrant from India who is now a U.S. citizen living in Webster. Their experience is a microcosm of what Monshipour hopes will come from the program the students are helping to organize — "Along the Silk Road," a multicultural gathering that will celebrate art, cuisine, history and products from the trade route between China and the Mediterranean.
MCC offers service-learning opportunities across the curriculum, says Charlotte Downing, the college's director of curriculum and program development and co-chair of the diversity council. Service-learning students earn part of their grade with hands-on work related to the course material they are studying.
Monshipour, an Iranian immigrant, says that although she has been here more than 30 years, she still sometimes feels like an "outsider." Perhaps, she says, her need to "feel that I belong to a community" is what drives her to organize events that bring together people "from all corners of my scattered community" to learn about one another's history and culture.
The evening will begin with a presentation by Fatemeh Keshavarz, a George Washington University scholar, Iranian exile and expert on Persian poetry who will speak about the movement of ideas, philosophy and religions along the Silk Road. The program also features a dance choreographed by Aram Bayat, a Canadian-Iranian who teaches at Magill University in Montreal.
The Kazakh Students Association of Rochester Institute of Technology will perform indigenous music from their country; an MCC student from Turkmenistan will do the same.
Reza Sattari, also an Iranian immigrant who owns the Oriental Rug Mart in Victor, will display rugs from a variety of countries — including Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He'll discuss how the rugs are made, the history of various styles and the importance of rug making to the economy of the region.
"The colors are put together like melodies in music," Sattari says of the rugs. "To reach the level of complexity you see must have taken thousands of years."
Even today, Monshipour says, it is estimated that as many as four million Iranians are involved in the rug-making industry. And it dates to a time when many Persians were nomadic shepherds, using the wool they'd sheer from their sheep to make the first rugs and then using the rugs as portable pieces of furniture.
The event is an opportunity to learn more about and appreciate the ways our community is evolving and becoming more diverse.
Often new arrivals are invisible to the larger community, but at MCC they are very visible, Downing says, "because they are coming here as students and we do not want students to come and go without connecting."