Students and community members shared their cultures through performances at Global Cultural Night Friday.

While past Global Cultural Nights focused more on cultural music and dances, this year’s was more informational with the addition of PowerPoints describing each country’s culture.

Some PowerPoints included information about China, Nigeria and even looked at powerful women in history from a global standpoint.

Hawah Abdulrasaq Coker, a junior biological sciences major and the president of the Association of International Students, said bringing all these different cultures together helps unite the campus community.

“It was very hectic because we do have a lot of grad students here. I am an undergrad, so it was really hard to try to get people to actually do this. I have very dependable executive board, and a lot of them are from different countries,” Coker said. “I felt like they helped with that outreach so that was pretty good.”

Coker said this year’s information needed to give the audience more background information about the cultures and their traditions.

“I feel like people need to be educated about cultures. In previous years we would just have singing and dancing, which is totally fine; but this year I really want to incorporate people learning,” Coker said. “I was happy people learned something from here.”

Each country that was a part of this event presented a traditional song and dance.

Then, they presented information on each custom such as food and drink, religious practices, how names are written and chosen in different cultures and cultural differences within the country they live in.

Bolarinwa Cladipu, a graduate student studying biological sciences, played two soulful songs on the piano, one of which was accompanied by his singing.

Cladipu said he was nervous, but had fun performing.

“Africa is well represented, Europe is well represented. We have friends from Germany around here (and) North America of course, that’s where we are and we have a lot of them around too,” Cladipu said.

Audience member Prashansa Kannangura, a graduate student studying chemistry, said she enjoyed the performance because all the different cultures came together for the same event.

The night ended with a fashion show where performers and audience members got to showtheir own cultural fashion.

After the fashion show everyone sang, danced and got their photographs taken.

Jordan Boyer can be reached at 581-2812 or jtboyer@eiu.edu.