The Kamloops Caribbean Cultural Society will be hosting the first Kamloops Caribbean Music and Food Festival on Sept. 21, 2019, at Riverside Park from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Image Credit: ADOBE STOCK
August 07, 2019 - 5:30 PM
KAMLOOPS — A new culture festival is ready to hit downtown Kamloops next month that hopes to introduce Tournament Capital residents to Caribbean culture through food, music, games and more.
The members of the Kamloops Caribbean Cultural Society are getting ready to launch their first Kamloops Caribbean Music and Food Festival on Saturday, Sept. 21 at Riverside Park.
"What we are hoping to do is bring the culture of the Caribbean to Kamloops," one of the founding members of the Caribbean culture society, Hardley Williams, says.
Williams who is originally from Jamaica moved to Canada nearly a decade ago for school.
"There's not much Caribbean culture here so we are bringing a flavour of music, food, games and how we dress just so we can represent ourselves as Caribbean people," Williams says. "Our goal is to offer a feeling of home to other Caribbeans with no family to share our heritage and culture to the community."
The Kamloops Caribbean Culture Society has four founding members and 10 members in total. Williams says the idea to start a festival in Kamloops had always been a project they wanted to bring to fruition.
"It's always been in the making we just never had the opportunity to kick it off and so this year we kind of came together and decided this is the year we are going to start," he says, adding the society also got funding from a local Jamaican company, Structures Designz and Construction.
Williams says he hopes to see the Kamloops festival grow into a larger festival like the ones in bigger cities like Edmonton and North Vancouver.
"Those are the main reasons why we are doing this here because we see that there is a potential of sharing our culture to the people of Canada," he says.
Kid-friendly activities such as face-painting, a bouncy castle and hair braiding will be part of the event along with traditional Jamaican games like Dandy shandy, chiney skip and sack of potato races.
The festival will include live music performances by Vancouver-based group Mostly Marley and a Spanish-reggae group from the Lower Mainland.
Some of the food people can expect to try include Jerk chicken, brown stew chicken, goat curry and seasoned rice.
"Come out and enjoy some good food and music and feel irie," he says. Irie is a Jamaican term that means good or pleasing.
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