The most successful NSO event at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) is the Ethnic Food Festival. Members of the fellowship are asked to provide a dish that is representative of their heritage or ethnicity, and then make a lot of it! There is everything from French crêpes to sushi, from Chinese dessert pastries to shish kabobs. This last year we even had a great dish from South Africa. The main thing is to make sure to have enough! By Thursday of the first week in the dorms students are ready for something different and we are pleased to accommodate that need. The Bible study leaders each invite people from their dorms and we have a feast! Who doesn’t like food?!

We also sponsor a Sports Day that is intended to serve the more athletic interests in our UCSB community. We organize at least two separate activities, such as Ultimate Frisbee® and basketball, and we have a blast. It’s an easy event to invite non-Christian hallmates to, and it’s fun. We, like many other I-V chapters, host a barbeque during NSO week. We hold it on the same day as Sports Day, making sure to finish up sports activities with enough time for people to make it down to our barbeque. The main thing for Sports Day is to make sure that there is a specific place to meet and that everyone invites other people! It is so fun that it’s hard to turn down.

We also plan a Christian Dance Party. UCSB is a place that likes to have fun and parties are the name of the game the first Friday before school starts. There can be a tremendous temptation for new students to want to fit in with all of their hallmates who are going partying, so they either party it up or risk an evening alone in a dorm where they have few friends. We want Christian students to be hanging out with their non-Christian friends, but we also want to offer alternatives to the harsh party scene, so that’s why we sponsor the IVCF Dance Party. Students with a house off campus open their doors to us and on Friday night we take our fellowship’s loudspeakers, a bunch of great music (lots of secular music), and turn up the volume!

—Kurt Morrill is in his fourth year as an InterVarsity staff member working at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara City College. He says that, as much as he loves food, he loves his wife Karyn all the more. He also likes cheesy love lines, Hawaiian shirts and the Marx brothers.