Why do Folkmoot volunteers return year after year? Why do they endure late nights, hectic schedules, two weeks with little sleep, working with strangers from foreign countries who don’t speak the same language?

For some it’s a passion for people, a chance to meet new friends. For others, it’s a brief adventure with a culture they might not otherwise get to experience.

For many more, it’s the stories they’ll savor for a lifetime.

Bob Dehil, a longtime Folkmoot volunteer who has hauled many a mattress and set up plenty of beds in preparation for the festival groups, remembers one year when an Egyptian group came and got poison ivy while rehearsing outside. In the Haywood Regional Medical Center’s emergency room, Dehil was making small talk with one of the dancers when he asked about her footwork.

Next thing he knew, she stood up and started bellydancing around the room. Nurses gathered to watch. Everybody stopped what they were doing, entranced by the undulations of an exotic dance.

“That’s one time they shut the emergency room down,” Dehil said with a laugh.

It’s hard to compare groups, he said. Each year, there’s always some new group you love meeting. Having grown up in a Polish and Russian ethnic neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, he still loves watching the Russian dances.

Other Folkmoot volunteers find themselves getting more deeply involved in the festival with each new year. Derek Wenzel started in 1992 as an assistant guide and worked his way to becoming a board member. His brother, Chris, was a guide for a Romanian group and met his future wife in this troupe. There are other romances between members of visiting groups that started with Folkmoot and ended up as weddings.

“Meeting the people — not just the dancing — is probably the most rewarding part,” Derek Wenzel said. “Every year there’s more people — and they’re always friendly.”

Back in the early ‘90s when he was guiding Folkmoot groups as a teenager, he enjoyed feeling like a cultural ambassador helping visitors to understand more about America, but all the while, he was learning just as much or more about other countries.

These days, so much has changed with the groups, he added. Before the Internet got popular, groups would come and stay and might feel isolated from the rest of the world except for a telephone. Now they come with their tech gear and Facebook addresses, instant messaging friends across the globe, sending digital photos back home.

Vivian Poppas, who started out as a bus driver shuttling groups around during Folkmoot, eventually became a guide to spend more time interacting with the dancers and musicians. She’s proud to say she has friends all over the world from Aruba and Greece to Malaysia and New Zealand.

“I like to tell everybody that I travel the world every year and never leave home,” Poppas said.

At her home, she keeps an assortment of souvenirs and sentimental treasures from Folkmoots past — jewelry from Turkey, wooden figurines from Aruba, pottery, pins, a wool vest, shawls, purses — a whole cabinet full.

Even when language can be an obstacle in communicating with the Folkmoot performers, there are still some amusing opportunities to get to know one another. Poppas remembers one afternoon at Waynesville Middle School when she sat down with a man from China. Neither one could speak the other’s language, but they took turns drawing out little stick figures to express what they were thinking.

“We had a very interesting conversation,” Poppas said.

You never know what visiting dance groups might find interesting in America. Brett Sharpton, who’s worked as a Folkmoot guide for years, recalled his 1999 Turkish group had a curious penchant for sporks. They collected sporks by the handfuls from a Kentucky Fried Chicken and packed them in their suitcases.

Anna Stringfield, a rising sophomore at Davidson College, has guided groups at Folkmoot and is working this year as an intern for the festival. For her, Folkmoot is its own unique world where regular work schedules are abandoned for the love of performing and sharing time with other cultures.

“Somedays, we would have to get up around 8 a.m. and load the buses to go to a venue,” she recalled. “We’d perform around lunch time, eat lunch there, hang out a little, then pile back on the bus to book it to the next show. After the nighttime performance, we’d all head back to the [Folkmoot Friendship Center] and have a late nighter [which starts around midnight]. Bedtime (if they went to sleep) was usually around 4 a.m. or so. You’re on a high for two weeks, so sleep doesn’t really matter.”

Stringfield also got to take on the role of a tourist in her own country, going rafting, visiting Asheville sites, and riding to performance venues throughout Western North Carolina.

“It made me really appreciate where I live,” she said. “It was great learning first-hand about other cultures. It’s complete immersion for two weeks.”