Vassar Haiti Project

On November 7th, the Vassar Haiti Project tabled in the annual Asian Students’ Alliance (ASA) Night Market. The following is a collaborative post from Ruoyu (Lucy) Li, and Thao Nguyen about the preparation and tabling for the event.

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The feeling of making a cuisine from home is unexplainable, especially for me when it comes to making dumplings. Every year during Spring Festival, the most important holiday in China, I’d sit with my entire family around a big table and make tons of dumplings for celebration. And this year, I sat with VHP around a big table and we made hundreds of dumplings for the ASA Night Market. I thought I would feel homesick, but I did not. Instead, I felt at home.

Dumpling making (like working in VHP) is a collaborative and time-consuming work. On Friday November 6th, we started at 6 p.m. and probably finished around 10 p.m. We made over 350 lovely dumplings. We started by chopping everything in sight into tiny pieces, which was a very stress-relieving activity — highly recommended during the more stressful weeks of the semester. Then we mixed everything together, poured in all kinds of seasonings and then mixed them by hand. A thousand thanks to Kidus, our VP for External Events, who sacrificed his hands for the job! Finally, we got to sit together and make dumplings, and I was surprised to find that everyone had their own way of wrapping dumplings. From this, I learned that there are multiple ways to reach our goals, and making dumplings is no exception. Throughout the night, even though we were all working incredibly hard, there was music, conversation and joy.

Our effort is not only for the Night Market: the money raised by selling dumplings will go to the Education Initiative to support our school and scholarship program in Haiti. When we speak of supporting education in a developing country, we might think of something serious and tiring, and not a happy dumpling-making party. But helping can actually be achieved by doing something small and with personal joy, like what we did that night. Fabulous people, fabulous food and fabulous purpose.

Lastly, I wanted to extend a big thanks to everyone who helped in making dumplings, and especially to Udbhav Agarwal ‘18, the Director of VHP’s Education Initiative. I would also like to send my thanks to Robyn Cox ‘15, Vassar alumni, for the amazing dumpling recipe!

-Ruoyu Li ’19

I could not help with dumpling making so I signed up to table during the Night Market. We had dumplings, steamed buns and mini rice balls. The food looked great and tasted even more amazing because of all the love and hard work VHP-ers had put into making them. I was pretty nervous at first because people worked very hard and we had a lot of food to sell. But as soon as the event started and until the very end (2 hours) we were busily selling food to the lines of people in front of VHP’s table. People really enjoyed the food and wanted to support VHP’s work. We even ran out of steamed buns half way through and had to make more for our hungry customers! It was awesome getting to work side by side VHP-ers, talking to more people about the project and increasing VHP’s presence on Vassar campus.

-Thao Nguyen ’18