AYLUS Great Neck Branch volunteers for Mid Autumn Festival 9/21/24

On September 21, the Great Neck Branch of AYLUS volunteered to help out at the Mid Autumn Festival hosted by the Great Neck Chinese Association’s (GNCA) at Steppingstone Park. The mid autumn festival is an important holiday in Chinese culture, with a long history and many traditions. These include eating mooncakes, gathering with your family, and more. Volunteers arrived before the event started at 3, to help set up the venue. The volunteers had many different roles, which included helping out in a scavenger hunt, making balloon animals, and face painting. For the scavenger hunt, a volunteer would take a wooden sign with a symbol of the mid autumn festival (such as the moon, a moon cake, gathering, etc.) and its name in chinese. They would place them around the park for children to find, and if the children correctly said the name in Chinese, they got a stamp. Children that collected all the stamps received a prize. For the balloon making station, volunteers twisted many different designs for little kids, with popular ones being flowers, dogs, and swords. They were a big hit. As the sun went down, volunteers handed out lanterns and paper flowers to people, and they could decorate them. At a certain time, the candles on these were lit, and everyone released them into the bay, which was incredibly beautiful, and the event came to an end at 7:30. Overall, this was a very fun and unique volunteering experience, where everyone got to experience Chinese culture and have fun while helping out in their community.