With the Mid-autumn Festival fast approaching, on 18 September 2015 Youdao Foundation hosted an event at its Qingpu center to celebrate the arrival of the important festival. The event attracted more than 30 children and ten parents from the neighborhood. Volunteers - Liu Ping, Yang Qiuqian and her daughter, Tinnie and her daughter, Qian Xiaohong, and Sheng Cuicui - helped to make this event possible. The chairman of Youdao, Mr. Compton and other Youdao board members also participated in the event.
At 5:30pm Mr. Compton gave a short address on behalf of the board to welcome children and their parents. In his address he also expressed his appreciation to the continuous efforts made by the volunteers over these years for supporting Youdao’s Qingpu Center.
For the first event, kids were divided into two groups, with one group making Chinese lanterns (Denglong) and the other group baking biscuits. The children were very overcome with joy. The group making lanterns could barely wait till the end of volunteers’ tutoring before trying their own hand at making lanterns. The other group of kids, under volunteer Qian Xiaohong’s guidance, quickly learned the basic skills of working with pastry. Not before long did the aroma of baked biscuits spread throughout the whole yard. After both groups finished, they changed places to try the other activity.
Shortly after sunset, the evening event moved into its second phase with the traditional celebration of the Mid-autumn Festival: lanterns, riddles, and mooncakes! The kids hung their lanterns out in the yard to enlighten the whole locus. Xia Hui, the coordinator of the Qingpu Center, then taught the children the origins of the Mid-autumn Festival. Then the children solved riddles, while they ate mooncakes and their hand-made biscuits. The board members, staff, volunteers, parents and kids were immersed in the atmosphere of love and joy , experiencing the happiness which exists only in a real family.
Before the event ended, everyone got together and sang the famous Chinese song, ‘Dan Yuan Ren Chang Jiu’, a song about family love and its culmination during the Mid-autumn Festival.
In love may happiness dwell in the world!
