Mid-Autumn Festival 2012

Tết Trung Thu - the mid-Autumn Festival - is coming on 30 September 2012, and we want to make sure that the children at the centres get to enjoy the traditions of the festival with lanterns and mooncakes.

Typically children gather and parade on the streets with colorful lanterns shaped like fish, stars and butterflies. Another popular lantern is one that spins when a candle is inserted, representing the earth circling the sun. The custom for the festival is to give Bánh Trung Thu, boxes of square moon cakes filled with lotus seeds, ground beans and orange peels and with an egg yolk in the centre to represent the moon.

The mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated in many countries in East Asia and each country has its own legends about the festival. One of the legends in Vietnam is about Chị Hang, the woman in the moon, who accidentally urinated on a sacred banyan tree. Soon after this she sat on one of the tree branches and the sacred tree began to grow and continued until it finally reached the moon, leaving her stranded there. Every year, during the Mid-Autumn Festival, children light lanterns and participate in a procession to show Chị Hang the way back to Earth.

Another story from Vietnam is about a carp that wanted to become a dragon. It worked hard to achieve its goal and eventually transformed itself into a dragon. Parents use this story to encourage their children to work hard so that they can become whatever they want to be.

The appeal

Help us to buy mooncakes and lanterns for the children at Long Hải Centre. We are budgetting for approximately 12,000,000 VND (75,000 VND per child). Your contribution can help make this a happy time. 

The result

Through the generosity of many friends in Vietnam and Australia we collected 14,850,000 VND (approximately $675.00 AUD), AND the mooncakes were provided totally free (ingredients, cooking, packing). As a result we only needed to spend a small part of the money raised (1,150,000 VND) on lanterns for the students.

Instead your contributions have provided the centre with the budget needed to give every student a toothbrush and large tube of toothpaste. This is such an important project: a French medical team visiting the centre at the end of September found that the dental health of the students is extremely poor. Thanks to you an immediate response has been made possible.

The money raised will also be used to help re-stock the centre kitchen with essential, non-perishable foods like cooking oil, rice and noodles.

See the blog post for details about the money raised and our visit to the centre on 28 September to hand out the mooncakes, lanterns, toothbrushes and toothpaste.