Fundraising the Chinese way!

Over the past month I have had the opportunity to be a part of the planning team for a Fundraiser Dinner, Auction, and Variety Show for 200 people. Not only has it been a fun and exciting process, it has also been a challenge since 95% of the planning team speaks only Chinese. I rely heavily on the one Chinese English speaker to translate the things I need to know and even with that I feel like I am always missing things. I was also planning for a culture I still don't know everything about. A culture where it is OK to make last minute changes. A culture where the master schedule will be changed 20 times right up until the event starts and maybe changed two more times during the event. However, in the end the event was a success and I can now say I have planned a large scale event in a foreign country!

The evening started with a 100 yuan a head dinner with 50% of the profits going to help earthquake victims in Dujiangyan. Last week I learned the money will be specifically used to buy children there warm winter clothes. After dinner was the Variety show. This was my baby. I recruited people from our group to preform eight different acts. There was everything from singing to dancing to skits. I made sure everyone was prepared and had all the appropriate items on stage for their acts. Along with our eight acts were eight Chinese acts. One of them included these adorable children carrying candles (only in China!) and then doing sign language to a song.

My favorite act of the night was five guys from PLU (self entitled Pespect after a miss spelled hat one of them owns) doing a choreographed dance to 'Nsync's "It's Gonna Be Me". Not only did I enjoy watching this dance, but I recruited the 5 guys and the choreographer (my lovely roommate Erin) and scheduled and ran hour long evening practices. The guys blew me out of the water with their ability to learn and perfect an entire dance in only four days! They also had alot of fun along the way and made me laugh as I watched them turn into snooty, little divas. The night of the performance they did great and bounced back from a skip in the music right at the beginning. They made me sooo proud! They now have intentions to preform their dance on the Great Wall in Beijing. We will see how that goes over!

We ended the evening with a celebration for all November birthday (like me!). We had three cakes and everyone with November birthdays came on stage and blew out the candles as others sang Happy Birthday in Chinese and English.

The entire night was a huge success and we made almost $3000 USD total. That will go along way in helping Children in the earthquake zone!