“On March 28, 2025, at approximately 12:50 p.m. local time, a powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck near Mandalay, Burma’s (Myanmar’s) second-largest city, home to 1.2 million people. By April 6, the earthquake had caused 3,471 deaths and injured 4,671 people, while 214 remain missing.”
One of my best friends at Amherst is from Myanmar. Due to visa restrictions, she could not go back to her country for years, and now, she has received this unfortunate news from her home country. Thankfully, none of her family members were injured. However, as the only Burmese on campus, she gathered the E-Board members of the Culinary Club to organize a food fundraising event for Myanmar.
Since the news came out, we started reaching out to the Office of Student Engagement and Leadership to book an appropriate cooking location, Val Dining to support us with buying ingredients, and different clubs to help promote the event. We encountered many challenges, such as scheduling conflicts, not being able to have ServSafe monitor our event, and not enough people signing up. To overcome the last challenge, we tabled at the entrance of the Science Center for 3 hours to introduce what we are doing and attract sign-ups from students. We are also very grateful that some prospective students and their parents donated directly to the Foundation for the relief efforts on their tour at Amherst.
Last Friday, at 2 pm, we carried all the necessary ingredients and utensils to the kitchen and started cooking. We had to make 60 orders of pork bulgogi rice bowl and Ma La Xiang Guo (spicy stir-fry hot pot). It was busy, chaotic, but also fun. For example, we were cutting onions, but the onions made our eyes watery, even people standing at least five meters away. After finishing slicing the carrots, I had to start slicing potatoes right away. As I was slicing the potatoes, I also had to be aware of the rice cooker. We all joked that it felt like we were running a restaurant, but unpaid (lol).
As time passed by, we were soon hitting 5 pm– the time we promised to serve food to people who signed up. Hence, we started packing all the food into boxes, putting them into our car, and driving them all the way to the entrance of Val to start tabling.
Studying at college does not mean that we are only focused on academics and extracurricular activities that may help us in our future career, but also to immerse ourselves actively in the broader world, whether it’s our hometown or any other nation. Although we joked about not being paid, the process of volunteering and doing something purely for the benefit of others felt so meaningful and rewarding to me. I learned so much in the process of organizing the event and got to talk with a lot more people about the issue.