One student walked away from the Campus Center with a Sony Playstation, a set of un-matching dishes, and a three-dollar fur coat in her arms on Wednesday. She was not alone, as crowds of students left Campus Center at lunchtime with more than just a full stomach after visiting the Tsunami Relief Tag Sale.
Donated clothing, kitchen utensils, CDs, stuffed animals, electronics and more provided the tag sale merchandise that lined the walkway and courtyard, selling for a combined total of $1,400 to go toward the Tsunami Relief Campaign. The money will be combined with money from previous fundraisers to help grassroots relief organizations aid countries affected by the disaster.
After nearly three months of collecting, the boxes of goods donated by students reached staggering amounts.
“We had been collecting stuff for so long that we didn’t realize how much we had until the morning of the tag sale,” said Gitsy Prasad ’08, co-organizer of the event. “Literally, the bags just kept coming in, and we didn’t know what to do with it all. We had so much stuff we were wondering how we would sell it all. But luckily, pretty much everything sold. By the end of the day we only had a few bags left.”
While the sale was originally scheduled to end at 4 p.m., interested shoppers were straggling through until 7 p.m. The remainder of donated goods were then given to the local Goodwill.
“People just donated a hell of a lot of stuff, and bought a lot too,” Prasad said. “It was nice to see that people were so into it.”
Inside the Campus Center, students crowded the mirrors of the bathrooms, which served as makeshift dressing rooms for the used clothing. In addition to the traditional tag sale items of clothing and electronics, unconventional objects like slinkies, oven mitts, and mix tapes cluttered the tables.
“There were some really ugly dolls and stuff too, and surprisingly, they all got sold,” Prasad said. “It was great. Someone even bought this hideous-looking stuffed snake.”
Leading up to the sale, collection boxes were set up around campus back in February, with different relief campaign members in charge of advertising their purpose.
“There were so many people involved in the Tsunami Relief Campaign that we pretty much found someone from every dorm to put in a donation box, and then advertise it,” said co-organizer Sarah Reed ’08.
On the morning of the sale, Reed and Prasad rounded up bags and boxes with help from fellow organizers Rebecca Litman ’08, Ruby Ross ’08, and Molly Rosner ’08. While the original plans for storage involved leaving the donations in the old squash courts, Public Safety did not end up granting students access. Luckily, Todd and Adam Stone ’05 offered up their house as a storage space for the goods.
“Eventually we just gave up and called the Stones,” Reed said, having noticed the extra space during a recent event at the house.
Reed continued, “It was a laborious process collecting all the donations and getting it all set up, but it went surprisingly smoothly. A lot of people helped out.”
Reed also emphasized the importance of continued relief to the Tsunami-affected areas. “It’s one of those causes that people tend to focus on for a while, and then it dies out after a month, so it’s great that it’s still happening,” she said. “Our main goal was to make as much money as we could. $1400 is a lot of money for a one-day event at a small college, so we were pretty happy with that.”
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