Homemade food. Auctions. Quilts. Antiques. A 5K race. Even a bouncy house. Virginia’s annual Mennonite Relief Sale, hosted at the Rockingham County Fairgrounds, included a little bit of everything. This year’s two-day event kicked off early Friday evening and concluded its second day of festivities and entertainment at 3 p.m. Saturday afternoon.

The festival is held in Harrisonburg during the first weekend of October every year. It is run by approximately 1,000 volunteers and attracts roughly 10,000 visitors annually. All proceeds from the event go directly to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a faithbased organization which focuses on providing crisis relief, affording basic needs and education to families, and advocating for peace and justice around the world.

In addition to working at the Puerto Rican food stand serving “pinchos,”, a type of Puerto Rican kebab, on Saturday, Glorianne Flores, a first-year student at EMU, volunteered to help prepare donuts for Saturday’s event along with several other EMU students.

Flores volunteered at the Relief Sale from 12 a.m. Saturday until the end of the day, an experience she deemed “tiring, but fun.” Flores said there was a long line for the pinchos stand during the entire event. “We sold about seven hundred pinchos,” Flores estimated. “People really love them. Next year we will have them again.”

Seven hundred pinchos and 16,740 donuts made up just a portion of the Relief Sale’s total earnings this past weekend, which amounted to at least $370,000, according to preliminary results from MCC. 1,300 tamales, 550 pies, 2,000 chicken BBQ halves, and 720 quarts of Brunswick Stew were some of the other food items which were big hits at the Relief Sale.

Contributions to MCC from the live auction included Item 1247, “Chest of Many Drawers” and Item 1046, “Feedbag,” which were auctioned off at $6,000 and $2,600 respectively, the former being the highestselling wood item and the latter the highest selling quilt. Other items sold at the auction included an antique wagon box, a private Christmas concert by the Walking Roots band, a three-course fondue meal, and a three-tiered side table.

The Relief Sale not only raises thousands of dollars for its global efforts, but also creates a truly entertaining and community-based atmosphere for its guests. Juniors James Paetkau and Seth Weaver both reflected on the significance of the Relief Sale to them. “Harrisonburg’s relief sale always brings me back to the relief sale in Goshen, Ind.; spending Friday nights and Saturday mornings with a group of friends and family,” Paetkau commented. “Seeing people from your community outside of the usual place, whether that might be church or school, and having a shared place to spend time with people that aren’t generally in your daily life is something I really appreciate.”

Weaver expressed similar appreciations for the community aspect of the Relief Sale, noting, “Even people I know from Lancaster, people that I haven’t seen since middle school years or high school years who have since moved down to Harrisonburg— running into them is always awesome.”