This year, South’s Asian Student Association’s (SASA) annual friendsgiving event, a time for members and non-members to bring in food and make connections with each other, junior and event coordinator Nuha Babool said.

SASA’s friendsgiving, which fell on November 20th, took three weeks to plan while the club scheduled the day of the event, and ensured that members had adequate time to bring in food, senior and co-president Adil Lalani said. To plan out which food items were brought, Lalani sent out a spreadsheet and asked everyone to sign up.

“We [members] bring food from all backgrounds: American food, Indian food, Middle Eastern, [and] Chinese food,” Lalani said. “The point of [friendsgiving] is to get closer with each other as a club and have a good time.”

This event is an opportunity to strengthen the club community, seeing as SASA has 50 plus members, Babool said. Additionally, friendsgiving is different from SASA’s other events which are usually a celebration associated with something culturally related to South Asia, Lalani said.

“[Friendsgiving] definitely forms a bond, not only under the South Asian identity but just as peers that go to South,” Babool said. “You have two ways of knowing people: one is that we are students, but the other is that we are a part of this really cool cultural club, and we can relate to that.”

In addition to the food, they had a gratitude activity where each member wrote out what they were thankful for on a feather, then placed it on a turkey. For Lalani this was a highlight of the event as they created something very nice as one community. 

“This [Friendsgiving] is about Thanksgiving and just coming together as our own community and it was really just a way for us to get closer to each other and have a fun time apart from our culture,” Lalani said.