Firefly Project: How to Send Feminine Hygiene Products to Female Health Care Workers When They are Fighting against Coronavirus Favorite 

One of the donators, Sun Baihui, wrote her in-person experience when she participated in the project, which is translated from Chinese and abridged from the original text.

Preface

On February 7, Weibo blogger @ Liang Yu Stacey released a message on Weibo calling for attention to the shortage of feminine hygiene products for female medical staff, and "overnight comfort absorbency," began to enter the public eye.

Sun Baihui, the author of this article, paid attention to this issue on February 10. On February 11, she saw the donation project "Firefly Project" organized by "BIE别的女孩" and soon joined in the donation.

Here is the whole process of her donation:

Step A How the supply meets the demand

In the donation chat group of "Firefly Project," I learned that they contacted the brand of Wujimin in Weifang, Shandong, and found 300 boxes of goods (48 pieces per box). At that time, the demand was not so great. Coincidentally, I learned the 17 medical teams that support Wuhan need overnight comfort absorbency that night. These 17 teams are mainly from Liaoning and also include several medical teams from Guangzhou and Beijing.

According to the detailed statistics sorted by volunteer Yu Xi, there are more than 1300 female medical workers in these teams, accounting for 63%, nearly two-thirds of them. According to the monthly need for feminine hygiene products, each person uses five tablets per menstrual cycle, about 7500 tablets.

I immediately contacted the Firefly Project and claimed 160 boxes.

As a result, a back-up plan was launched to donate feminine hygiene products (mainly overnight comfort absorbency) to medical teams in Wuhan.

Step B Contact Delivery Companies

The second key is how to deliver donations to Wuhan.

At that time, the situation was that the major logistics companies only accepted the anti-epidemic materials donated by enterprises. First, our goods were not regarded as the donation of enterprises. Second, at that time, feminine hygiene products such as overnight comfort absorbency were not considered as the necessities to fight against pandemic for the front line, which prevented logistics companies from the free distribution.

Even if the logistics companies agree to deliver, most of them go through multiple transshipments. Thus, time cannot be guaranteed.

Partners and enterprise leaders of Firefly Project are responsible for delivering the goods out of the warehouse in Shandong. They struggled to find a local truck driver, Ju, who had a trip to Wuhan before and was in quarantine after coming back, so this time he could only send goods to Jiangxi or the junction of Henan and Hubei.

We agreed to his request and then began to look for relay drivers who could transport the goods from Jiangxi or Henan to Wuhan.

At the same time, through my acquaintances, I found a volunteer team "Cherry in Warm Winter," which is responsible for the delivery of materials in Wuhan because this batch of materials needs to be parked in warehouses and sent to 17 medical teams' accommodations, which was trivial and massive.

I thought transportation in Wuhan would be the most troublesome part, but "Cherry in Warm Winter" made this part the easiest.

Li, who is in charge, is very enthusiastic, responsible, and efficient. From her words, I know that the drivers of this team are all volunteers in Wuhan. They don't have funds or good protective and disinfecting supplies. They pay their own money for gasoline to ensure the delivery of materials sent from the rest of China and the world.

But the process of contacting the relay drivers who transport the goods from Jiangxi or Henan to Wuhan was not going well. At this time, Ju, the driver in Shandong, has already started his delivery and cannot confirm the destination.

Through connections in the volunteer group, I found Meng, who is responsible for contacting truck drivers from other provinces to Wuhan. He pointed out two plans. One was to let the driver deliver the goods to another city in Shandong, where he could find a driver to go to Wuhan, and the other was to increase payment to persuade the driver to deliver directly to Wuhan. He thought the latter was the best.

He introduced to me the situation that drivers were facing. They are risking a lot during transportation. If they don't work, they can't afford the cost of car maintenance.

Meng's words made me understand the difficult situation faced by truck drivers at the moment, so I told my project partner in charge of docking with Ju that if he could go to Wuhan, I would bear the burden no matter how much money he asked.

Surprisingly, Ju agreed and didn't ask for too much. What a Shandong Yishi (brave and kind soul)!

So far, the logistics of this donation was unblocked.

Step C Fund-raising and the Donation Team Set-up

When I found the driver, I started crowdfunding in Wechat Moments.

I sent my first post at about 7:30 p.m. Three hours later, all the donations, including payment for goods and freight, were collected, and I also completed the work of group construction, collection, and account registration simultaneously.

In the process of fund-raising, donators and I shared a lot of good moments.

I am a college teacher. In the beginning, I refused donations from students. But a student said that it was the money she earned from her internship. Some students said that it was their family's donation.

Many donators are my colleagues and classmates, most of whom are middle-aged mothers like me. We have to support our family. In fact, no one's life is easy. Although I accepted their donations, I really want to say sorry to them. I didn't accept some donations over 2000 RMB and from the same person who had denoted, even during a gap later in the project.

There are some donators I never meet. Almost every time I raise money, I receive donations from friends who are strangers to me before, which makes me feel unusually warm.

The only male donator is a real estate agent we barely meet.

The next day, I sent another post asking, "why don't boys devote themselves to charity," and then there were six male donators in the second round of fund-raising.

The car would be loaded in the next morning. Another important work was to make stickers on the packing boxes after the fund-raising that night.

Professional design students in the "Firefly Project" team soon handed in a beautiful sticker design draft.

I think of gouache works by Han Junyang, a young male painter. He painted the face of the female medical staff who took off the mask and was full of scars and sweat on their faces. It was already midnight, but I still asked if he could print something for us. He climbed out of the quilt and designed the perfect sticker.

Step D Follow up until All Donations were Delivered

*** Experience and Reflection

Our project is one of many donations during the pandemic. Although fast, it is still tough to achieve.

To this end, I would like to share some thoughts:

1. We should pay attention to the individual needs of the female medical staff. In this "pandemic war," the investment of female medical staff is higher than 50%. In the 17 medical teams I know, the female medical staff takes up 2 / 3.

The media should not exploit their bodies. Their individual needs should be taken into account.

2. We should pay attention to the living supply of medical teams from other places to support Wuhan.

Their medical supplies can be obtained in the hospital where they are located. In fact, personalized living materials are difficult to get through the hospitals they aid.

3. This kind of private donation project is taking advantage of people's moral conscience. To some extent, it is selfish. Due to the urgency, things were not well considered. Afterward, (I feel) there is a legal risk, and no one should follow this case.

4. The social public welfare system is essential for society to function. The general courses of sociology and social work should be popularized in the university stage.

5. In this donation, I experienced the dilemma of ordinary people to launch a charity project.