We are together: Students arrange food supplies to foreign teachers
Young students have stepped up to help fight the resurgence of COVID-19 in Shanghai.
Among them, two from Shanghai American School Puxi Campus – Richard Xue, 17, and Audrey Wang, 14 – have launched the "WeAreTogether" initiative to help their locked-down teachers obtain food and other basic necessities.
The duo told Shanghai Daily that they came forward to help with the purchases when they realized the school faculty was running out of basic supplies and necessities when the lockdown in Shanghai went beyond its first planned time frame of March 28 to April 5.
They heard teachers saying they were in difficult situations during classes and in weekly updates from the school.
"Many people began resorting to group buying, but our teachers are not able to do that because they're foreigners," said Xue. "They have this language barrier which makes it very difficult for them to reach out to the people in their community and to order with them.
"We realized we could communicate and reach out to potentially some vendors and suppliers to help support them."
Wang added: "Another reason we thought about our teachers during this tough time was because we ourselves experienced firsthand how difficult it was to buy groceries. We are locals here. And if it is so difficult for us to do something, then it must be even more for our teachers, some of whom recently moved to Shanghai."
Richard Xue (left) and Audrey Wang have launched the "WeAreTogether" initiative to help teachers of Shanghai American School obtain food and other basic necessities during the lockdown.
They contacted Yvonne Zhu, support services manager of the school, and got to know that many teachers spread across downtown and Minhang District were in need of supplies as food suppliers and delivery organizations were only working with very large corporations, and the school was not yet able to find a vendor that had the permits for deliveries.
They made some advertising posters and sent them on social media to gather funds and receive donations.
They also asked their parents whether they were aware of any vendors. They reached out to these suppliers, and then selected packages and discussed arrangements for ordering and delivery.
In the beginning, they connected a vendor, but it said it didn't have a large variety of products and was not willing to deliver the products door to door as the teachers live in different areas. Afterward they talked with several others and found two vendors called Yao's and Fuhong who were willing and able to do so.
The school's support services manager also helped them put out all the information about the food packages to the teachers who needed them and arranged the orders and payments.
While Wang collected money from the teachers, Xue organized and kept track of the payments in a spreadsheet to make sure that all orders were placed. The supplies included badly needed meat, fruit, vegetables and milk.
They frequently communicated with the suppliers to organize the logistics, including time of delivery and addresses.
"We talked with the drivers frequently to estimate the time of delivery and to communicate when our teachers should expect the supplies to arrive," said Xue. "It cost double or even triple time spent on the road than usual, and the deliveries were completed at midnights."
Some of the deliveries are completed at midnights.
Due to the lockdown, the delivery fees were extremely high. They even worked to cover these fees by providing their own money and through some donations from other students.
Xue said they continued supporting the school staff members until the school established its own connection with vendors and received their own permits for delivery.
"Ultimately, we were able to complete three rounds of delivery on April 7, 8 and 13 to 111 teachers," he said.
The teachers were enormously grateful toward the students. They expressed gratitude via messages and videos.
"We knew that disadvantaged communities faced serious challenges, but we could never truly understand their struggles," said Xue. "However, this lockdown provided us with a glimpse of that reality."
They said though their teachers are no longer presented with supply challenges, they realized that the problems of other unprivileged communities, such as those who are handicapped and those who are in poverty, will not disappear overnight.
"Therefore, we hope to promote WeAreTogether so that more people can join our efforts," said Wang. "We hope to start off by helping the people in our SAS community, then spreading to other international schools in Shanghai. If possible, we would also like to reach out to Shanghai public schools. For our future focus, we would like to support and assist students with special learning needs, as well as those with physical handicaps. Our goal is to help ensure that these challenges will not limit the opportunities that they have."
Xue added: "Throughout this lockdown experience, we have been thinking about what role we want to play in our society.
"We want to be kind, compassionate and grateful human beings. We want to give back to our community by devoting our time, efforts and talents to helping people who are unprivileged. We want to present those who are struggling with the same opportunities that others have."
