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May 13, 2014

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Home » District » Songjiang

Singing praises of unsung heroes

A community, it might be said, is only as strong as its lowliest resident.

Ordinary people doing ordinary things. Minor contributions making big differences. That is the spirit embodied in the district’s Touching Songjiang Awards, which attempt to credit the good deeds of unsung heroes.

Twenty people and volunteer teams recently were honored at an awards ceremony hosted by Sheng Yafei, Songjiang Party general secretary.

“A worthy era needs heroes with lofty minds who set good examples for us to follow,” Sheng said in a talk heavy with pride and praise.

The 20 award recipients were selected from 67 candidates by popular vote via mail and the Internet. About 500,000 people participated in the ballot.

The award winners are just ordinary people doing activities because they seem like the right things to do. There is the teacher who saved a drowning boy, the grandmother who organized a rock band of lonely senior citizens, the wife who cares for a disabled husband and a paralyzed father-in law, the educator who went to a remote village to teach migrant children and the volunteer who sorts trash for recycling.

Among the recipients is Wang Rugan, an 80-year-old carpenter from the Yongfeng Community who made 600 small chairs and distributed them free to his neighbors.

His charitable attitude toward his community didn’t stop there. The “chair man,” as he came to be called, has been a volunteer doorkeeper at the century-old Dushi Ancestral Temple for 10 years. He spent the last three of those years weeding and replanting the gardens at the now somewhat derelict site.

“Lei Feng is my role model,” he said of China’s most celebrated example of selfless devotion. “I’m old, but it’s never too late in life to contribute to the place where you live.”

Another recipient is Xie Yingfeng, 34, from Jiuting Town. He has the rare Rh-negative blood type and has donated almost 3,000cc of blood in the past nine years to help patients in Shanghai, Inner Mongolia and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

One afternoon in 2011, Xie received a phone call from a weeping mother, asking for his help to save her child suffering leukemia. Since he was on a business trip at the time, Xie called on other Rh-negative people he knew and asked them to donate blood for the boy. When he returned home, he rushed to the hospital, only to discover that the boy had died.

“I sat in the dark room the whole night, feeling weak and powerless,” he recalled. “I started to realize that I couldn’t do everything by myself.”

So Xie set up an online volunteer platform for Rh-negative blood types, attracting more than 200 donors. He coordinates with volunteers in a dozen provinces in China to try to ensure that anyone needing lifesaving rare blood will have a donor.

“Nothing comes in the way of saving people,” he said. “If a call comes in when I am at work, I drop everything and rush to help. When people need me, I’m there.”




 

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