Fire Country Star Diane Farr Sheds Light on Menstrual Education with Uganda Trip (Exclusive)

Accompanied by her twin 15-year-old daughters, the Fire Country star will be heading to Kampala, Uganda after wrapping season 2 of the CBS series, where they will personally distribute more than 5,000 pairs of menstruation panties.

In partnership with celebrity stylist Karla Welch -- who began The Period Company and the NGO Reach a Hand Uganda -- this mission will not only give the girls they're servicing in Uganda the resources they need to get through their period each month, it will allow these girls to stay in school and achieve their goals.

TooFab spoke with Farr about the impact of this mission and how something as simple as period underwear is changing lives for girls around the world.

"It's the thing you hate the most in the world, but the idea of it being taken away because it's embarrassing to go to school because you don't have materials is crushing," Farr shared, before detailing how she got involved with the mission in Uganda in the first place. "My son started doing some service work in Uganda. Drowning is the number one cause of death for children there. So there's a bunch of lifeguards from his high school that were all going this summer to go and teach kids how to swim. And from that, we met this NGO, whose purpose for 10 years has been to bring education and materials to Uganda."

She continued, "And it's not the cities -- there's some really urban, fun, lively developed parts of the country. And then there's some places that aren't, that really are having a hard time. Child marriage is still a huge problem there because if you can't go to school and you have no way to make yourself solvent by 13, the children become a burden on the family."

While there have been attempts to bring in period materials to Kampala before, with the village even implementing a machine to produce menstrual products, the machine broke down and, as in many rural areas, there were no parts and no engineer to fix the problem.

"My thought was, 'What's the smallest footprint where there's no sanitation issue, there's no place to be made fun of, and that we don't need to do this twice,'" Farr explained. Partnering with Welch, the pair will be able to hand out enough period underwear to cover the girls of this Ugandan village from puberty till high school.

"The panties that she makes last eight years. If we can hand them out to girls at 10 years old, it'll cover them from puberty till they finish high school. It's a one time event," she continued. "There's no second footprint, there's no need for us to go back."

With women's history month upon us, the topic of menstrual education is all the more important, with Farr telling TooFab that it's time for it to become a normal part of discussion.

"I remember the terror in junior high school of possibly bleeding through. Now everyone knows that in order to continue the human race going women have an egg. It's such a normal thing, but it's so secretive. I don't know how it got sort of attached to sexuality, where it almost has that shame quality about it, as if you're doing something wrong," Farr said. "In the spirit of Meghan Markle, in the spirit of people are really pioneers, let's make this a regular word."

As for why she's bringing her 15-year-old daughters along, Farr said she hopes that if these girls see someone like them, someone close to their age that use the product too, they'll be that much more inclined to use them themselves.

"I can stand there and hand these out. Whatever tiny cachet I might have in Uganda, let me spend it this way. But if I can put my 15-year-old daughters next to me, if a 15-year-old could stand there and say, 'Here, take this. My mom got it from me when I got my period,' my hope is that we can start to change the shame around it," she maintained.

When it comes to how we can help from home, Farr said those who wish to can donate to Reach a Hand Uganda, so that they can reach towns even further out than Kampala and help the girls there.

"The work that we're doing, they take no percentage of. 100% of the donation goes directly to the period company for the panties and the taxes and the shipping. That's it. Everybody on the ground is spending their own money to get there," Farr shared.

TooFab also spoke to Farr about Fire Country, her CBS series which shows how climate change spurs natural disasters like fires, and what it takes to stop them.

"Fire country is outside. It's sort of like the earth and what we're doing to it and everything to do with climate change, and how that's affecting anything from mudslides to chemical plants, to losing all of our trees," Farr, who plays Sharon on the series, explained. "So it's got this sort of earthy, almost country feeling to it. There's a lot of country music in it. Our star and creator, Max Thieriot, is a huge country music fan, and it's in every ounce of it."

While's it not Farr's first time on a fire drama, previously starring in Rescue Me, this was one project she had to jump on, telling TooFab it had "one of the best plots she's ever read."

"I wanted to join this show from the moment I read the pilot. It was one of the best pilots I ever read. And I've read a script probably every day for 25 years," she said of the show, which just got picked up for a third season, "I didn't see the ending coming, and some of the ending was who I am to this protagonist, to this character that was gonna change the world."

And she's hopeful Fire Country and the characters on the show can help do just that, serving as a warning to everyone watching.

"When I was driving up to shoot the pilot -- I have three kids, so we drove from Los Angeles to Vancouver and I was gonna show them the coast and all the states, and Yosemite was on fire. And it was the first time I'd ever seen Cal Fire trucks because I live in a city, so I was seeing urban LAFD," Farr recalled. "So we were racing up to go shoot this fictional show, and every day there were more and more Cal Fire trucks heading into Yosemite. And I don't even remember the number of how much it burned. I was like, "We're really in trouble. We're gonna lose all of our beautiful resources if we don't bring a light to that.' So the hope is TV brings more information to people than a textbook, that hopefully we could shine a light on it."

To hear Farr dish more on Fire Country and why age gap romances are harmful to Hollywood, check out the video above.

Fire Country airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.