30 May, 2016
BBC News Magazine
In Malawi a packet of sanitary towels can cost a whole day's pay, and girls
often miss school because the cotton strips they use instead are
inadequate. Charlotte Ashton met a woman in Blantyre who's come up with a
solution.
It's a 14-year-old girl's worst nightmare. You're standing in front of your
class when giggling erupts from the back and everyone's pointing at your
behind. With despair you realise your sanitary pad has leaked and an
embarrassing circle of blood has appeared on your dress. I clearly remember
the anxious checking of my school skirt as a teenager. You'd pull aside a
close friend: "Have I leaked?"
But the worst never actually happened and I don't remember seeing it happen
to any classmates. Because in the West we're blessed with effective,
disposable, affordable sanitary protection - the vast majority of us can
afford pads or tampons every month.
Here in Malawi, that's not the case. The sanitary pads in the shops cost
500 Malawi kwacha (75 cents; 50p) per pack. That's nearly a whole day's pay
at the minimum wage - and you really need two packs per period.
Imagine spending two days' wages every month just on sanitary pads.
To find out what women do instead, I head to a school in a township on the
outskirts of Blantyre, Malawi's second city, to talk periods with a group
of teenage girls.
[image: Classroom in Blantyre]
"Tell me," I venture. "We're here to talk about sanitary pads. Do any of
you use the disposable ones?"
A row of shaking heads then a brave hand goes up.
"We take pieces of old *chitenge* and tear them into strips." Benku is 15
and bright-eyed. Chitenges the pieces of cotton material Malawian women
wear around their waists. "Then we fold them over and put them into our
underwear."
"That must be uncomfortable," I ask.
"Yes," she agrees. "Sometimes I get sores on my legs where the material
rubs. And sometimes the chitenge falls out!
"That happened to me once in class. The boys were laughing. I was so
embarrassed."
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*Find out more*
[image: Trinitas and schoolgirls]
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------------------------------
The monthly burden doesn't end there. The girls explain how they get up
early or stay out late to wash the used strips - in a quiet moment when
no-one's around to see. Hanging them up to dry in the sun would be too
public a display of an issue that's taboo here. So the girls find a dark
corner inside to dry their rags.
And then the answer that I somehow found saddest of all: "Do your mothers
help you?"
Their heads shake again: "No," says Benku's friend. "My mother asked my
aunt to explain everything to me when I got my first period."
Another girl was given an old chitenge and a lesson in what to do by a
neighbour. A third was sent to her grandmother's for a week.
This monthly struggle has been the same for generations. But unlike their
mothers, aunts and grandmothers these young women have a champion, who's
determined to tackle the problem.
[image: Trinitas holding a Chitenge strip]Image captionTrinitas holding a
chitenge strip
Trinitas is a tall, vivacious 31-year-old researcher at Blantyre's College
of Medicine. When six boys but only two girls turned up for a focus group
she was running at this school, she asked the teacher where they all were
and was told they'd excused themselves that week because they were
menstruating.
And that's a whole other tragic side to this issue: girls often don't leave
the house while they're bleeding. "So how many days of school are you
missing every month?" I ask the group.
"Five, five, six, four, five," they tell me.
Trinitas remembers this from her own schooldays and is angry that another
generation of girls is suffering. She's the daughter of a single mother and
studied at a basic government school. Yet she beat the odds and made it to
university - thanks, she says, to her mother's insistence on the value of
education.
With that in mind Trinitas bought an old treadle sewing machine and started
making reusable sanitary pads from fabrics available locally. She's been
doing market research at the school and the girls have all tried out her
pads.
The feedback is resoundingly positive. "They're so easy to wash!" says one
girl. "The top layer is lovely and fleecy so they're comfortable," says
another.
Trinitas's challenge is to get capital investment in this chronically poor
country - enough to scale up production and bring down the price so it's
low enough for the average Malawian.
The girls are clearly excited by the new freedom this product could afford
them. "The wings and the poppers mean I can move around as usual," chirps
one. "We can do skipping rope and everything."
And with that I'm reminded that these schoolgirls deserve better than a
week of discomfort and humiliation every single month.
------------------------------
More from the Magazine[image: Amy Peake in her kitchen]
Two years ago, when Amy Peake was leafing through a magazine she saw an
image that shocked her. It showed thousands of refugees queuing for food in
a bombed-out street in Damascus. In the foreground stood a woman, and for a
split second she thought, "What if I was her? What if my children were
there? And what if I got my period?"
Then her husband showed her a BBC News Magazine story about an Indian man
who had invented a machine to produce cheap and hygienic sanitary pads
after realising his wife, and millions of other Indian women, used rags. He
didn't want to sell the pads, he wanted women to make and sell their own.
Peake immediately thought: "That machine should be in the refugee camps -
and if it isn't, perhaps I should take it there." So that's exactly what
she's done.
--
Ann Marie
"The art of living consists of knowing what to pay attention to and what to
ignore." -- Mardy Grothe
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