I recently came across someone by chance on Kijiji who was looking for fabric donations to sew cloth pads for Days for Girls. I was intrigued, and started reading about the situation in other countries.
A little background from me - I have been in Haiti, Uganda & Kenya, and I know that it's not easy to have a period without running water. I remember disposable pads in Uganda were cheap compared to Canada, (a small pack was around $1.50) but when men often make as little as $1-$3 per day, you know women and girls are not going to have that kind of money... We didn't have a lot of money to live on while we were in Africa, and I remember putting off buying pads as long as I could. I had left my menstrual cup at home because it was not safe/hard to manage when all the water has to be boiled etc. One of the most embarrassing moments of my life was having to burn my disposables in the open, because there was nowhere to dispose of them. There are no landfills. They melted into a big glob and refused to burn...
A women I know in Uganda, ask if I had heard about reusable pads, because she had heard about someone who knew about them. I had not heard of them back then, so I couldn't share any info. She said she had heard of using a certain kind of moss. I really had only used a Menstrual cup for about a year previously and didn't know anything about anything else. I wish I could have told her about cloth pads!
So, even after having been there, I never imagined the situation was so bad. I didn't realize that MOST girls cannot afford sanitary products, so they end up staying at home for their entire period instead of going to school. Even more unimaginable is that most of them do not even own a pair of underwear. Some girls find a way to use newspaper or dish cloths. Some are sexually exploited in exchange for sanitary products... So, it turns out that one of the biggest problems in the third world, holding back girls from completing school, and keeping mothers at home for a week every month instead of being able to work, can be solved with washable pads and underwear.
Transformation Textiles is a clothing manufacturer with the most genius solution to helping these girls. I will not spoil their story, so be sure to check it out on their website because it's just so smart.
Get involved, and save the world by making the lives of other women and girls better.
-MC
P.S. With all the money we save using Menstrual cups, we could keep a little jar for the girls of the world, eh? ;)
