No water, electricity or money. Period

A reusable sanitary napkin used by girls in a Kenyan village. Pic/C Y Gopinath

Consider something indelicate - menstruation.

I know, it isn't thought polite to talk about such matters, especially if you are male. But male or female, our bodies are messy, full of secretions and excretions, gases and bubbling liquids, and we are taught from an early age how best to handle them so that no one finds out. Managing one's wastes is considered a life skill.

Women, according to the pious patriarchs who rule us, should have no bodily wastes at all. But her personal reality is a far greater burden - apart from daily ablutions, she also endures a monthly catharsis called menstruation. Many Indian women, specially in village India, are already thrice challenged every day - not only must she find a private spot but she must be invisible throughout. This means she must do it under cover of darkness. The government's construction of 90 million toilets has not eased her life; most of them were left unconnected to water supply and could not be flushed. In many places, they are now used to store grains.

What about her monthly time of inconvenience, aches, exhaustion and blood, the so called ‘period' that is still widely misunderstood across the country? Sanitary towels are a luxury for her and not on sale in the nearby kirana shop anyway.

What must it feel like to be such a woman, managing her body's outpourings in darkness, without water or sanitary supplies while somehow avoiding detection?
I got an inkling of an answer in 2010, when I spent three weeks in Kajulu, a Kenyan village without running water or electricity by Lake Victoria. I lived among Luo tribals there in a mud hut.

I had learned to use and tolerate the pit latrine they called a toilet, literally a hole on the cement floor of a phone booth sized cubicle whose door did not lock. Spiders, bluebottles and horseflies buzzed around the malodorous pit but this is nonetheless where I - and everyone else in the compound - did our business each morning.

My mind naturally turned to the monthly ordeal of Kajulu's women. How did they manage? Considerable thought goes into the design and marketing of sanitary napkins and tampons, not to mention pills and medications that take the edge off those few days. But what about women who can barely afford a change of clothes, much less a sanitary napkin, and lived where there was neither water nor electricity?

Hundreds just quit schooling when menstruation starts, after suffering the indignity and jeering of teachers and boys who could not understand why blood was flowing down her legs.

The local church had asked me to work with a dozen or so unwed teenage mothers; our daily meetings took place in a room behind the church. I asked them how they dealt with their menstrual flows.

There was a long since before one girl said, "We use cloth, Mr Gopi."

"What do you tear up?" I asked.

"Old clothes."

"Really?"

Finally, the lie collapsed. An older girl said, "She's lying, sir. We have hardly two or three changes of clothes. We can't go tearing them up."

Rosa (not her real name), normally reserved and shy, spoke up. She had been recruited to a project that stitched washable, re-usable sanitary napkins for women. Shaped like two dog-bones laid crosswise upon each other, the napkin was meant to be fastened to the bottom of the panty with velcro tabs. Within, it concealed washable cotton with a plastic liner to prevent seepage and staining.

I got through to Michael Ochieng, who headed Girl Child Empowerment, the NGO promoting these reusable sanitary napkins.

"Girls here mainly use rags, and strips of cloth to soak up the blood," he said. She would be described as sick and lie in a corner of her hut, missing school and life for about a week.

In Kuria district nearby, I learned, girls caked cowdung over their genitals during menstruation, letting it harden and staunch the bleeding. This required them to lie motionless as long as possible, confined to a hut. Even urinating would break the cake, requiring a fresh application. Kuria had the highest incidence of genital ulcers and infections among young girls in the entire province.

A single reusable napkin cost 35 Kenyan shillings (roughly 20 rupees back then) and six would last a year. The NGO's intentions were progressive, noble but a little impractical.

How would girls afford the soap to wash and reuse their napkins? I asked them. And where would the water come from?

"We negotiated with the local community leaders to give us a plot of land to grow some maize and spinach. The money from the harvest pays for the soap the girls use to wash their reusable napkins. They use stored rainwater."

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com

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