Restoring girls’ dignity one pad at a time

Nelly Lukale, 33, is a community health nurse and the founder Hope in Action Network.

What you need to know:

  • I have met some very hostile communities who get upset that I want to talk about these things openly. I have been told to stop teaching girls 'bad manners'.
  • There are a lot of girls in these regions who are not as lucky as I was to improvise rugs, so they trade sex for pads.
  • There are also a lot of teenage pregnancies and subsequent unsafe abortions, thus we talk about sex as well.

My mother made me an activist. I grew up in an utterly patriarchal community in Migori County.

My mother is a social worker. I saw how hard she worked for women to access their basic rights.

Sometimes she would even hide contraception in our house so that these women’s husbands would not find them and throw them away.

TRADE SEX FOR PADS

My father passed on when we were young and it was tough for my mother. I remember improvising rugs during my monthly periods so that I wouldn’t miss school. I grew up knowing that I wanted to change things. Activism thus came as a natural choice for me.

I was barely in college when I began my quest to keep girls in school. I began with 10 of them and I would supply pads and panties to keep them in school all year long. I began my work officially four years ago. I work in Wambiu slums in Eastlands, Nairobi.

There are a lot of girls in these regions who are not as lucky as I was to improvise rugs, so they trade sex for pads. There are also a lot of teenage pregnancies and subsequent unsafe abortions, thus we talk about sex as well.

My main focus is teaching menstruation health management to adolescents. We talk about periods, what happens to the body and body hygiene. Then I rally people to donate pads and panties to needy girls.

'BAD MANNERS'

The most difficult part of my job has been mobilising the resources. A lot of people I come into contact with do not think that menstruation is an important topic. They forget that whilst we ignore it, girls menstruate every month.

I have met some very hostile communities who get upset that I want to talk about these things openly. I have been told to stop teaching girls 'bad manners'. So now I talk to men as well, I figure that once fathers are on board, it will be easy for their daughters to come to them with problems.

The other problem is that the pads and panties we give to the girls do not last the whole term. Sometimes these families have no food so when a girl goes home with four packets of pads, their parents sell them to buy food, and hence the girls continue missing school during their menstrual cycle. I’m working on a more permanent solution.

The bigger dream for me is to manufacture re-usable sanitary towels so that I can provide jobs while at the same time giving girls access to pads. Sometimes I meet people who wonder why I’m doing what I do. They ask me why it’s bothering me that girls do not have pads and yet they are not my children.

I think I have a role to play. I got a lot of help growing up so I will give it to any girl that needs it. An ideal life for me is the day I will wake up to a situation where all girls are understood.