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Please Help our Girls!
Sanitary pads for our poor Ugandan girls
In
common with many other girls in Africa, poor girls in Uganda suffer
from a problem that means they miss 25% of their education. The problem
is that they can’t afford to buy proper sanitary protection. The
traditional way they ‘manage’ it can be left to the reader’s
imagination. It’s also exacerbated by a lack of running water and the
difficulties of carrying even more water to cope with those times from
pumps a long way from their dwellings. Some girls have to
fetch water from muddy puddles/springs because water pumps are even
further away. Add that to the lack of sanitary pads and they find it
impossible to attend school for that week every month. Families can’t
afford to pay for pads because in rural villages such as Kyabirwa
where people live by subsistence farming the family income is an average
of $10 a month which has to provide everything they can’t grow or
gather for the family. So buying a ‘luxury’ like
sanitary pads is out of the question.
Many
girls at Kyabirwa Primary School miss one week in four for this reason.
You may now be asking why primary school girls need
sanitary pads. Due to poverty, most families are unable to keep all
their children in school at the same time, many children start school at
a late age and don’t attend school in consecutive years. To 'manage' education for their children they often alternate which
children they send to school to save money and also to use them to help
dig the fields to grow the food on which they subsist, so we have many
'children' in their teens. Many pupils are 18 before they finish
primary school.
At our school we have initiated a ‘Girls
Sanitation Project’ to try to alleviate this problem. We made a small
sick bay so that girls can rest for a while if necessary for the
paracetamol to take effect before returning to class and a simple
‘bathroom’ where they can wash and change. The bed was provided by a
kind UK volunteer and we raided our homes for the bedding! We try to
provide them with sanitary pads and paracetamol so that they can be in
school every week of the month.
As we don’t have any funding for
sanitary pads and paracetamol, we rely on volunteers help. Sanitary
pads weigh very little so if volunteers bring packs of them in their
luggage it doesn’t use up much of the luggage allowance. Supermarkets in
Jinja sell sanitary pads, but they’re more expensive here. In fact
Kenya Airways and KLM allow 2 x 23kgs of check in luggage as long as it
is in two cases, plus 10kgs of carry on. Check their websites to verify
this in case it changes at any time.
We are hoping that you
will be able to help our girls by bringing as many packs as you can
manage and afford. If you do feel able to help our girls in this way,
please give the pads and tablets to Robinah the Head Teacher. Don’t forget to tell Moses so that he can record it in the
new folder for recording volunteer's donations.
UNICEF Video
115 Million children in the world do not go to school. Most of them are girls. Think about it.
You Tube Video
When girls get an education, they pass it all on... and poverty declines.
Educate girls. Change their world. Change the World!
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