By James Waruiru | Project Manager
Dear friends,
Please receive greetings from Fountain of Hope Youth Initiative in Kenya. We are delighted for this opportunity to bring you up to speed on the progress of our project which without your support could be wanting.
While doing all we can to meet menstrual hygiene needs of needy sisters in our community, we are appalled by the fact that there is still a lot of stigma surrounding the issue of menstruation not only in our community but globally. Even in rich countries there is still a lot of stigma on menstruation, although they use some jargon like 'Crimson flow', 'on the rag', 'ride the cotton pony', 'shark week', 'women trouble', 'when the moon is red' etc. While some of these words and expressions sound funny for instance 'have the painters in' and 'Congratulations! It’s an egg!', some words are however very demeaning to women and seek to portray menstruation as a negative thing while it is a normal biological process that all healthy women go through, some of the most demeaning words we have come across are words like BV which is an acronym of 'Bloody Vagina', Drainage, Leaking, in the abyss, potential murder suspect and Dracula's tea bag referring to tampons and sanitary pads. (Read more here http://www.mum.org/words.html)
In Kenya we do not have a published list on the words and phrases used for menstruation but in our everyday language this issue has been expressed with derogatory and demeaning language, most of the time it is tantamount to verbal abuse on women. It is saddening that in 21st Century our women not only have to deal with menstrual hygiene needs but also endure the stigma on menstruation. Some religions still consider women unclean while menstruating and therefore not allowed to mingle with 'clean' people freely. Let me pose a question for you; ever thought of why Muslim women do not worship together with men? Or why in some churches there are pews on this side for men and that side for women? This is gender stereotyping that need to be addressed.
At Fountain of Hope we do not just stop at providing for menstrual needs but we have started a new vibrant campaign to end stigma on menstruation. Led by our project leader, James Waruiru, we have started a campaign dabbed 'from Men to Men end stigma on menstruation' we also have motto on this issue, we say and believe that 'No Menstruation, No Life'. This campaign seek to engage men to be more involved in meeting menstrual hygiene needs and end stigma on menstruation. This is not just a local campaign; locally we want to engage more people though participatory sessions where we will provoke open discussions on menstruation and take this campaign wider though social media and blogs. We invite you to follow us on Medium.com where we will be posting more stories on menstruation, Follow us on Twitter and Like our facebook page to stay tuned and also voice your thoughts to this noble cause. We also appeal for more donation as this is an expensive venture but worth every penny. We also invite you to watch this short video to learn more about our work.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
