Support monthly sanitary napkins for five girls by Bhavada Devi Memorial Philanthropic Trust (SENEH)

Help girls in rural Assam have safe periods

Ashima Begum is a student of Class XI from the village of Morigaon District, Assam. To reach the school one has to travel through an inhospitable terrain for a two km stretch of broken road. The devastating flood of last year has inflicted irreparable damage to the road. There are around 300 girl students in the school. Ashima, a frail and pale girl of around 15 has to walk two km to the river bank, take a country boat to cross, walk another km to reach school. Her parents are marginal farmers who are hardly making a living with the meager farm income and occasional hard labor in others fields. She is the second one out of the seven siblings. Her elder sister, who never went to any school save a year or two in a small Madrassa, is now married. She is 17 but already has a child in her lap. She is expecting a second child. Ashima's parents are unhappy because they think she is wasting her time by going to school. Luckily for her, the school is not only free but gives a midday meal, school uniform and all books, her only expenditure is commuting by boat. Ashima misses her school three to four days every month when she has her periods,. When our volunteers inquired from the students, only two had heard about sanitary pads. Even the daughter of a teacher at the same school, who is in class XI, had not heard of the existence of such pads. They use dirty cloth pads, to contain the trickle down, which they hide out of shame. There is an urgent need to educate the girls about menstrual hygiene. Unfortunately even if they are convinced that using sanitary pads is a must for their health and hygiene, no one in the school can spend towards the cost of buying the pads from the market. Even if the parents can afford, they themselves are unaware of its importance and they will consider it as an infrastructure expenditure. This is a serious problem that needs immediate redress.

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