“When I was young, a girl who had her first period was scared and scared,” Burkinabé grandmother Marie, 73, tells her daughter, Aminata, and her teenage granddaughter, Nassiratou, 18, who calls his grandmother “Yaaba”.
The three women sit together under a tree in their village in west-central Burkina Faso, forming seed balls to make a condiment called soumbala. “The girl's mother gave her a sheepskin so she could sleep until she stopped bleeding,” Marie confesses. “In those days, girls and women were isolated during their periods. They washed their sheepskins and protective clothing every day, so in the Moore language we use the word 'washing' to refer to the time of menstruation.”
In Paraguay, grandmother María, 73, also shared her experience of menstruation with her daughter Ester, 51, and her granddaughter Alma, 16, Ester's niece. “We didn't used to talk about it,” Maria says. “We, secretly, had to deal with it and there were no sanitary pads or anything. You had to use cloths, wash them and iron them.”
On any given day, in every corner of the world, around 300 million women and girls have their period, according to a report by a group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that advocate for investment in menstrual health. [PDF]. At the same time, one in four lack access to menstrual health products or clean toilets reserved for girls, according to a report by the nonprofit social change advisory group, FSG.
Some are forced to use materials such as old newspapers, rags, dirt, sand, ash, grass or leaves to control their periods, like grandmother Bui Non in Cambodia, who, as a child, used pieces of a sarong as makeshift sanitary pads . . “I cut the cloth into pieces,” says Bui Non, 57. “After a week, I buried or burned those cloths.”
Taboos, stigmas and myths of yesteryear still abound in many rural communities around the world, with a culture of silence and shame often surrounding the topic of menstruation. Beninese grandmother Angel remembers how women in her time were not allowed to cook over a fire or serve food to her parents if they were menstruating.
For Inna, a Togolese grandmother, things were even more challenging. “The family had to find a room on the side of the road where the menstruating girl had to spend her entire period. So, the family alerted the entire village.” Still, in many communities, girls are excluded from everyday life and opportunities, especially school, when they have their period.
Today, when girls are able to monitor their periods and talk about them, it is often due to long-standing community health projects that work with girls and boys, women and men to foster intergenerational dialogue to break down taboos and barriers around pregnancy. menstrual health. “It's a rights issue,” says Denise, Inna's 16-year-old granddaughter, who, like all the teenagers in this article, participates in a community project run by Plan International, a humanitarian organization that works to promote rights and equality of children. for girls in 80 countries around the world.
“Previously, no head of family would allow a discussion session like the one we are having today on menstruation in his family,” agrees Aminata in Burkina Faso. “The change today is clear.”
