How CES supports our students during menstruation

Sarah Nabongo, Administrative Assistant of the CES office in Kakamega, Kenya, has become a “Big Sister” to many of the CES students. This includes many aspects of growing up that many Kenyan parents are reluctant to discuss with their children – such as menstruation. Sarah provides warm, caring, practical advice to our girls. Through the generosity of CES donors, she’s also able to provide them with sanitary kits and a supply of pads.

CES Canada secretary and board member Carl Friesen sat down with Sarah recently over a Zoom call and asked her about how menstruation affects girl students and what CES is doing about it. Here’s a lightly edited transcription of that conversation:

Carl: Can I ask you then, traditionally, how have girls and women deal with menstruation?

Sarah: Before the coming in of sanitary pads, people used to have to use old cloths. You’d cut up cloths, or old blankets because a blanket is thick and absorbs liquid, maybe old mattresses. Some used cotton wool. Those solutions are still used by people unable to afford manufactured products.

This is a problem because when someone is menstruating, in traditional tribal (Luhya) culture she’s seen as dirty. So, there are some things that women are not allowed to do. In churches, you’re not allowed to go to the altar to receive the sacraments, because you are deemed as unfit. You’re not allowed to participate in a community meeting. You’re not allowed to prepare food for your family, because you are seen as not clean. You can’t even pick vegetables – there’s a belief that if you do, those vegetables will wither and dry up. They think that the blood that is coming out of you will affect even the plants.

Thanks to technology and current ideas being spread, those aspects of traditional culture are now being overlooked.

For some students, when they’re on their period, they don’t go to school, because of the stigma associated with menstruation. That’s particularly if they can’t afford good sanitary pads or have very heavy flow. If they’re in school and soil their clothing, the boys and other girls laugh at them. They become stigmatized and are reluctant to go to school during their period.

This has consequences for them. First, the teacher isn’t going to stop teaching while they’re away. The student will miss schoolwork, and this will reduce their academic performance. Second, their self-esteem is low, because people will say, “You know this girl, she doesn’t come to school.” People talk behind their back, and they hear of this, and their self-esteem becomes low. Our students come from poor families, so these issues can be more extreme for them, compared to students from more well-to-do families. 

Maybe a student has only one pad. Pads are supposed to be changed every two hours if you have a moderate flow. But if you have heavy flow, it is within every hour. So you find that if a student does not have money to buy those pads, they are at a big disadvantage.

Poverty affects our students in other ways too. Sometimes when they have menstrual cramps, they need to take painkillers. But students from poor families, they don’t know what medication to take, and can’t afford it anyway.

Another vulnerability has to do with the fact that many Kenyan schools available to students from poor families are day schools. This means that the students have to travel to and from school each day, perhaps two kilometres each way. Often they rely on boda-bodas, which are motorcycle taxis. Sometimes the driver will offer a girl student a ride for free, and this makes her naturally willing to share her problems with the driver – perhaps about how she can’t afford menstrual pads. 

Those drivers will sometimes offer to buy pads for their girl passengers – but they have an agenda. They may expect sexual favours in return, and it often happens that the girl gets pregnant. It’s quite likely that as a result, she won’t continue with her education. In many cases, the boda-boda driver won’t be able or willing to take responsibility for raising the child, maybe because he has a family already. So for the girl’s family, this becomes a burden on top of a burden – they need to look after this girl who’s pregnant, and then the baby too. So often, the girl can’t go back to school. She’ll be stuck with some manual job to support her upkeep.

Carl: What kinds of pads are used – and what about re-usable pads?

Sarah: Currently what is commonly used is non-reusable pads. We tried providing re-usable pads at one time, but what I found out is that they don’t work well. This is partly because of the need to wash the pad, dry it thoroughly and then use next month.

We distributed some, and then went back and asked how they worked out. Responses were not good. They were telling me that they don’t work well in practice. Students told me that they’d wash the pads and leave them out to dry in the sun, but when they were in school none of their family members would bring the pads in when it started raining. That’s because menstrual pads are like private things. You can’t just put them on the usual clothes line; they are not exposed to public view; they’re like underwear that way. They have to be aired separately, somewhere hidden, and as a result they get left out instead of being brought inside to dry. Another thing is hygiene – you need to clean them very well, and then dry them thoroughly, because if you don’t, the risk of getting an infection is high.

Carl: Isn’t buying one-time use pads unaffordable by many students?

Sarah: Most pads are sold in packets of eight. The cheapest one used to be around 50 Kenyan shillings (about 50 cents Canadian), but now with inflation it is 60. In a month you can use even two packets because they are so thin, so you have to use more of them. If you want better pads, you’ll pay a higher price.

Carl: What does CES do to help?

Sarah: I have to buy the pads, and for a while we were also buying underwear, partly to demonstrate how the pads are used.

I provide instruction, because reproductive health in our African society is not talked about. The parents are not open to talk about reproductive health with their daughters. So you find that these girls have some instruction from their teachers, or they hire someone to come into the school and teach them. Parents don’t feel free to discuss it.

Some women and girls get indications when their period is about to start, so they can be prepared. Some don’t get that warning – so it can happen that they stand up, only to find their clothes have been soiled.

So as an administrator when I visit these schools, I bring the girls together, I talk to them, I show them what they’re supposed to do. During the visit, I tell them what to do, how often they need to change the pads because it’s not healthy for them to stay with one pad for more than four hours. The chances of getting an infection are high.

So we estimate that one packet will last a month, so we give them three or four packets, enough to last for the whole term.

I think it’s something that we should continue doing with our girls, because they need this information, and they need this support. As you know, CES supports girls from needy families, so we need to support them with the pads.

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Learn how CES Alumnus Dennis Were has been, in his own unique way, helping Kenyan girls and women through birthday gifts to himself. Learn how Dennis does it