Periods of change -by Anna Banyard

I really enjoy provoking men by talking about menstruation. I love being able to talk openly about menses and warning others to tread carefully around me during that ‘time of the month’ because the hormones can make me act deranged and frightening.

Even today in England there is a stigma associated with periods. Some men respond: ‘don’t talk about it Anna, it’s not sexy’ or ‘if you’re going to continue to talk about this I’m going to have to leave’. Maybe my delight in the discussion is a product of going to a girls-only secondary school, or maybe it’s a result of receiving adequate information growing up, teaching me it’s a normal sign of becoming a woman, and something to be proud of. I know men know that menstruation exists too, so me telling them I’m bleeding from my womb isn’t anything that should surprise them (even if it does scare them a bit).

Many girls in Kenya, suffer much more from the stigma surrounding menstruation due to a lack of information, cultural taboos, and a lack of resources to adequately manage it.

There are many factors impairing girls’ education in Kenya. Some of these factors include early marriage, often because families need the dowry to ease financial stress, a lack of family planning and contraception resulting in early and unplanned pregnancy and gender roles in the family requiring female members of the household to be responsible for cleaning, cooking, collecting water, providing firewood and looking after younger children. In addition, girls in many areas of Kenya are pressured to undergo female circumcision to varying degrees of severity.  On top of all this they must manage their periods as well!?

Menstruating for most school girls living in rural Kenya is difficult and problematic, to say the least. Without the necessary finances to access the safe and hygienic products on the market, they use whatever they can find: rags, cotton wool, tissues, and newspaper scraps. Some girls have no access to any of these things at all, and so use soil, leaves, grass, dried animal hides or simply nothing at all. While these methods are uncomfortable and most unhygienic, all are ineffective. Because of the shame and bullying numerous girls experience from their peers when they leak on to their chairs and uniforms, many stop participating or stay home from school. This amounts to girls missing approximately 10-20 percent of school days each year, leading to a major decrease in school performance and grades.

The lack of information these girls have available to them means they have questions not only just about how to take care of themselves, but also about what is normal, what’s happening to my body, and what it means?

Dig Deep in collaboration with our partner organisation WASH United have included a Menstrual Hygiene Management syllabus in a comprehensive Water, Sanitation and Hygiene programme targeting schools in Western Rift Valley, Kenya. We run workshops with young adolescent women to provide a platform of information sharing, demystify the menstrual cycle, understand body and mood changes during puberty, to know what products are available, how to use them hygienically and dispose of them correctly, and why girls should be proud to be women. Another goal of the workshops is to open discussions with boys, asking on their understanding of menstruation and normal adolescent changes in themselves as well as their female peers.

The workshop is done using a range of interactive activities and participatory games. We use a giant female reproductive system diagram to explain the anatomy (which looks weirdly like an angry cow face), show the stages of the menstrual cycle through an interactive calendar, and make bead necklaces with red and yellow beads to represent the menstrual cycle and help girls plan for their next flow.

We also invite external social enterprises with appropriate products that are renewable, reusable, low cost, environmentally conscious and hygienic to inform the girls of solutions that are accessible and preferable, that can keep the girls feeling secure enough to come to school all month round. The training is both fun and informative, which helps to effectively engage participants and ensure that information is well understood and memorable. We also focus on making the girls feel comfortable and safe. Even male teachers or facilitators are given names like Florence or Grace and asked about whether he prefers menstrual cups or tampons. By the end of the training, full of laughter and learning, many of the girls realize how much they like talking openly (sometimes graphically) about our flows, our personal tsunamis in our knickers.

Marketing dilemma's - by James Haughton

In the past few weeks I have been thinking a lot about Dig Deep and our marketing. Marketing sounds like a dirty word in our sector but charity revolves around the need to garner donations and maintain awareness. Neither requires secret strategies of manipulation(!) so I wanted to share with you something that we are giving a lot of thought to right now. It is a dilemma that a lot of charities have to face in presenting their work. 

The scales of the problems are breathtaking in Kenya and there is real human suffering. Presenting images of such suffering has worked for charities for a long time but doesn’t fit with our ethos. How can we present messages about Kenya and the work that we do without resorting to worst case portrayals of the situation there and imposing the narrow lens of our needs as an organisation and donor community?

We would never entertain here in the UK even asking permission to take a photo of a mother weeping, with a child dead in her arms due to cancer, to promote research into one of our primary threats as western people so what makes this acceptable to do during drought in somewhere like 'Africa'? Is it worth it if the money flows in? Or are charities not engaging enough with positive messages about change? Does the need to present more and more impactful images devalue the underlying messages?

Your donation to Dig Deep stops people dying, that is a fact but it is also a message that plays on guilt to a certain extent and reduces the complexity of the impact of the water crisis to a single negative message which is perpetuated continually. When you give to Dig Deep you unlock potential, remove the roadblocks of illness and missed opportunity for education/livelihood to allow the breaking of well-established poverty cycles. You can invest in this kind of change because the communities we work with have incredible energy and drive to carry this forward. They demonstrate this throughout the project process and by asking to work with us in the first place. Looking back on our impact report I can see this enthusiasm shines through over and over by the project reports. Our beneficiaries are active, engaged and not passive onlookers.

Photo taken at Ndanai, by community member Justus, of children learning to wash their clothes after the project opening. It is a good example of what we can learn from the images taken by community members as to the wider impact of accessible and clean water.

So how can Dig Deep put this undertaking to portray our work with sensitivity and communicate positively with our donors into practise? I’m not 100% there yet but the answer must lie within the promotion of direct interaction between our beneficiaries and our donors, to tell their story directly as opposed to their story told by us. One measure we have agreed to roll out is to provide cheap digital cameras to communities and to ask them to record the progress of their projects along with brief captions. Everyone changes when they are put on camera and no one likes being filmed unless it is on their own terms. By lending these cameras out, and with no specific direction, we hope to be able to have a unique insight into what our beneficiaries deem important about their communities, projects and their impact. We very much look forward to sharing these with you all unedited and unabridged.