A student group at Gonzaga University in Spokane is taking feminine-hygiene kits to girls and women in Zambia, Africa, a simple tool that can fuel social change.
A group of students and faculty from Gonzaga University is heading to Zambia on Monday, carrying unlikely tools for social change: feminine-hygiene kits that will make it possible for young girls and women to stay in school.
This is the second year the Gonzaga-in-Zambezi program for organizational leadership has added the cloth kits to the supplies and services that students share with villagers in the sub-Saharan African nation, said Josh Armstrong, director of the school’s comprehensive leadership program.
But it’s already one of the more popular and meaningful ways to have direct impact on the villagers’ daily lives.
“There are so many people with great intentions that go to Africa and do projects, but are these the projects that they need most?” said Armstrong, who has headed trips to Zambia for nine years.
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The 19 students and three faculty members will bring 75 hygiene kits that include cloth liners and absorbent pads that can be washed and reused for up to three years, boosting privacy and dignity during menstruation.
It’s an idea gleaned from the Lynden, Whatcom County, nonprofit Days for Girls International, which has supplied kits to more than 100,000 girls and women on six continents since 2008.
Founder Celeste Mergens realized that many girls and women in Africa and other poor countries are excluded from society during menstruation, primarily because they have no access to hygiene supplies. Many make do with leaves, mattress stuffing, newspaper or even rocks, but they often miss school or work for a week out of every month.
“When it’s that time of the month, the women go out and stay with the cattle,” said Lora Moren, office manager for Days for Girls. “With this, their lives have been changed completely.”
The Gonzaga group became aware of the program after Dale Abendroth, an assistant nursing professor who had been to Zambia, read a magazine article about Days for Girls in 2010 and decided she wanted to help.
“I had a friend who said, ‘I’m going to purge a ton of fabric out of my sewing room,’ ” Abendroth recalled.
That gave her an idea. She joined with friends who were quilters in Spokane to create the kits, which include two fabric shields that hold a liner in place, eight flannel liners, two pairs of panties, a wash cloth, a bar of soap, a one-gallon plastic bag and a drawstring pouch to hold everything.
“We’re happy to work on the project,” Abendroth said. “We spend the day sewing. Everyone brings their sewing machine. Sometimes we have six sewing machines going. I consider this a double blessing.”
Nursing student Hannah Van Dinter, 20, delivered the first batch of hygiene kits to women in Zambia last year as part of a women’s health educational project. Along with information about sexual health, HIV and AIDS, prenatal monitoring and newborn care, she and her classmates provided the feminine-hygiene kits to girls as young as 11.
“In Zambia, menstruation is not something you talk about,” she said.
But when the girls and women learned they’d have access to a reusable, reliable tool for handling their monthly cycles, they were excited, Van Dinter recalled.
“It was a joyous celebration, for sure,” she said. “They just stood up and started singing and dancing. We couldn’t get a word in for five minutes because it was a celebration.”
The kits allow girls to stay in school full time and, eventually, break the cycle of poverty. In addition, Days for Girls is about to launch projects that send the raw materials to make the kits to developing nations as an entrepreneurial project for women, Moren said.
“Just one person saw a need and said, ‘This is wrong, we’ve got to fix it,’ ” she said.