Lunapads Blog

One of the most exciting new directions for Pads4Girls these days is that we are creating relationships to facilitate learning about how to make pads, in addition to sending them over from Canada. There is much more news to come on this front, but in the meantime here is a wonderful example that is particularly poignant because of the involvement of a group of girls in Vancouver rallying to support girls in Kenya, via the US Peace Corps.

A dear and longtime girlfriend of mine has been working as a Girl Guides and Pathfinder Leader for the past decade. She brought her troup of ten 12-14 year old girls, the #4 Vancouver Pathfinder Unit, to visit Lunapads recently. The girls were particularly taken with Pads4Girls (I had shown them our video about it when I attended one of their meetings last year), and they surprised me with a wonderful donation of $140 that they had earned via babysitting.

Fate had it that a few days later we received a request from Helen McGuirk, a US Peace Corps volunteer, requesting help with finding donations to help her teach a group of girls in Kenya how to make their own pads. They needed $344 to complete the funding, and so we took the $140 the Pathfinders had raised and made up the difference ourselves. Please read Helen’s email below about the project to see what can happen when girls and women come together for a common cause.

(more…)

Share and Enjoy

Of all the various partner groups and individuals that Pads4Girls works with, there are two in particular that stand out with respect to their long term vision, success and unique personalities – we are thrilled to report that they are now working together, and that there is a new way for you to support them directly.

The Lugari Community Resource Center is the brainchild of charismatic leader Jenipher Wasike (see our video of her talking about her own experience growing up in Kenya without information about or access to menstrual products on our YouTube.com channel), a project of the Willing Hearts International Society – Canada (WHISCA).

Afri-Pads was started by two Americans: Pauls Grinvalds and Sophia Klumpp, and a longtime Pads4Girls collaborator, Canadian Carrie-Jane Williams. Right from the get-go they have sought to go beyond simply distributing Pad Kits to girls in need, emphasizing instead building padmaking businesses (image above is of the tailoring class learning about sewing machine maintenance.) They have had remarkable success, and are now renovating their second padmaking factory.

WHISCA is now seeking to offer its tailor training program at Lugari and is seeking donations to finance the training- click here to donate and be part of this remarkable story!

PS/ I have spent a measurable portion of my life behind a sewing machine, but what was once a professional pursuit ultimately lapsed into a hobby, particularly after my daughter was born 5 years ago. I have just committed to donating my last two industrial sewing machines to the Lugari Resource Center, which will be shipped off later this month as part of a container load of donated goods funded by a Vancouver chapter of Rotary International. I love the idea that the same machines that made Lunapads in the early days will now be part of new padmaking ventures in Kenya!

Share and Enjoy

            We are always on the lookout for organizations to donate cloth pads to, though our Pads4Girls campaign. The need for a sustainable solution to womens’ menstrual needs in developing countries is great and there are many wonderful organizations addressing this issue. Our newest recipient group is the Pads for Prisons project. The project exists to address the needs of women in the prisons of war-torn southern Sudan.
After two decades of civil war, the prison system in Southern Sudan has all but been destroyed and is in desperate need of reform. In the mean time the government of has identified a specific need to respond more effectively to the circumstances of children, women and other groups in prison with special needs. An assessment of the situation found that one of the issues that women in the prisons are facing is a total lack of health care and sanitary facilities, including sanitary pads.
Currently prisons are used to house numerous individuals who are not offenders, such as the mentally ill who are detained simply because the specialized facilities required to assist them simply do not exist. Aside from the many mentally ill women, many of the women detained in the prisons are not criminals by North American standards, rather they are in prison because of adultery (considered a criminal offense only for the woman involved) or they are serving time for their husbands who have unpaid debt.
Menstruation is a big challenge for the women in the prisons as they do not have adequate supplies. At best they are forced to use an old rag to deal with their period and at worst; nothing at all.  According to Pads for Prisons’ website one prisoner noted that she was tied to a tree during the time of her menstrual cycle, as the guard did not want her to make a mess on the prison floor.
Pads for Prisons has already collected 610 cloth pads to send to the women and are seeking further donations to help supply all of the women at the prisons with a supply of reusable cloth pads. To donate a Pads4Girls Lunapads Kit to the Pads for Prisons project or any of our other recipient groups visit the donate pads section on Lunapads.com.

Share and Enjoy

In Lunapads mythology, Once Upon A Time there was a fair young maiden (yours truly!) who aspired to make the loveliest washable menstrual pads in the land.  She toiled endlessly at her sewing machines day after day, week after week, and (natch) month after month, until she created something she was satisfied with.  She asked her mirror, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which are the fairest pads of all?”, to which the mirror replied “All pads that are made with love and respect for women’s bodies are truly fair and lovely.”  Love that mirror!  I passed along the task of sewing Lunapads to our noble production partners many years ago, but I continued to sew all manner of clothes and household linens right up until my daughter was born just over 4 years ago.

Since that time, I must confess that gardening has captured my creative heart (easier to do with a 4 year old, as well!), and so I was a bit nervous to pull out my rulers, scissors and 20 year old domestic single-needle machine to make this video – did I still have the magic?  That verdict will have to be in the eyes of the beholder of the video, but for my part it was really fun in a “blast from the past” kind of way.

Part 1:

Part 2:

The videos and pattern download were created in response to two needs: first, as a possible option for those who can’t afford Lunapads, or to support those who prefer to make things themselves, just because. Second is to offer it as an instructional tool for women in Africa to make pads for themselves and/or as commercial products, as well as for crafters in this neck of the woods who want to make pads to contribute as donations to Pads4Girls (more on that in the next post – stay tuned!)

A note on the video: it is not about how to make Lunapads, which requires a far more complex sewing process (not to mention 3 different fabrics and 2 different sewing machines – eek!)  Rather, it is an easy, adjustable pattern that can be made with a single-needle domestic machine and a wide variety of fabrics.  You can download the pattern here.  I encourage you to experiment with different fabrics and closures, and have fun!

Share and Enjoy

Good news continues to come our way about initiatives bringing cloth pads to women and girls in Africa.  As discussed in this earlier post, millions of girls and women in Africa do not have access to adequate menstrual supplies.  Sadly, girls stay home and miss important school days because they have no means to deal with their period while at school.  While Proctor and Gamble have their “protecting futures” campaign (donating disposable pads to girls, thus creating a long-term waste problem), partners in our Pads4Girls initiative provide girls in rural areas of Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya with a sustainable alternative: Lunapads!

While we recognize supplying cloth pads to girls and women is an important step, there are many others in Africa helping to take this initiative one step further.  Several colleagues of ours are building programs to train women to make the pads in their own community, thus creating employment and income for women.  Here are a few examples:

Sapna Dayal of Imagine1Day will be bringing Lunapads with her to Ethiopia in May with hopes to build skills and employment for local women to make and sell cloth pads.  When Carrie Jane Williams travelled to Uganda last fall to bring Lunapads to Uganda, she helped orchestrate the production of ”AfriPads” right there on the spot.  While she was there, she met a young couple who became so excited by what they saw, that they are now completely devoted to getting AfriPads off the ground.   Pauls Grinvalds and Sonia Klumpp have plans to launch a six-month pilot project to determine the feasiblity of manufacturing and distributing cloth pads to the girls in Kitengeesa, in the Masaka District.  Paul and Sonia’s plans were featured in one of Uganda’s national newspapers: the Daily Mirror.  Hopefully this press will stimulate greater awareness of the problem and some funding for their project.  Please pass on the word on their behalf.

Recently we learned of an even larger cloth pad manufacturing program that was inspired by Lunapads.  Last week, I attended the annual Ethiopian dinner of Partners in the Horn of Africa. This Canadian charity works in Ethiopia and directs 100% of the donations directly to projects that involve building schools, bridges, wells, and providing group homes and centres for HIV orphans.

A niece of one of the board members showed her aunt a Lunapad, and from there, the idea of replicating our cloth pads in Ethiopia took off.  In 2008, a Partners-funded pilot project manufactured and distributed 20,000 modified Lunapads and 2,500 Lunapanties for girls in a rural school district near Addis Ababa.  For every $5,000 they invested in this project, over 7,000 more school days for girls were added.  We had no idea this was happening and are so happy to hear about the trickle effect Lunapads has already made in Ethiopia.

Partners also provides microfinancing for women entrepreneurs, and a result of this pilot project they will be expanding the program to set up a manufacturing facility to make 200,000 pads and employ local women.   It was inspiring to hear John Baigent, the Executive Director of Partners, talk about the cloth pad program so passionately to a group of 200 supporters at the dinner.  I was amused to hear that John has achieved “rock star status” among the women and girls because of the profound impact the cloth pads have brought to their community.  Hmm, I’m imagining John channelling Annie Lennox and leading the girls and women in a chorus of ”Sisters are doing it for themselves!”

The Partners cloth pad pilot project was made possible by the generous donation from a group of mothers in West Vancouver called Mom and Me.  Each Mother’s Day this group holds a family dance and in 2008 they raised almost $25,000 for the Partners cloth pad initiative.  I hope to attend the event this year with my family and would love to see this fundraising model replicated everywhere.  Because Partners covers all the administrative costs, 100% of the donations go directly towards the projects they fund.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if more groups replicated this idea and supported this initiative?

Share and Enjoy

It’s April and we’ll be kicking off an exciting month focused on Pads4Girls and community outreach.

To help support some of our current partners going to Africa, we’ll be holding a Pads4Girls Benefit Tea with Peggy O’Mara at Lunapads on Friday, April 17th.  More details forthcoming in a future post as we finalize our plans.  Needless to say, I am buzzing with excitement about having Peggy here at Lunapads.  I have been a reader of Mothering Magazine for 6 years and a huge fan of Peggy’s books.  The magazine and website has been a constant source of information and inspiration for me as a mother.

Also this month, Lunapads is a sponsor and exhibitor at the Healthy Families conference in Vancouver.  In addition to key note speaker Peggy O’Mara, this two day event will feature speakers and workshops with topics to help build community for our children at home and in school.  I am looking forward to establishing new connections and gathering ideas on how to strengthen the relationship between family, children and community.  The event is April 18 – 19th and you can get tickets here.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes in our global community, momentum is building for projects like AfriPads.  Over the next few months, we will be closely following the journey of a young couple (Paul Grinvalds and Sonia Klumps) who are working in Uganda with plans to make cloth pads.  We were introduced to Paul and Sonia by Carrie-Jane Williams, who is also busy networking with other folks to help make her dream of pads being made in Africa happen.  Next week, Madeleine and I are attending a benefit dinner for Partners in the Horn of Africa, a not for profit organization that works in Ethiopia to provide infrastructure improvements, health and welfare and women’s anti-poverty projects.  We hope to learn more about how individuals and organizations are helping to make the lives of girls and women in Africa better and how Lunapads can help.

In the meantime, please continue supporting our partner organizations in our Donate section.  Thank you!

Share and Enjoy

This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post.
Written by Elizabeth Scharpf and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.
Photo by Pierre Holtz | UNICEF.

Thatcher Mweu is a high school sophomore at Choate Rosemary Hall, a prestigious New England boarding school. Two years ago, she was living in a rural Kenyan village. Introducing the new class of 2011, Choate’s headmaster told the school of its deepening diversity – there was a girl who had never been in an elevator before. What he didn’t know is that Thatcher had never seen a tampon before, either.

Despite the fact that half the world menstruates, most people overlook the serious repercussions of a lack of affordable sanitary supplies in developing countries. The reason? Most people don’t know that it is a problem. Others find the subject embarrassing. Even those who do understand think there are more pressing problems at hand. Why spend money on pads when AIDS remains to be solved, when countries desperately need infrastructure, when the economy is collapsing? Because it turns out that providing pads does much more than prevent embarrassing stains. It is a simple solution that can change the standing of a gender, and thus an economy, across a continent.

In the US, sanitary pads first became widespread in 1921, tampons in 1936. As a result girls and women had the opportunity to fully participate in school, sports, and the workforce. These products equaled freedom. And this is why many women say tampons are one of the greatest inventions of all time. They effectively reduced the inconvenience, opportunity cost, and stigma of menstruation.

But in developing countries, periods continue to be a serious handicap. According to UNICEF, ten percent of school-age African girls miss school because of a lack of access to affordable sanitary products. In Rwanda, it’s much worse. According to on-the-ground research by Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), half the girls are missing school due to menstruation and the main reason given is that sanitary pads are too expensive. For women, 24% miss work – up to 45 days per year – for the same reason. This not only limits girls’ educational and women’s professional achievement, but leads to a significant economic loss for nations. SHE estimates that a lack of affordable sanitary pads reduces GDP by $115 million per year in Rwanda alone.

There are also serious health repercussions of not having pads. In Asia, many women still use rags; less fortunate ones use newspapers, banana leaves, even sand or ash. While rags were common before the pad was invented, the problem in developing countries is that often women don’t have access to clean water to wash them. And the taboo of menstruation means that many women cannot hang their rags to dry in the open. So, instead, they hide them in dark, damp places where no one will find them. As one might imagine, infections are rampant.

The first step is to destigmatize menstruation. Bringing periods into the open won’t be easy. The taboo of menstruation is embedded in our religions, culture, and history. The Quran declares that menstruating women “are a hurt and a pollution.” Indian women are exiled from their own homes. Orthodox Jewish women are forbidden to have sex.
French housewives can’t make mayonnaise. In ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder wrote that contact with menstrual blood “turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, …, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled.” Today, Pliny seems ridiculous, but discrimination and ignorance remain.

To change attitudes means breaking the silence. Our hope is that this article will help start a dialogue with the women and men around you. Almost every woman remembers her first period – where and when it happened, who, if anyone, she told, and even what she was wearing. Girls should know the stories of the women in their family. Sharing these stories will help mothers and daughters (and dads, too) talk more openly about this natural process.

Equally important is to change the economy of menstruation. Sanitary pads should be affordable and safe. This is an investment not only in women, but economies.

Thirty years ago, Gloria Steinem published one of her most famous essays, If Men Could Menstruate. There would be no taboos. Men would brag about how long and how much. And sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. It’s time we do a better job helping our sisters around the world. P&G is contributing $5 million over five years to provide sanity supplies in Africa. SHE is jump-starting local businesses to produce affordable sanitary supplies around the globe. (And Lunapads has Pads4Girls – a way to donate reusable cloth pads to girls & women in need.)

Individually, we can all help end the taboo by talking. These are the ways to truly celebrate International Women’s Day.

Share and Enjoy

Meet Emily Wilson. She works in Zimbabwe with women’s organizations and through this work she has discovered a real need to help women and girls gain access to menstrual supplies. In Emily’s words:

“At one meeting, a member of the Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe stated that there is a real need to engender humanitarian responses in the country; the example she gave is the fact that many women can no longer afford to buy sanitary wear, or else it is just not available in stores. This message was repeated over and over during my visits to different organizations and communities, and so knowing that I was to return to Zimbabwe again in early January, I decided to try and do something about this issue. I mobilized friends, family members and complete strangers in Ottawa to collect 35 boxes of tampons, 65 packages of maxi pads, and 5 packages of reusable pads. The collection drive was fascinating, as it started up numerous debates and discussions about the most appropriate sanitary wear for women in Zimbabwe (tampons versus pads), issues of health and sustainability (disposable versus reusable), etc. In the end, of course, I took what had been donated, and felt very grateful for all of the support received.

I took a giant suitcase of these items with me to Zimbabwe in January, and personally delivered them to a women’s shelter in the city of Bulawayo. I met with some of the young women there as well as members of the Board and people from the local Church who volunteer to help run the shelter. They were all extremely grateful and were very touched by the gesture. After discussing with them what the most appropriate items are for young women in Zimbabwe, it became clear that reusable pads are the best – in terms of being culturally appropriate, practical, and sustainable.”

This is where Lunapads comes in. Emily contacted us to help her collect enough pads to fill another suitcase (or two, or three!) with reusable cloth pads. She wants to give the women a lasting alternative and something beautiful and functional. So please, read about the groups Emily is working with in Zimbabwe and don’t hesitate to help a woman there today!

Choose: Sexual Rights Centre (Zimbabwe) from the donation options. You can donate a Pads4Girls Kit which gives a full set of pads needed for one woman/girl or you can donate any amount of money, which will go towards the purchase of more kits.

The Sexual Rights Centre is the ‘umbrella’ organization that will oversee delivery of the pads to The Haven, Contact Family Counselling and Ingutsheni Psychiatric Hospital. For the safety of the women they help we cannot provide much information about these organizations, but below are a few details.

The Haven is a shelter for abused women and their children, located in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. The shelter was established by concerned citizens and professionals from the legal, medical, psychological and education sectors. This committee of professionals started providing shelter for abused women and their children in 1999; a home was purchased as a permanent shelter in 2006. The Haven Trust and its networks provide education on women’s rights, HIV & AIDS, sexual & reproductive health, and livelihood skills. Members from the Bulawayo community provide food and in-kind support for the shelter, which is how it currently continues to operate.

Contact Family Counselling, also based in Bulawayo, offers free counselling services for families and children in difficult circumstances. The organization focuses on disadvantaged people to empower them to lead healthier and more productive lives. Contact also trains a broad range of health, social service and community workers in systemic counselling techniques. Contact initiated a Child Sexual Abuse Program in 2007, offering services to children and their families affected by sexual abuse. For more information: www.contactfc.org

Ingutsheni Psychiatric Hospital is one of the largest psychiatric facilities in Southern Africa. The hospital provides residential care and outreach support for people living with mental health problems. The hospital currently houses over 300 female patients. The hospital has experienced serious challenges in delivering effective medical resources and information for female patients. The Sexual Rights Centre currently works with the female patients at Ingutsheni and are appealing for sanitary products for the women. Access to sanitary products is a huge problem for Zimbabwean women and particularly women living in institutions.

Share and Enjoy

Lunapads and our generous customers have donated hundreds of pads to women and girls in developing nations in recent years, and we are now offering more ways than ever to help in our new Donate section.

Pads4Girls seeks to address the problem of girls in developing nations missing school due to a lack of adequate menstrual supplies.  Paying homage to Deanna Duke‘s original Goods4Girls project (sadly now defunct), we decided to keep the name simple as well as make it easy for anyone already aware of Goods4Girls to know that we are up to pretty much exactly the same thing.  Here’s a quickie fact sheet on the drastic difference that missing school can have on girls’ lives.  In comparison to the Always “protecting futures” campaign, Pads4Girls seeks to offer a more sustainable, environmentally responsible solution.

We had the recent pleasure of connecting with Sapna Dayal, Executive Director of Imagine1Day, a Vancouver based NGO (started by the founders of lululemon athletica) whose mission is to provide primary education for children in Ethiopia.  Watch our short video interview with Sapna to learn what Imagine1Day is doing, why this work is so personal to to Sapna and how you can fill her suitcase with Pads4Girls when she returns to Ethiopia in May.

We are so encouraged by the growing public interest in helping girls in Africa. This week alone, we added 2 new organizations and are collecting Pads4Girls for communities in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ethiopia.  You can learn about each organization in the Donate section of our site, and we will continue to update our list of recipients as we connect with them.  The synergies of our common mission ~ to help keep girls in school and provide a more sustainable solution is incredibly exciting.  But this is just the beginning!  We are currently in the midst of bigger plans which include providing resources and training to allow the women in Africa make the pads themselves and create a source of income for their families.  We’ll tell you more about this in a future blog post as this project develops.

You can also choose to donate Maxi Pads for inclusion in Birth Kits being distributed by Shanti Uganda, a Vancouver based NGO helping women in rural Uganda .  And of course, cash donations can be made to support the purchase of  pads.

To watch more videos about our Pads4Girls campaign, go to our YouTube channel here.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

Share and Enjoy

Wow.  If you’re not already aware of this powerful campaign, please check it out.  For all that I love grassroots initiatives such as Goods4Girls and others that we support, it’s nice to see some big money and big names stepping up to the plate.  The central premise of the girl effect is that educating girls is the single most powerful change that can be made to improve the lives of everyone in developing nations.  From curbing the spread of HIV to reducing government corruption and reducing the incidence of violence against women, look no further than helping girls stay in school to make it happen.  Even one extra year of primary school attendance will result in a lifetime wage boost of 10 to 20 percent.Please check out their Facebook group and spread the word in whatever ways you can!

Share and Enjoy