This young woman is helping end the period stigma in Uganda

How many of us have hidden feminine hygiene products up our sleeves at work or in school? How many of us have experienced the fear of wearing white one week a month since we were teenagers? How many of us change our plans once Mother Nature makes her monthly visit? For many of us, these are the typical problems we face when we’re on our periods. For a lot of girls out there, the issues run much deeper.

Kaitlin Rizk is one of an incredible group of men and women looking to change that. Working with Days for Girls (DFG), a non-profit whose goal is to educate and empower women about their own hygiene, Kaitlin has made her way to Uganda. She works at a center that makes reusable pads and distributes them to local communities. Distribution occurs in two different ways.

One method of distribution is selling them locally. By selling the kits and other products like homemade soap, women are able to start their own micro-enterprise.

Another way the reusable pads are distributed is through trainings for girls that take place all over Uganda. “They teach the girls reproductive health and how to sew the Days for Girls kit,” Kaitlin explains. Kits come in large bags that girls can carry around like backpacks and they contain reusable pads that can last up to three years.

When the girls are educated about reproductive health from a DFG teacher, they tend to giggle, but at the end of the day, they leave with valuable information about their bodies and how to take charge of their own health. In fact, she and her colleagues conducted a focus group to find out if the girls actually use the pads. Not only did they find that the girls used the pads, but many had even taught their friends how to make them too, a truly liberating and contagious gesture.

All of these measures are absolutely necessary because girls in some of the impoverished regions of the world are literally missing three to five days of school a month because they are menstruating. When Kaitlin was in Karamajo, one of the most impoverished and neglected areas of Uganda, she faced one of the hardest experiences of her life.

“I saw firsthand all of the things I read about women’s empowerment,” she says. “Each day we taught 30 girls at once in a classroom. Some of the girls were 14 and already had babies that they brought to the training. During lunch I talked with many of the girls and told them my hopes to stay in school and get married when I was 30. They thought I was crazy.”

Some of the obstacles these girls face include rape by older men in their villages and a lack of access to feminine hygiene products, and even underwear. Kaitlin met some girls who were not yet married and did not have children and she explained to them all how well they could do if they stayed in school.

Kaitlin herself is a rising third year student at Georgia Tech who wants to base her career around menstrual hygiene management. She has always been interested in women’s issues. “I want menstruation to no longer have a stigma around it.”

Her specific job at DFG in Uganda is to develop an inventory and ordering system to kit production. The purpose is to determine optimal ordering quantities of materials to manage production, handle large volumes of orders, and be more efficient.

Through her experiences abroad, Kaitlin hopes to learn how to adapt to a different culture. According to Kaitlin, “it is so important to know that people here do not necessarily need people to help them or tell them what to do.” She wants the people at the Center to want a better system and to design it themselves. That’s how a system becomes sustainable, when people in the community are involved in the whole process.

“When I was in high school I read the book Half the Sky which is about women’s empowerment and that women hold up half the sky along with men so we should value them too,” Kaitlin recalls. In working with DFG, Kaitlin is definitely helping to empower women. They leave training sessions with knowledge of their bodies and how to better themselves as women. Women’s health is not just an issue for women. Kaitlin believes “women’s health should be valued by everyone.”

Kaitlin’s hard work, dedication and passion are helping end the stigma around menstruation. After all, what are we all if not “a case of a missed period”?