The Red Box Project quietly ensures that no young person misses school because they have their period. Working as a nationwide community, The Red Box Project seeks to provide free menstrual products for the young people in our local schools.
Schools with a Red Box find absenteeism drops on average by 30%. It is awful that girls have to miss out on education because they are not properly equipped to cope with their period.
Just imagine, your Dad's walked out, Mum's on benefits, bringing up 3 children, and you are 14. You are old enough to know she is struggling to pay the rent, and feed the family, and old enough to get 'the curse' every month. But you are not old enough to get a Saturday job in order to be able to fund your own sanpro. You'd rather Mum spent the limited budget on supper for your siblings than on Tampax for you. So a couple of days a month, you just stay at home, near your own bathroom...but your education suffers, and you feel ashamed and embarrassed to explain your absence to your male Form Tutor.
And there are hundreds of girls facing this sort of dilemma every month. This charity is helping to reduce 'period poverty' and restore their dignity. I am so glad our church is supporting them this Christmas.
I am old enough to remember the cloth sanitary napkins my mother made for me. They were simply squares of white fabric that she hemmed all around. She showed me how to fold them to make a somewhat thick pad which was attached with safety pins to a belt I wore around my waist. These sanitary napkins were washed (by hand, as we had no washing machine) and reused. It is what a lot of my classmates and friends and I wore. We wore white uniforms to school, so, it was an effort to keep anything from leaking and staining our uniforms, but, we managed, for the most part. Disposable sanitary napkins were something of a luxury at the time and in that place.
ReplyDeleteI grow up in Brazil, lived there till age 20 and that was what a lot of the girls did. I was fortunate enough to have my paper products but of the girls did not and they seem to handle the "rags" like they used to say. In fact it was rags they used, pieces of old clothes that got too old to be used as clothes. I do applaud this project and hope red boxes reaches all corners of the globe, to land a hand is very important and our duties as Christians.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great project!
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