womens empowerment

Hot Off the Press! CCF's Menstrual Health Guide

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by Colleen Cahill


Talk about a labor of love.

After nearly two and a half years of incubating...er...I mean, development, Conscious Connections Foundation (CCF) is proud to announce our brand new Guide to Menstrual Health for Women & Girls is complete and has already been put to use! This is BIG news for our small and mighty organization.

CCF super-hero-slash-key-partner, Kesang Yudron, led a massive effort to bring menstrual health training to the remote villages in the Upper Arun Valley in Eastern Nepal last month—our first training session since the lockdown began last year (look for this story coming soon). The women and community leaders loved the guide with all its bright and fun illustrations.

Puberty page layout

Puberty page layout

CCF Steps Up Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) Training Initiative

In the fall of 2018, CCF began conducting menstrual health training. This initiative grew out of our existing Power of 5 program working to educate children—with an emphasis on girls.

Through this effort to educate girls and break down cultural barriers, it was clear that without adding the menstrual health component, we’d be falling short on truly setting them up for success. It aligned well with CCF’s mission and Nepali partners led the way to get this work started.

Kesang Yudron, CCF MHM project manager, set out the goal of the initiative:

“To inform and provide access to information on Menstrual Health and Hygiene across Nepal so women have a choice to live in dignity, equality and justice.”

To date, CCF has held several trainings in Kathmandu as well as several remote areas, and until last month, there have been no specific course materials. The students and trainers asked for a more permanent and comprehensive reference tool to take home and share with others.

In doing some research to see if other organizations had an existing menstrual health manual CCF could purchase to support our training sessions, we discovered the options were proprietary and didn't quite fulfill our need for information that fit all literacy levels.

Kesang proposed to the board that the organization create its own manual and design it based on our specific training focusing on issues around gender inequality, sexual reproduction, myths, taboos and religious beliefs surrounding menstruation and the local laws that support women’s rights. She added that it should be available to anyone who wanted it so that it might be shared widely.

This was no small undertaking, but the board unanimously agreed to fund the project.

Kesang was off and running.

The “Un-Manual”

CCF formed a menstrual hygiene committee to offer support to Kesang as she gathered her team in Nepal and developed content. Together, we determined the primary goal of the manual—to simplify the menstrual health information so that students of all ages with different levels of literacy and education could understand it and get excited to share it back to their families and communities.

We wanted to avoid creating another boring textbook. To keep the students—whether female, male, young or old—engaged and curious, Kesang hired an illustrator to develop colorful, fun and informative illustrations. This talented Nepali woman, Promina Shrestha, brought the guide to life by introducing “The Egg,” our cute, friendly main character who shepherds us through the manual explaining diagrams and offering informative tips and encouragement.

Illustrator’s rough sketch of The Egg describing her journey through menstruation

Illustrator’s rough sketch of The Egg describing her journey through menstruation

For a topic in Nepal that can be taboo and shameful, this was an effective tactic to make students feel more at ease.

The team in Nepal was rounded out with help from a nurse, writer, translator, and graphic designer, with a little support from the menstrual hygiene committee stateside.

Illustrator’s rough sketch of The Egg explaining what might happen during menstruation

Illustrator’s rough sketch of The Egg explaining what might happen during menstruation

Comprehensive Menstrual Hygiene Content

This version of the guide is one CCF will continue to evolve going forward. Many issues were discussed and considered, but in the end, we focused in on the following outline for our first edition:

  • Puberty

  • Anatomy (male and female)

  • Menstruation

  • Menstrual Restriction, Social Norms and Taboos

  • Menstrual Products (Pros and Cons)

  • Menstruation and the Environment

  • Menopause

  • Menstrual Cycle Calendar ( Moon Cycle)

Menstruation page layout

Menstruation page layout

The Introduction invites the student in with a friendly tone and immediately frames menstruation in the positive light it deserves:

Menstruation is an exciting time of change in your body and mind that signals your entry into womanhood, sexual activity, and being able to have babies. Although it’s an exciting time of change and is a completely normal and healthy process, many girls face exclusion and restriction due to the belief that menstrual blood is impure and dirty. Chauppadi, one of the most restrictive menstrual practices of confining women in small sheds, is practiced in Nepal.

This mini manual is designed to explain to families and communities about Menstrual Health and Hygiene. This Menstrual Health Manual, explains the natural and normal changes that are happening in your body. When you are more knowledgeable about your body, you will be empowered and better equipped with the information and confidence necessary to manage your long-term sexual and reproductive health.

Maintaining good menstrual health starts with understanding the changes that occur in our body during puberty.

The manual even comes complete with a menstruation calendar at the back, so the women and girls have a tool to help them learn how to track their periods!

Spreading Menstrual education far and wide

CCF published the guide under the creative commons license. It is our hope that this information is shared out freely and widely throughout Nepal and wherever menstrual health education is needed.

The guide was produced and printed in both English and Nepali. If you’d like to support this work and menstrual hygiene education in Nepal, hit the button below. Just $20 sponsors a student to attend menstrual health training. Your dollars make a huge impact.



A BIG thank you to our donors! Through you, this work has been possible.

What CCF does and how it does it

CCF sponsored Menstrual Leadership Training in Kathmandu

CCF sponsored Menstrual Leadership Training in Kathmandu

By Kimberly A. Maynard, Ph.D.
– CCF Board Member

I have personally worked with, for, and beside hundreds of international aid organizations in many countries. I have professionally examined the intention and value and, ultimately, the impact of international aid work. What does truly caring about our fellow humans around the world and “doing good” look like in an organization? We are in an era of extreme resource imbalance within a globalized economy. Through the media, we are privy to the lives of others in the far reaches of the world 24/7. It tears our hearts when we witness an earthquake destroy a whole village or a young girl destined to hard labor deep in the hands of poverty. We are the privileged, the few, the top end of the ladder yet what do we do to help? How do we express our humanity effectively?


How Do We Do Good Well?

After a career in the field and decades examining this personally, I have boiled it down simply to exemplifying good ethics. In the end, we are humans who want to favorably touch and be touched by other humans. This entails two things for me organizationally: 1) upholding an excellent partnership relationship with those we work with and 2) making an effort to think long-term and to act short-term in the best interest of the community and country.

Last year while trekking to each of CCF’s projects, I kept this in mind. Sitting in a circle in front of the Baseri Health Clinic along with the clinic’s oversight committee and staff, I asked myself this same question: what does “doing good” look like. The clinic was in need of repair. Children from the school next door had taken to throwing rocks at it, which chipped the siding. Some of the rooms flooded during the monsoons due to poor run off and an inadequate foundation. What actions could CCF take that would support the long-term ability of the community to have and uphold a quality clinic and not simply do a quick fix? That day in the circle, we agreed on a plan. CCF engaged a local contractor who employed Baseri young men to upgrade some structural components of the clinic. The contractor, also a committee member, took responsibility to guarantee the work would be maintained in years to come. After our meeting, the schoolmaster from next door walked over to me and thanked CCF for helping ensure that the community had such a viable health service. He said he would personally ensure that children learned to appreciate the value of the clinic and that they would no longer throw rocks.


CCF Takes A Deeper Look At What It Does

That trip prompted some navel gazing among CCF’s Board members. Clearly, CCF is greatly appreciated among the Nepalis with whom we engage and whose lives we touch. How do we articulate how that works? How can our ethics and methods be made more visible and consistent in our work? How can we ensure our integrity, transparency, and underlying values are inherent in everything we do? CCF has held strong values since its inception, such as trusting and working closely with specific Nepali relationships to guide its grant-making. However, up until now, these had been more intuitive than verbalized.

The Board formed a committee to look deep into this question. We held a series of introspective discussions unpacking what we stood for and how we operate. This invisible substructure developed into clear, discernible philosophies and standards documented in What CCF Does and How and agreed to by the entire Board. It states our underpinning beliefs, what kinds of projects we fund and why, and our guiding principles and is the foundation of all our operations. In it, is a set of seven criteria against which we measure each proposal in deciding what to fund in upholding this platform.

For example, our internal discussions pointed directly to our belief that when women and girls thrive, the world is better off. Yes, there are many deserving issues, and CCF has chosen to center its work on women and girls. For decades, I’ve had a sticker next to my desk that reads, “For every year beyond fourth grade that girls go to school, family size drops 20%, child deaths drop 10%, and wages rise 20%; yet international aid dedicated to education is declining.” Paul Hawken’s Project Drawdown uses big data to list the 100 most important, already existing solutions to reversing global warming. It measures how much CO2 is either not emitted or is captured by each solution. Educating girls is number six, family planning is number seven, and the two combined are number one. CCF’s scholarships and menstrual hygiene training are right in there.

I learned early on that giving money and food to the women resulted in the whole family surviving better. When girls get a leg up, their entire lives are transformed, they have more choices, and they give back to their societies. CCF has seen this transformation with Nepali women and girls since its inception. So, we made explicit that our work is to support women and girls.

The Process Is As Important As The Product

Yet, my experience has underscored it is not just what an international aid organization does does but how it does it. The process itself can often become the majority of the benefit. CCF has always invested in trusted Nepalis to guide our actions. Making this explicit through our guidelines grounds us in these precious relationships. This stems from the fact that every organization has to decide how directive it will be. Will it use its education and experience to proffer activities to a community or will it ask the community—sometimes without much subject matter experience—to decide what to do?

CCF has decided to walk beside and partner with Nepali communities, working collaboratively on issues of interest related to girls and women. In this, Nepalis collectively benefit from CCF’s involvement (not least of which is financing), while we in the West learn from working closely with the unique Nepali cultures and approaches to their circumstances. That said, CCF remains open to the understanding that there will be situations when it walks ahead and directs change. Similarly, there will be situations when our Nepali partners have more insight and should rightfully lead. We see this two-way, accommodating modality deepening and strengthening our relationships.

Around the World Benefits

Another significant component of CCF’s internal workings that emerged during our discussions was the value of our North American partners. We are immensely grateful for the financial generosity that continuously delights and strengthens us. Indeed, without our bighearted donors, we could not do what we do. And yet the relationship goes far beyond the funding.

Despite most of the world now having full time access to information, our understandings of and exposure to other cultures is always limited. CCF plays a unique role in bridging some of this gap personally. Recognizing this, we renewed our commitment to bring glimpses of the rich Nepali life to our donors and to the internet public through our website, newsletters, blogs, fundraising, and personal interactions with other Americans. We see this cross-cultural sharing plays a crucial role in linking communities and individuals across the planet and contributing to a broader sense of our global humanity.


To Hell With Good Intentions

As we all have witnessed, the challenge is not in holding good intentions as we set out to “do good.” The pages of history and the streets of villages around the world are literally littered with examples of disastrous projects of well-intentioned aid organizations. I can personally attest to many “unintended consequences” of poorly designed, ill-thought out, and failed programs.

Unfortunately, the international system rarely holds international organizations accountable for such projects. It is the community, the local population who must live with the debacle. Some of this is the result simply of poor planning and inexperience, exaggerated expectations, funding shortfalls and other such natural naiveté. Much of it, however, can be avoided by knowing the context in detail and thinking longer-term. By imagining both the spinoff benefits and potential problems that might arise from both the project and the process used, one can develop a more informative perspective.

CCF has adopted this long-term thinking in our foundational platform. For each proposal, we ask ourselves whether the project will likely have been a good idea a generation (20 years) hence. Without the benefit of hindsight, we do our best to imagine the enduring positive and negative implications of our actions. In the Baseri example above, in the short-term, the clinic was repaired before the monsoons. By using a local contractor (instead of one from Kathmandu) who then hired community laborers using largely local materials, money went back into the area’s economy, local workers developed some capacity in this form of building repair, and the skills necessary for maintaining the clinic are now resident in the community. A generation from now, these capabilities will hopefully remain.


Living Our Values

During this reflective process, we asked ourselves, “Change is happening all the time; what part of that change do we want to be?” While articulating our values and methodology doesn’t fundamentally change what CCF does or how we do it, it does elevate our work to a higher level. We are now visibly more accountable to ourselves, as we have an agreement against which to measure our actions. We are also more accountable to our Nepali partners, as our transparency is a commitment to right relationship. Lastly, we are more accountable to the public and to our donors who can track how we manifest our principles in our activities. By being explicit about our actions and values and putting our integrity on the line, we hope to attract North Americans intrigued by our work as well as Nepali partners and other opportunities that align with our approach.

Like many others, my years in the field have developed an attentive eye towards international aid. Our responsibility to our fellow humans obliges us to ensure our good intentions equate to positive long-term impact to the best of our ability. Dependency, colonialism, entitlement, and cultural bias are just some of the challenges we face with our generosity and true interest in helping others. It is with that sensitivity that I am engaged in and so appreciate CCF’s concerted self-reflection. While we never know the full impact of our efforts, with our ongoing partnerships with Nepali colleagues, we hope to cultivate a better, more loving world for all—one in which we each bring what we have to the table and engage deeply in each other’s lives such that we truly are contributing to a more beautiful world.

CCF empowers girls to take charge of their futures & celebrates International Day of the Girl! Check out this story!

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Today is significant for Conscious Connections Foundation (CCF) because it celebrates the work we do every day in Nepal! Our mission is to help girls reach their full potential and we know first-hand, the impacts of educating and empowering women.


CCF invests in girls and women through education, healthcare, skills development and training.


Thing is, we discovered a woman’s period can provide a big barrier to getting these resources to them.

To kick this obstacle aside, CCF funds a Menstrual Health Hygiene program that has been growing and gaining great interest in several parts of Nepal. We provide menstrual health training workshops and reusable menstruation kits to our participants—and CCF doesn’t just work in urban and easy-to-access areas.

Carrying 400 reusable menstrual pad kits up the trail toward Sertung, Nepal.

Carrying 400 reusable menstrual pad kits up the trail toward Sertung, Nepal.

In fact, our Nepali partners take our trainings to some of the most difficult and remote areas of Nepal.

This is where Menstrual Hygiene education and reusable kits are needed the most.

Watch over the next few weeks as CCF’s trainings come alive in the villages of Hindung and Neber in northern Dhading district…

  • Many days walk from the nearest road

  • Near the border of Tibet

  • In the shadow of the 24,000 ft peak of Ganesh Himal

We look forward to bringing you some great stories from this experience. Stay tuned!

 

In honor of International Day of the Girl Child help our work continue on.
Your donations make this happen.

 
 

Photos
Top Left: Four women and one gentleman came down from Sertung to pick up and carry the kits for CCF.

Top Right: Pema Tamang, Certified Medical Assistant and Menstrual Hygiene Trainer with women from Sertung carrying CCF reusable kits into Hindung.