Kiwi offers a period of hope
A young New Zealand woman is creating innovative and inexpensive sanitary underwear that could save the lives of women in some of the poorest parts of the world. Amanda Saxton investigates.
Until last Friday, Emily Au-Young awoke at 4am to the call to prayer at the mosque outside her homestay. By sunrise the bells, horns, revving engines and barking dogs of Dhaka would overpower any further Koranic crooning.
The Chinese-Kiwi, born in Porirua but ‘‘a Palmy girl at heart’’, has been in Bangladesh on a mission to tackle period poverty among workers in garment factories. Studies have shown that many of these women believe they’re untouchable while menstruating, and suffer – silently, with shame – infections caused by unhygienic homespun sanitary pads because they can’t afford better products.
‘‘This is a problem the world over, and I made the decision to start off here,’’ Au-Young says, over a scratchy phone line from Dhaka. ‘‘Why not? These women, at least as much as anyone else, deserve better.’’
Au-Young could be the poster girl for emerging Kiwi values identified by the 2018 AMP/Sunday Star-Times Survey: she is kind and modest, an entrepreneurial outward thinker bent on gender equality. The second to last value – embracing the world beyond our shores – is one Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern emphasised during her speech at the United Nations in September.
Values Au-Young personally admires are our No 8 wire mentality and ‘‘how chill we are’’, she says. The survey calls the latter our ‘‘pragmatism, being down to earth and practical’’.
Au-Young is only 26 but has already co-founded a charitable trust called Reemi, with the aim of providing sustainable menstruation products and education to women who need it most. A cohort of individuals savvy in environmental, apparel and business issues have backed her. Au-Young made the call to forgo paid work for the time being to focus fully on the initial research side of Reemi, hence the sojourn in Bangladesh.
Living off money from family, friends, and strangers who believe she’s worth investing in, AuYoung knows she has to get her business not just ethically but financially sustainable.
Garment factories’ floors and nearby roads in Bangladesh are strewn with off-cuts. Resident rats snatch slivers of cloth and use them to line their nests; female factory workers in bright headscarves salvage larger scraps of fabric to line their knickers with – a type of DIY sanitary pad known as ‘‘nekra’’.
Au-Young says there can be ‘‘anything and everything’’ on the fabric, from rat poo to fungus, and that nekra is seldom washed before use.
It’s an on-the-fly solution thought up by women who quite suddenly found themselves sitting for long periods of time, with their periods, in a garment factory.
Most came to cities from the countryside, where Au-Young says wearing underwear is not the norm. Those working in the fields might let their blood ‘‘just run out’’ or stay at home where it wasn’t such a hindrance to freely bleed, thus avoiding contact with others as is customary for Muslims and Hindus menstruating in Bangladesh.
‘‘But in the factory, they have to sit for long hours every day – and find a solution for their menstruation. So they started wearing underwear and stuffing their underwear with rags,’’ says AuYoung.
Nekra gives women repeated vaginal and urinary infections. So they miss work, which gets them in trouble with bosses.
Au-Young first encountered period poverty in 2015 while working for a Hong Kong-based not-forprofit covering the Syrian crisis. One of its partner organisations in Jordan mentioned how women in refugee camps were getting sick due to a lack of sanitary products.
Au-Young was rattled. She says she added ‘‘access to tampons’’ to the ever-growing list of privileges she hadn’t realised she had growing up. She also started brooding on the injustice that anything ‘‘just part of being a normal healthy person could isolate you from normal participation in society’’.
‘‘I just couldn’t shake it,’’ she says. ‘‘I also had these monthly reminders, of course, which I don’t mean in a crass way – but having what should be a normal bodily function be so disruptive to your life . . . it’s really not OK.’’
Au-Young went to Palmerston North Girls High School, then Massey University to study development economics. She left uni to start up an ethical clothing label then moved to Hong Kong to spend several years as the communications and fundraising manager for the Crossroads Foundation.
She often brings up her privilege. Despite being born in a progressive country, to a supportive family who made sure she got a good education, Au-Young does not, however, hail from the stereotypical privileged background.
Her father is a refugee from China, and her Pakeha mum died when she was little. She was raised by her dad and stepmother.
The Chinese side of her family fled Mao’s regime in the early 60s, around the end of the Great Chinese Famine in which tens of millions of people died. They escaped to Hong Kong when her dad was 10 years old and were granted refugee status. Seven years later the family wound up in New Zealand, which they had believed was in Europe. Au-Young says her dad, who became an accountant, has ‘‘strong Chinese values along with that more chilled Kiwi manner’’.
‘‘It’s hard to put a finger on it, but his hospitality and generosity is very old-school Chinese – that’s a huge thing I’ve learned from him,’’ she says.
Au-Young thinks her definition of privileged – anyone who’s had an opportunity someone else hasn’t – and her determination, have been formed from her family history. She knows her dad ‘‘came from nothing’’ and had to adapt to a whole new
‘‘This is a problem the world over, and I made the decision to start off here. Why not? These women, at least as much as anyone else, deserve better.’’ Emily Au-Young