Woman breaking period taboo in rural Pakistani village
BOONI: Bent over her hand-operated sewing machine, Hajra Bibi carefully stitched sanitary pads for the women of her mountainous village in northwestern Pakistan, one of many rural areas in the deeply conservative country.
“I am responding to a crisis,” said the 35-year-old mother, sat in front of her small, doily-covered work table here.
“Before, Booni’s women had no idea what sanitary towels were.”
Less than a fifth of women use sanitary pads in Pakistan, local charities estimate.
Traditionally, women have used rags and cloth to soak up their menstrual blood, but the stigma around periods and a lack of reproductive education meant hygiene standards were poor and many contracted infections.
As with other areas of rural Pakistan, menstruating women were viewed as unclean and limited in what they were able to do.
Bibi was given training to make the disposable sanitary pads — made of cotton, plastic and cloth — by the Aga Khan Rural Support Program (AKRSP), a non-governmental organisation working with the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef ), in a scheme that aims to change attitudes to women’s health.
She took up the work to support her family because her husband is disabled and they had little income. Each pad took around 20 minutes to make and was sold for 20 rupees (RM1.17).
Initially, her work disturbed the local community.
“At first, people were asking me why I was doing this. Some were insulting me.”
But now, “girls in the village can talk about their periods”, she said proudly, adding that she was fighting “for the basic needs of women”.
In Pakistan, Unicef has warned that in some cases, information about menstruation has deliberately been withheld from women as a “means of protecting their chastity”.
“This in turn negatively impacts their physical and emotional health,” it said in a report last year.
Historically, the women here have used cloth, but according to Bushra Ansari of AKRSP, the taboo surrounding periods meant many were ashamed to dry them outside, unaware that damp cloths were a breeding ground for bacteria.
There was no sex education in schools and the topic is rarely discussed, even between women, at homes in northern Pakistan, a particularly conservative part of the country.
The situation is different in cities. But in the patriarchal Muslim country, ranked 148th out of 149 by the World Economic Forum for gender equality, and where sexist stereotypes persist, access to basic feminine hygiene products remains difficult.
In Karachi, a metropolis of 20 million people seen as the most liberal city in Pakistan, sanitary pads were easily accessible, though expensive.
Many women were still made to feel uneasy by leering shopkeepers and asked their husbands to buy them instead.
After 20 years of battling to introduce sex education classes in Pakistan, the first lessons were finally being given in public schools in Sindh province.
Bibi, who is working alongside 80 other women trained to make sanitary pads, is confident things will change here too.
“With this project, I have made people aware.”