Quilters in Ledyard help with faraway hygiene
They create kits for women in 75 countries
Ledyard— Resident Jean Scialabba says most people are shocked when she tells them girls around the world miss months of school largely because of their periods.
But in parts of several countries, some girls spend most of the weeklong timeframe each month sitting on a cardboard box. Others use available materials, such as coarse paper or corn husks, as makeshift pads, often resulting in infection.
“If you don’t have that infrastructure for sanitation and you don’t have the stores to buy products, what do you do?” Scialabba said she asks people. “What do you use?”
Since last year, she’s been volunteering for Days for Girls International, a nonprofit that gets help from volunteers around the world to provide reusable feminine hygiene kits in more than 75 countries.
Beginning in April, members of the quilting group at Ledyard Senior Center joined Scialabba in the quest.
Working in a corner room at the center Monday, they joked about being nonunion and working up a literal sweat during the three hours they spent helping create the kits.
Each one, packed up neatly in a Ziploc bag within a colorful, handsewn Days for Girls bag, contains 16 items: two pairs of underwear, one thin washcloth, an additional Ziploc bag, a bar of soap, two shields, eight liners and one pictorial instruction sheet.
It works like this: each hand-sewn shield, which snaps on underneath the underwear and contains nontoxic, waterproof polyurethane laminate, has two small pockets on either end that hold the hand- sewn, 100 percent cotton flannel liners in place.
When a girl has fully used one of the liners, she can place it in the Ziploc bag, adding half of cup of water at most when she’s home to soak it before she hand washes her regular load of clothes.
“When she hangs it up to dry, it looks like a face cloth — it doesn’t look like a pad,” Scialabba explained. “There’s so much stigma about having a period that we’re trying to have ( the kits) be the most user-friendly in every country that we can.”
The girl has her colorful, drawstring Days for Girls bag the whole time, too, so fellow classmates never know she’s on her period.
Over the course of three years — the life expectancy of the kits — the average girl gets the 180 days of school she likely would have missed back, hence the nonprofit’s name.
“Just the whole concept, it’s unbelievable to me,” said quilter and sewer Mary Jane Peterson, whom Scialabba said played a large role in getting the quilting group on board. “We are so spoiled in this country.”
But Days for Girls, Scialabba emphasized, isn’t just for sewers, and it isn’t just forwomen.
A donation of $20 can help buy the washrags, panties and plastic bags that go into the kits. And, while the quilting group is hard at work sewing, others still need to iron the material and insert the bags’ drawstrings.
Scialabba, with the help of countless donors and volunteers across Connecticut and into Rhode Island, sent her first 1,300- kit shipment to Kenya in May. She’s hoping to have another 1,000 prepared to send overseas early next year.
Scialabba, not a member of the senior center, first learned of Days for Girls from an O, The Oprah Magazine story last March.
“I literally left the magazine on the sofa and I said to my husband, ‘ Holy crow, this is like a miracle,’” said Scialabba, who’d been looking for a way to put her sewing skills to good use. “I feel I’ve been so blessed in my life. I’ve worked for everything, but I’ve had a lot, so I believe in helping others.”
Another important aspect of the kits, she said, is that the girls are educated about their bodies’ processes and are able to pass that information along to their family members.
“Fifty percent of the population has (a menstrual cycle),” she said. “It’s natural and none of us would be here ifwe didn’t have it. So why are we so reluctant to talk about it?”