Keeping Girls in School

Dignity for girls starts with being able to sit in a classroom and concentrate on your lessons. Not counting the days and dreading some, because you are having your period. 

Some weeks ago, MOTSE returned to Tsetsebjwe and Moletemane, this time to the upper primary school classes (form 6 and 7). Same mission as last year: making sure that period poverty does not keep girls out of school.

Together with Palesa Pads, a South African, women-led company producing reusable sanitary pads that last five years or more, we held ceremonies in both villages. There were prayers, poems, a few speeches, and then the Palesa Pads team doing what they do best: turning a room of girls into a room full of laughter, frank conversation, and a little dancing.

Each girl went home with something practical and complete: a set of reusable sanitary pads, a bucket, soap, and a hanger. Everything needed to wash and dry them at home, quietly and with dignity. And alongside the kit, a proper explanation of menstrual health: what is happening in the female body, and why none of it is anything to be ashamed of.

Keeping a girl in school, month after month, is one of the most grounded things a community can do. We are glad to be doing it again.

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