Barbie teaches young girls how to make reusable pads

Barbie Kyagulanyi, wife to local musician Bobi Wine, is imparting life-changing skills in young girls.

In a lengthy post on social media, Barbie revealed that she is teaching young girls how to make reusable sanitary pads through her NGO, Caring Hearts Uganda. She posted:

“Although old pieces of cloth were cut to make something similar to a sanitary pad, girls in my primary school still had their waists tied with sweaters during those days. Uncomfortable and worried about the leakage, they soldiered the four or five days every month amidst teasing from the boys. Some of them avoided any risks and stayed home. As I grew up, It dawned on me that actually in my village, we were blessed to have a cloth to be creative with when in our periods! Today, With my own eyes, I’ve seen girls use bunches of well piled green leaves from strange plants during menstruation. How these my sisters that use them feel, is another untold story.

Not only am I trying to reach them to avail good quality and long lasting healthy materials to use during this time of the month, Iam also giving them skills on how to make a very friendly, neat, reliable and long lasting reusable pad! We had one session with 12-18 year old girls recently and I was impressed with how fast each one of them completed the challenge to make a pad. You would need to be in this class to understand the cross shapes, graphs and pie charts though.”

Here are some photos from the exercise.

Staff Writer