Скачать или смотреть A Controversial Solution To Menstrual Exile Building Better Menstrual Huts

When Chetana Madavi, 29, gets her period, she gathers a few clothes and makes her way to a kurma ghar — or menstruation hut — a few blocks from her home in a tribal community in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. It's a mud shack with a broken door and no toilet. When it rains, water leaks through the mud-tiled roof. Phoolawanti Gangu Kova, 44, who lives in the same state (but in a different village), also heads to a menstrual hut when she is on her period — but it's a very different kind of hut. It has a fan, beds, mattresses, running water, a medical kit and an indoor toilet. There's a proper door and lock. She says it "feels like home." The exterior is made of bottle-bricks, a sustainable construction method in which used plastic bottles are filled with sand to resemble bricks. She's new to this particular hut, which is part of an initiative by a nonprofit organization called Kherwadi Social Welfare Association. All her life Kova has been going to a mud hut where she would sleep on the floor over a burlap sack. "I've been bitten by scorpions there but what could I do? I had no option," Kova says. Menstrual exile is a tradition etched deeply in some parts of India (as well as other parts of the world), and women often face consequences if they don't abide. Thus far, no one in Madavi's community has refused to follow the practice. Women who won't go along with it face community scorn and in some cases even financial penalties, says Amol Thaware, a project coordinator at the nonprofit. "The woman's family has to donate animals to the temple — a goat or a chicken. Or give a bag of rice or a few thousand rupees," he says. The hut upgrade is that nonprofit's way of immediately addressing menstrual exile: If you can't get a community to reject the tradition of banishing a woman from her home when she is menstruating, at least make sure the menstrual hut is relatively safe and comfortable, says Nicola Monterio, Thaware's colleague. It's a controversial solution. For years the government and some nonprofits have led a movement to convince communities to get rid of the practice completely. That hasn't yet happened. As for the interim solution of improved huts, some menstrual health activists think it ends up validating the tradition of menstrual exile."It is like treating the symptoms and not the cause," says Pema Lhaki, executive director of the organization Nepal Fertility Care Center, who has worked extensively on menstrual rights in Nepal — including bringing a stop to menstrual exile. Dilip Barsagade, executive director of Society for People's Action in Rural Services and Health (SPARSH), says you also have to consider the dignity of the women, not just creature comforts."You can shift them from a hut to a palace," he says. "But the core issue about their segregation is still not resolved.


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Article Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsand...


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