Hello! It’s Rio. It's been so hot lately that I feel like melting every day .
Well, this time I would like to share with you all about "how we met with GBN!"
It was when we were in high school that we first learned that
menstruation was a factor in educational disparities. When a lecture held at
school, we were shocked to learn that there were girls around the world who were
unable to attend school due to menstruation. This made us think, "there are things that we as high
school students can do because they are high school students," and we
decided to take any action.
In researching the issue through the Problem Inquiry class, we learned that menstruation was preventing girls in various parts of the world from freely choosing their future.
We wanted to learn more about the detailed situation in each region,
and with the help of NPOs and NGOs, we developed our activities
while learning about the situation in each of the places where we worked.
The main initiative of our activities is to promote cloth napkins
and cloth napkin making methods to schools in Uganda, Kenya, and Thailand.
First, we aim to deliver cloth sanitary napkins to the schools to make them
aware of their existence, and eventually to enable local people to make their
own cloth sanitary napkins. Our goal is that girls who are unable to attend
school due to menstruation will be able to return to school and make autonomous
choices about their future.
That is how I came across the Global Bridge Network, where I am currently interning 🌞I was researching organizations on the Internet that work to solve issues related to menstruation and happened to find GBN. We were interested in learning more about the reusable sanitary pad project “Improvement of school environment to combat Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) challenges to Stop Adolescent Girls 'School Dropouts”. that GBN was working on, and we immediately contacted them for advice. We could learn not only about the situation in Uganda but also about their activities.
As the days went by, and we worked hard on the activities, we began
to feel a strong desire to actually go to Uganda. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that the activity was part of my high school class, we
were never able to visit the site... 😢.
We wanted to continue this activity even after we became a
university student, and we definitely wanted to go there! We thought,
"Yes! we'll do an internship. We immediately sent an e-mail to GBN and
asked if we could study there as interns when we became university students. We
were very excited and waited for a reply, so we were very happy to hear that they
gladly accepted our request.
It was a little while after that. It was at our first meeting.
We were talking about what kind of activities we would like to do in the future
and what we would like to work on as interns, when Maiko, the representative of
the GBN, made a surprising comment.
She said, "We are going to Uganda this summer, why don’t you go
to Uganda with us?
I think I stopped thinking for a moment. Of course, the answer was
"Yes!". I was so happy and excited because I had never thought that
my dream, which I had wished for since high school, would come true so soon.
Now, we are steadily preparing for our trip, which is coming up in
two weeks.
In this article, I would like to introduce our encounter with Global
Bridge Network! How was it? Personally, I think that you never know what life
has in store for you 😂.
Next time, we'll bring you an update on our recent online exchange
with the girls from a local school!
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