How an experience of teaching girls how to sew reusable sanitary pads taught me the importance of family.
Despite being the tallest in the family, I will always look up to my three older sisters. I was never excited to return home from school because Aya, Ananya, and Bella would work as a team to transform me into their human doll. Being a cricket lover, they would always lure me into their room by explaining that they had a new cricket bat for me. As I would run through the doorway in excitement, I failed to realise their trap! Bella pinning my legs down. Ananya, my arms. And Aya would be beginning the makeup process on my face. Ten minutes later, which felt like an eternity, I was forced to catwalk down the bedroom. Hair plaited up, high heels on, walking with sass; and they would be in hysterics, laughing, clapping, and shouting “Raph, encore encore!”.Despite my dislike towards this happening, as I grew older, I came to realise that the greatest gift I have in my life are my sisters, and it is thanks to them for making me realize how important family is.
My parents always instilled in me the importance of family. Family is not just defined by parents and siblings, but this can also include friends, teammates, classmates and more. Unfortunately in today’s society, it is becoming rare to find strong family bonds. Multiple times when walking around, or going to a restaurant, you will often find families glued to their phones. Also, siblings’ relationships often flake apart, and it’s sad. My sisters are extremely special to me, and I can only hope that it is the same for any other brother in the world. I never stayed at a single school for more than 3 years, and during these changes my sisters would comfort me and reassure me especially because of how nervous I was. No one will have your back as much as your family members. This is an incredible gift. Whenever you are down, or need some company, it is a treasure to have your family right there next to you; they are the ones who assist you to stand back up and guide you through times of uncertainty.
At age 14, I left my high school in Zimbabwe to go to an all-boys boarding school in the UK, which was a hyper-masculine location. Unfortunately, the boys there always seemed to objectify women. Luckily for me, I wasn’t like them, and because of this there were moments where I felt a bit out of place. I had the great privilege of being educated by my sisters on how important and special women are to the world. In the society we live in, it saddens me to see how women are being objectified every single day, and it is disgusting. At an all-boys school, women get objectified on a daily basis; as horrible as this is, it is the reality. I was shocked.
I kept questioning myself as to why the school never taught us the importance of treating women with respect. All the school cared about was our class ranking. When thinking of this, it reminds me of a quote said by Bell Hooks in her book Teaching to Transgress: “This meant that whether academics were drug addicts, alcoholics, batterers, or sexual abusers, the only important aspect of our identity was whether or not our mind functioned, whether we were able to do our jobs in the classroom.” (Page 16, ch 1). From this quote, we can realise a huge issue in society — sexism- and how it links to my old boarding school. We were lectured on the immense importance of grades, when we were forgetting the most important thing in life: family. Whatever our family may be, we take them for granted and are so tangled up in what we’re told what is important, forgetting what actually is. Too many times, we see that when people take things for granted, these things are usually taken away from them.
When a group of people (family) work together, there can be a huge impact on others; this is what I learned being part of a family. As the famous African proverb explains, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. Working together is essential, it’s that simple. My sisters taught me the difficulties that women face (birth, menstruation, gender inequality), and from a young age, I have always been amazed by the strength of women. Having been informed about these difficulties throughout my childhood, I began to notice the immense struggles that women in Zimbabwe undergo, especially if they didn’t have financial stability and a family. For a bit of background, and as explained in Enet Tini’s article on “Girl’s education and menstrual hygiene challenges in Zimbabwe”, young girls in Zimbabwe ‘miss the opportunity to go to school as they cannot afford sanitary pads, resulting in being taken out of school’. Also, some of these girls, who were taken out of school, were married off to much older men and had to face the danger of dying of premature birth. 1 in 3 of the girls don’t have parents when they reach the age of 5 as they would’ve died from diseases and other illnesses. Just imagine if that was you and you had to tackle that life on your own. Scary right; we could’ve ended up in that position. Do not take your family for granted. Period.
Through realizing this, I made it my duty to learn how to sew reusable sanitary pads so that I could go to rural villages in Zimbabwe and teach young girls how to sew their own pads. They could now make their own reusable ones and attend school. I learnt this all through my family. Everything that I have learnt in school up until now, I haven’t been able to positively impact someone’s life. But through one afternoon with my sisters, teaching me to sew and highlighting the difficulties women face in our world, we were able to spend weeks in villages teaching girls how to sew to give themselves an equal shot as men. This is what family can do. These young girls were isolated from all kinds of families. But thank you to my sisters, we were able to act as the girls’ family and were able to support them during their extremely difficult time.
I guess what I am trying to say is that having a family is a gift. These girls in Zimbabwe don’t have parents; another reminder of how lucky some people are to have siblings and parents. They are isolated at the age of 5 and are left alone with no protection from the realities of the world. They wouldn’t have much opportunity if they were not supported by other human beings and a community. Another gift from family, through this experience of teaching girls how to sew their own reusable sanitary pads, is that they can teach you things that school doesn’t. Combined with this, I found it truly special that they taught me this simple thing, and with their assistance, we were able to transform the theory of the issue, and match this with practicality to actually impact people. That is why I believe family is the greatest gift in the world, because through family (friends, blood-related, whatever), we are able to have an impact on others for the better, and we enable our character to grow into the person we want to become. It is extremely difficult to go from A to B by ourselves. It is far better to work together to improve the situations we are in.
Bibliography:
Tini, E., Ickonga, A. J. E., Kwauk, C., |, & Bhula, R. (2021, May 27). Girls’ education and menstrual hygiene challenges in Zimbabwe. Global Partnership for Education. Retrieved September 15, 2021, from https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/girls-education-and-menstrual-hygiene-challenges-zimbabwe.
Simmons, M. (2013, September 5). If you want to go fast, go alone. if you want to go far, go together. Forbes. Retrieved September 19, 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelsimmons/2013/07/22/power-of-relational-thinking/?sh=602bac0910e3.
Freire, P., Ramos, M. B., Macedo, D. P., & Shor, I. (2020). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic.
