Of Art, Comics and Periods
A cackle of school girls descended on my house this Tuesday afternoon. Clad in their chequered brown uniforms, and raucously excited about their upcoming Christmas holidays, they sauntered around till I ushered them all upstairs. Armed with 5 Menstrupedia comic books, lots of crayons and colour pencils, a bundle of drawing sheets, sanitary napkins and chocolates, I had been waiting for them the whole afternoon, all enthused about conducting a mini menstrual awareness session at my house!
3 weeks ago, Menstrupedia’s co-founder Aditi Gupta had couriered a bunch of the comic books after I expressed interest in conducting awareness sessions with young girls. I work with Pasand, a social enterprise based in Bengaluru which has been working in the field of Personal health and wellness education since 2013. For adolescent girls and boys, Pasand has a 3-part curriculum which equips them with all the information they need while growing up. And what more? The sessions are fun, interactive and activity-based, making it exciting for both the facilitators as well as the students. While the girls we directly work with get all the information and support they need, I reasoned that there were several other girls who did not get this opportunity.
Our domestic help, Ramanamma Aunty’s daughter is 12 years old. Aunty has been with us for the last 3 years and has grown to become an integral part of our family. While aunty works as a domestic help in several households in our neighbourhood, her husband is a daily-wage worker and together they labour from dawn to dusk to make a living in this city. A year ago,when her daughter got her first period, I had wondered if she had been told anything at all about the bevy of changes that were taking place in her body. Talking to her directly would have put both of us at either ends of an elephant-in-the-room situation. It suddenly dawned on me that this was my best chance to share my knowledge with her! I remember the little girl often coming home and borrowing our childhood copies of Tinkle comics. The presence of these comic books would be the perfect way to initiate a conversation with her and dissipate the awkwardness around the issue.
Heart in mouth, I spoke to my mother asking if Aunty would be open to the idea of sending her daughter to attend a Menstrual Awareness Session at our house. My mother is incidentally blessed with marketing skills that would put all ad agencies to shame. Between chopping onions and peeling peas, my mother slowly grooved Aunty into little chats everyday and pitched the idea to her in small doses. She did not forget to emphasize how important this information was to growing girls. At the end of a week, Aunty did not dilly-dally one bit and said yes quite instantly. Much to my happiness, she also offered to bring a handful of her daughter’s friends for the session!
As the girls settled down one by one, chattering away to glory, I made them sit in a full circle and I sat down among them. This was a conscious act as I wanted to break the hierarchy in the session. Instead of standing up and delivering a lecture, where positions of power and privilege are established from the very beginning, I wanted to bring about a sense of equality, and make it a memorable learning experience for both of us.
An ice-breaker did more than just break the ice; they were already ‘best friends’, but it definitely helped them become comfortable around a stranger who had befriended them ten minutes ago and was going to talk to them about “scandalous” things.
[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]“Beneath the chest are lungs, beneath the skull is the brain… What is beneath your belly?”[/inlinetweet]
I passed around sheets of paper, colour pencils and glitter pens and told them to respond to this with drawings. They pondered upon this for a while, looking at each other before bursting into giggles. Seizing the moment, I told them that is exactly what we were going to learn about today; things they hadn’t been taught before.
We first started with the word ‘Puberty’ and what it meant for these girls, and most importantly, what physical and emotional changes they could expect to undergo in the forthcoming years. As menstruation is one of the most important pubertal changes for girls, we moved on to understanding the workings of the internal female reproductive system. I drew a more-than-life-size version of ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix and the vagina on a sheet of paper and narrated the story of the chosen egg that journeyed from the depths of the ovary to the womb, waited patiently for the sperm to come by, and eventually broke and bled its way out through the vagina.
After this, we opened Page 33 of the Menstrupedia comic and together drew colourful ovaries, squiggly fallopian tubes, glittery uteruses and blue-and-orange cervices. And of course, a shiny, happy vagina![inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””] We also memorized an equation: EGG + SPERM = BABY.[/inlinetweet] Post-utterance of this equation, I spent the next 20 minutes battling all baby-related questions in the most child-friendly way possible!
With this done, I brought out a sanitary napkin and a cloth and demonstrated how to use and dispose/re-use both of them. I roped in the girls to help me out with this, and this made them shed their inhibitions further. The ones who had already started their periods taught the ones who had no clue about what this was all about and shelled out expert advice! The session was officially over after we all ate chocolates and I distributed the Menstrupedia comic books to each of the girls. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]They also got to take home their lovely uterus drawings tucked inside the pages of the comic book.[/inlinetweet] We all took group photographs and I preened around like a proud mother hen around her young ones who are ready to go out into the world.
Before they gathered their bags and scurried away to play, the younger ones turned around to ask, “Akka, can we please come back another day and learn some more? We have Christmas holidays coming up!”
Author: Sharmad
a Shastry
Sharmada is a reclusive writer and poet from Bengaluru. She works with Pasand, a social enterprise in the areas of menstrual and reproductive health. You can drop her an e-mail at sharmadashastry@gmail.com or just message her on Facebook!
Teaching about periods is crucial and we make it easy and fun!
