Making sanitary napkins in Dhaka

DHAKA, BANGLADESH — Today, I made a sanitary napkin.

I had lunch with Md. Kamal Uddin, the CEO of Arban, an NGO that aims to help the poor by funding and organising schools and construction projects. After eating (rice, lentils, and vegetables — yes, I used my hands, no silverware), an Arban driver took us to a housing project and then to Mirpur, a slum in Dhaka.

As sanitation — more aptly lack of it — is problematic in the slums, a project Arban has recently undertaken is helping with feminine hygiene. Instead of women using rags or anything else they may find, Arban employs people to hand-craft sanitary napkins.

It goes something like this: sit on the floor in a small room on top of the roof. A window lets natural light in. Pull apart cotton in an effort to fluff it, place it into a sheet of cotton about 8″x8″, roll it over several times, place that into some netting (like what the tree farm puts around Christmas trees), then sew little doubled-over cotton loops (they resemble a hair band) to that assembly, one on each end. Sterilize, place ten into a package, seal, and sell.

Price: 25 taka/package (69 taka/US Dollar)

Packages made per day: 17

Population of Dhaka: 15 million

Boy In the Rain

You should follow the link above to get an idea of where Mirpur is. Do not be fooled by the few streets that appear on the map; this is not a sparse acre-size-lot-per-single-family-house suburbia. Rather, it is a dense jungle of concrete and brick structures that generally rise 4 to 7 stories, and single-level homes with rusty tin roofs. The streets are dirt. The buildings are from manual labor; there are no Caterpillars or John Deeres here.

A man carries a bamboo post used in the construction of poured-concrete buildings.