The unlikely sanitary pad missionary

[livingdead]

When an Indian man invented a simple machine for poor rural women to make cheap sanitary pads, the idea was to provide jobs for some, and hygiene for millions - often for the first time. The story gave one British woman an idea that quickly became her mission in life.

Amy Peake is experimenting in her kitchen in a remote corner of south-west England, ripping apart different kinds of sanitary pads and testing their absorbency. She has just returned from another fact-finding trip to India, where these pads were made.

Her family tolerate her eccentric behaviour without completely understanding it - her six-year-old daughter calls it "the knicker thing".

"I didn't expect to become an expert in sanitary pads, but I probably know as much as anyone else in the world about these low-cost pads now," Peake says, laughing at the unexpected direction her life has taken.

Her obsession began one morning in March 2014 when she went to the doctor for a routine appointment.

Leafing through a magazine in the waiting room, she saw an image that shocked her. It showed thousands of refugees queuing for food in a bombed-out street in Damascus. In the foreground stood a woman, and for a split second she thought, "What if I was her? What if my children were there? And what if I got my period?"

The image from Syria that inspired Amy Peake

Then a remarkable coincidence occurred.

When she got home, her husband showed her a BBC News Magazine story about Arunachalam Muruganantham, an Indian man who had invented a machine to produce cheap and hygienic sanitary pads after realising his wife, and millions of other Indian women, used rags. Muruganantham didn't want to sell the pads, he wanted women to make and sell their own - his aim was to create a million jobs for poor rural women in India, and he planned to expand to other countries where sanitary pads are unavailable.

Peake immediately thought: "That machine should be in the refugee camps - and if it isn't, perhaps I should take it there."

She experienced a kind of revelation.

"It was one of those scary moments where that purpose that you have been looking for all your life is staring you right in the face," she says.

Peake began to drum up interest for the project, which she idealistically called Loving Humanity. But who would listen to a yoga teacher with no experience in business or charity?

One man laughed in her face - he thought she was crazy. And none of the big humanitarian agencies returned her calls.

But Peake is nothing if not tenacious, and after six months of this she decided to just go for it.

First, she decided to seek some official backing from a charity - maybe this would help her get taken seriously? Step up the St Austell Rotary Club. This group of gents, average age 70, were not entirely comfortable discussing periods - "I made the chairman blush just by shaking his hand," says Peake - but they gave her their blessing.

Next, she collected 40kg of donated baby clothes and jumped on a plane to Jordan - host to more than a million Syrian refugees - to meet local volunteers. With their help, she finally made it to the country's largest refugee camp, Zaatari.


Zaatari - this vast desert camp houses 79,000 Syrian refugees

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The unlikely sanitary pad missionary - BBC News