The Women of JACK-Berlin

On October 7th, 2020, members of hildsahaus delivered a Menstrual Health Awareness program to JACK-Berlin an educational center for female refugees and women in need of shelter in Germany. Because JACK’s mission includes helping strengthen a women’s autonomy and social participation, we thought they’d be perfect collaborators. And we were right :)

Though JACK mostly provides German language classes to the women, once a year they also offer a special programming or “Project Week”. For this time period, we proposed offering a Menstrual Heath Awareness program to their students. The truth of the matter is menstruation is still stigmatized and not talked about regardless of cultural background. Because of this, women miss vital opportunities to ask questions about their body.

As you can see from itinerary, we focused on offering holistic methods to manage pain including herbal tea and yoga as well as promoting environmental menstruation through the distribution of our reusable menstrual pads. In addition, the women also made their own heatable rice bag to use for menstrual cramps. We served a total of 24 women, with one group in the morning and one group in the evening.

Timeline:

9:00 - Khloud Zaher-Iraqi, owner of Hayatuna, a medicinal herbal shop in Neukölln opened the Menstrual Health Awareness day by giving a short presentation on the healing impact of herbs, particularly when it comes to treating female issues such as period pain. Everyone receives a warm mug of “Frauenpower” Tea, oranges, cookies, as well as a sampling of tea they can take home.

9:45 -Nicole and Fede deliver a welcome presentation introducing hildsahaus and the importance of Menstrual Health Awareness. We also share the itinerary for the day.

10:00 - Nicole and Fede distribute the reusable menstrual pads and explain how to use and take care of them.

10:30 - The women get to choose which fabric they’d like to use for their heatable rice bag and begin to sew their bag. Once they are done, Nicole helps them pour rice into the bag so they can seal it. Nicole distributes instructions on how to heat the bag safely.

11:15 - Anna Sciré, of Yoga With Amore, delivers a relaxing yoga session, specially formulated for yoga-novices/women who are experiencing period pain or stress. The first ten minutes were spent giving ourselves a massage while Anna stressed the importance of taking time out for oneself - even if it’s just five minutes. There was a lot of giggling throughout the practice but everyone seemed to enjoy the relaxing after-effects.

12:00 - A lot of the women had to leave after yoga (most had kids they needed to pick up from school) but a few stayed behind to eat lunch with the hildashaus team. Another one of our team members arrived at this time (she is from Afghanistan - so she was able to communicate with some of the women in their native language.)

13:00 - 16:00 - The second group of women started to arrive and we repeated the itinerary for them.