We weren’t looking to expand our work to another country. Lord knows we have enough on our plate but last month, during a local Rotary Club Zoom meeting, I met an incredible woman - Alice Marcus.

Alice is from Nigeria. She tells me that girls and women in her village lack access to menstrual products and often use leaves and plastic bags to manage their periods or they just squat over the dirt, dripping.

Alice moved to the U.S. several years ago with her infant son and little else. Today she is a home-care nurse and wants to give back to her village in the form of MoonCatcher Kits. She is funding a MoonCatcher sewing guild to make and provide our menstrual kits. The Niskayuna Rotary is partnering with her.

Alice makes my head spin. She has already purchased sewing machines and found tailors. She initially used the machines to make 500 masks after having discovered that workers from her village weren’t allowed in the fields without them. People who couldn’t afford masks were losing days of work. I love that she had the town crier beat his drum to announce free masks for those that needed them.

The MoonCatcher Project gave Alice a sewing machine, fabric and instructions so that she could practice learning how to sew MoonCatchers. Alice isn’t a sewer yet, but she is determined to become one so that she’ll be able to understand everything about making this project work. She has interviewed tailors and hired the ones that she wants. She has sourced the supplies and read through our curriculum. She’s thrilled that we have one for boys too as she agrees that this is an integral part of menstrual education.

We are excited by this model. The MoonCatcher Project acts as mentor, providing our patterns, curriculum and knowledge. We will also provide Tyvek as this isn’t available in Nigeria. Alice, with the help of the Niskayuna Rotary Club, is raising the money needed to run the project. Through this partnership, we will maintain our standards, and provide MoonCatcher Kits to Nigerian schoolgirls free of charge.

Meanwhile, our sewing cooperatives in Malawi are back at work – providing menstrual kits to local women and girls while we wait for schools to reopen. We had been told that this was to occur on July 13, but plans have changed as cases of COVID are on the rise. I was glad to hear that the Malawian President is being cautious. I get nervous when I think of teachers returning too quickly to crowded classrooms and tailors sewing together in small spaces. But I also worry about how difficult it is for people to feed their families and make ends meet. I understand the desire to “get back to normal” as it’s the same here. It all just makes me anxious and I find myself “mother-henning” everyone about safety during a pandemic. 

Uganda, Kenya and India remain in a state of lock-down also, but our tailors are working on MoonCatcher kits at home in an effort to have stock ready for distribution as soon as schools reopen.

In India our partners at the Shashi Kiran Charitable Trust were contacted by the Red Cross in Calcutta for assistance. They were able to ship 1,000 MoonCatcher Kits along with video instruction on how to properly use them and care for them, and our reproductive health curriculum. While our sewing center in New Delhi remains closed, our tailors were able to distribute more kits to migrant workers in June.