The Days for Girls Weyburn group will hold a fundraising bake sale on Friday, October 7 starting at 8:30 a.m. at the Weyburn Credit Union’s Community Room.
Volunteers with the Days for Girls organization are working to create sanitary supplies for girls and women in Third World countries, such as Kenya, Tanzania, Haiti and Zambia, to enable them to go to school or work.
In many countries of the world, girls miss one week of school a month, and women miss a week of work each month, because they have no sanitary supplies. If they don’t do well in school, some girls can get sold into slavery or get married off as young as 14.
Days for Girls is a registered charitable non-profit organization which started in 2008 in the U.S. and has since grown to every province in Canada. Volunteers sew and distribute reusable sanitary supplies all put together in a beautifully-sewn bag or kit.
Each kit contains two moisture-proof shields, eight flannel liners, two pairs of panties, a bar of soap, a washcloth, and two Ziploc bags, one to hold soiled liners and one to wash the soiled liners in).
The vision for Days for Girls is to enable girl and woman in the world to have access to quality sustainable hygiene and health education by the year 2022. These women and girls are often not able to buy these supplies due to a lack of funds. Disposables are also an issue in areas where there is little or no sanitation service, Improperly discarded sanitary pads are a health risk and add to the stigma.
Vi Leclair and her daughter Amy Jakubowski started volunteering with Days for Girls about three years ago because they wanted to make a difference.
“Our team has grown and we now have many team members in Saskatoon, Weyburn and we have had help from a team of ladies in Ogema and in Grenfell and Wolseley. We have had a ton of support from Weyburn and surrounding area,” said Leclair, adding many women she’s talked to are shocked that items they take for granted here every day is life-changing to other girls and women in the world.
Each kit costs about $8 to $10 to make and takes about 10 hours to sew, including prewashing the material, serging and sewing at different steps. The bake sale fundraiser is to help raise for buying more materials for the kits.
Information about the organization can be found at www.daysforgirls.org, or they can emailed to [email protected], or visit their Facebook page.
