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Maseno Minute – Undies in a bundie!
Hello, good afternoon, and welcome back to another exciting edition of the Maseno Minute! From all of us here at TLC, we hope you’re doing well, we hope you’re happy, and we hope you’re ready to talk about undies.
Undies, as in “don’t get your undies in a bundie.” We have all heard that phrase as some point in our life, and we have all wondered the age-old question, “what exactly is a bundie?” Well, I have done some research, and according to Merriam-Webster, a “bundie” is not a word at all, though a “bundy” is “a small often crooked Australian tree with pendulous branches.” We hope this clears things up for you.
However, joking aside, the Pad Project needs underwear. For families in developing countries struggling to pay for food, buying underwear is not a priority, as most people can function just fine without underwear—everyone except menstruating girls.
During a pad distribution in Kenya, our volunteers were giving a pad talk and handing out pads to girls at a local school. During the talk, the volunteers demonstrated how to use one of our pads, and to do so they used an extra pair of underwear. After, when the girls were asked if they had questions, one girl raised her hand and said,
“How do we use our pads if we don’t have underwear?”
And the answer is, you can’t. Initially, we didn’t consider that girls wouldn’t have access to something like underwear, something we consider to be basic and essential. For us, the world is a place where people have drawers of underwear: but everyone doesn’t live in the same world.
This week, the Pad Project is asking you to go into your room, pull out your top dresser drawer, and count how many pairs of underwear you have. Whether your number is 7 or 49, we ask that you take a moment to be thankful for whatever that number is. Because there are girls all over the world whose number is 0.
To ensure that no girl has to be worried about using her pads due to a lack of underwear, Pad Project distribution volunteers now come equipped with underwear to give out at pad talks to the girls who need it. To help us continue to do this, we need three people to donate $5 per month for the next 4 months to help us buy underwear. (The Pad Project also loves donations of unused underwear; though we accept all sizes, Girls’ Sizes 10-16 and Women’s Size S are the most used.)
We hope you have a great week, and every morning when you open up that top dresser drawer to pick out a new pair of underwear, we hope you feel a little extra grateful for what you have. And from all of us here at TLC , try not to get your undies in a bundie, whatever a bundie may be—because your life is too good to waste on bundies.
