Haiti: Remembering Tampons and Bosniak Women

As I watch a BBC report on Haiti that includes footage of a woman giving birth on the sidewalk just feet from a line of earthquake victims’ bodies, I think about the particular needs of women in situations of strife. That takes my thoughts back to the Bosnian War - and I hope my poor memory does service to this story. When I was living in Europe, some British women activists – one of whom was a close friend – put together  a brilliant, unforgettable project to support Bosniak women in the midst of the war in the early/mid 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. That brutal conflict split families and neighbors, killed over 100,000 and displaced nearly two million. Many women were forced into refugee camps, living in wretched conditions.

The Serbian men became experts in using rape as a war weapon and then used it against tens of thousands of Bosniak women. “Bosniak women were specifically targeted as the rapes against the Bosniak women were one of the many ways in which the Serbs could assert their superiority and victory over the Bosniaks. Women were kept in various detention centres known as rape camps where they had to live in intolerably unhygienic conditions and were mistreated in many ways including being repeatedly raped.”

A group of British women got together a convoy of trucks to bring essential hygiene supplies to women. Their main concern was to provide sanitary napkins and tampons and toilet paper, but they knew too that soap, shampoo and creams were needed.

At that time I was working for a charity promoting international youth volunteerism. I was on the road more than I was home, often going to a couple of different countries each month. I had saved up a box full of hotel cosmetics – soaps, creams, shampoos, tiny sewing kits, little mirrors. I put the word out to colleagues and friends to always, always pack away toiletries each night in a hotel so that they would be renewed the next morning. A four-day business trip could potentially give a moment of solace to a half dozen war-ravaged women.

The main convoy effort took many months, maybe a year, to pull together. The logistics of crossing Europe and of reaching the women were a story that ought to be told widely. I had lots of time to build up a stash to which dozens of others contributed bags and bags of those little bottles.

When the convey finally returned to Britain, I met up with my friend who had been key to this amazing effort. They had dropped off the bushels of toiletries at a center working with abused women. She told me of the tears, the excitement, the dazed joy of women getting their hands on nice soap and aromatic hand cream, not to mention the practical benefits of toothbrushes and toothpaste, needle and thread, packets of tissues. It may sound like a small thing, a minor thing, but for these raped women soap was one crucial key to mental health.

I watch the story of Haiti on my TV all day and yet no one has talked about the particular hygiene needs of women. Are there toilets? Clearly, there is no clean water to boil or clean rags for the woman giving birth on the street. I think of the British feminists who took on themselves the provision of supplies that changed the lives of Bosniak women, not the least giving them a sense of the international solidarity of women. “Someone cares, someone understands,” they said to the convoy women. As there’s not much else I can do right now, I wish the Haitians a swift sense of the profound concern of people of good will.