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Print Of Diapers and Tampons: Women and the Earthquake
by Ustun Reinart, Turkey
By mid-afternoon in the hot and dusty sports stadium of Adapazari, one of the Turkish towns hardest hit by the earthquake, I began giving out diapers. A huge crowd of women, their faces turned up to me and their eyes warmly looking into mine, gathered around me.
"I will give out diapers to all of you," I shouted. "Please form a line so that my job becomes more manageable."
They formed a long, winding line to receive five -- no more, just five -- diapers each.
Some asked, "Can't you give me a whole box?"
"I wish I could," I answered.
Five diapers. I know about babies with diarrhea, with diaper rash. How far could five diapers go? But that's all I had. Oh, the pity of it. It is so difficult to be a woman in the earthquake.
It was a month since August 17 when the earth heaved and shook and destroyed entire cities and killed tens of thousands of people in Northwestern Anatolia. Five days before, I returned from my home in Quebec City, Canada to my native country where I am teaching university English. Each night, my employer, Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, sent a bus to Adapazari with volunteers and donated supplies. I took the bus one day with two teen-age girls, Birgul and Banu, whom the disaster had left homeless and school-less and which also took the lives of Birgul's best friend and Banu's aunt. I was helping the girls, both exceptional students, to transfer to a residential school in Ankara. They were going home one last time to get their things and to say their good-byes. I would meet their families and volunteer for the day.
At 5:30 a.m. Birgul nudged me awake as we passed through Cark Avenue, the main street of Adapazari and once its fashionable downtown artery. Half asleep I looked out of the bus window to see a horrible, distorted, destroyed world. A nightmare.
Apartment blocks with gaping holes where floors would have been. Ruins, buildings tilted sideways, balconies hanging over the roofs of buildings. On many sidewalks, beside the ruined buildings there are pitiful, shabby looking tents. Beside some of the tents there are clotheslines with laundry hanging on them. The desolation and sadness of Adapazari at that lightless moment before dawn was overwhelming.
Our bus stopped in front of the football stadium. No more games here. Beside the sign that said "Guest Team's Entrance," a banner announced "Post-traumatic Counselling by the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Istanbul" and another banner said "Field Hospital Open at 10:00 a.m." I walked to the football field, full of tents housing an Egyptian field hospital, a pharmaceutical dispensary from the University of Istanbul, and the METU relief headquarters.
Boxes and green garbage bags full of donated supplies and clothes were piled on the spectator seats. As resident volunteers began to stir in their cots and sleeping bags, we pulled on surgical gloves and went to work, sorting through clothes and organizing them to be distributed at the tent-villages through the day.
After several hours of sorting, I visited Birgul's family at their tent. Birgul's father had been a carpenter-painter before the earthquake. Now he is jobless. He had argued that he couldn't afford to send her to school in another city. But now, he is grateful. The extended family, with Birgul's grandmother, her uncle, aunt and their two children are staying together in a tent.
To wash, they heat water in a cauldron outside, and take turns in a makeshift bathroom made up of canvas, stretched around four poles. The family received me warmly and thanked me profusely. Birgul was proud and excited. In preparation for her big move, her elderly grandmother and her two aunts washed Birgul's laundry in a tub, and hung it to dry behind the tent, near a corn field.
For women, tent life is a particular ordeal. Even though an army kitchen served meals at the tent-villages, many women attempted to cook on gas stoves.
"It's reassuring to make soup for my family," Birgul's grandmother said. "But there's no fridge, no cupboards, and the clean-up takes the whole day." She sighed, "It's impossible to keep clean in a tent. Every day, I feel as if I fail as a woman."
Birgul's two aunts, Glay and Nermin, both of whom have babies, complained that their breast milk has dried up. The infant formula being distributed at the tent villages every evening "is never enough," Gulay said, handing her baby a tea biscuit to lick.
I returned to the stadium. By about 4:30 p.m., I had handed out all the diapers. Women came to me and whispered "Do you have sanitary pads?"
"I don't know," I answered. "Wait. I'll find out."
"Please go look for sanitary pads," I told Ata, the bearded law student who was bringing me boxes of diapers.
Ata brought me a crate full of sanitary pads. Within seconds, a long line formed before me. Once again, I had to open the boxes and give out only five pads each. I was struck by the sadness, the absurdity of handing out unconcealed pads to women most of whom were covered in Islamic headscarves. They were supposed to walk home holding the things in their hands. One woman took what I handed out.
"Do you know how difficult it is to be a woman in a tent?" she asked me. "This isn't enough!"
"I know," I said. "I'll try to find more."
There I was handing out five sanitary pads to each woman. Oh, the shame, the shame of it. And suddenly the crate was empty. There were no more packages of "Libresse" or "Orkid."
"Please," I pleaded with Ata. "Please do something, find some more."
He performed a miracle and brought back another full crate from inside the stadium. And a crate full of tampons. I looked at the tampons. I looked at the women. I know that Anatolian women don't use tampons. They don't even know about tampons. Soon the fresh supply of pads has been given out.
"None left. I'm so sorry," I said and considered dismissing the crate full of tampons. But then suddenly, I found myself shouting to be heard. "Listen sisters," I said. "The sanitary pads are finished. But there's something else here. They're called tampons. I'll tell you how they are used. Those of you who want to try can do so."
I raised my voice, hoarse from trying to be heard in the crowd. I described in graphic detail how a tampon is used. Sweat was dripping from my brow. I tore the paper around a tampon to show women the cardboard pieces, and the piece of string attached to the cotton tampon. I answered the women's questions about when to take it out and how. Whenever a man approached the crowd, the women told him to go away. They shooed away little boys too. But I realized to my horror that I didn't know whether a tampon might damage a girl's virginity.
"I don't know," I said. "Perhaps young girls shouldn't use this."
After my lecture and demonstration, the women formed a line once more and they took all the tampons.
At 7 p.m. the METU bus took off from Adapazari. Reluctantly I returned to Ankara. I took a hot shower, feeling sad because a hot shower is such a privilege. Before falling asleep, I thought about tampons, and wondered how the women fared with them. I know they probably had no other choice but to learn how to use them.
Ustun Reinart is a writer in Quebec City, Canada and author of Night Spirits (University of Manitoba Press, 1997. She is currently teaching at Middle East Technical University (METU) in her native Turkey. To contribute to the relief effort in Turkey access http://www.depremfelaketi.org and http://www.metu.edu.tr under the heading "deprem." Or visit the Republic of Turkey American Embassy web site at http://www.turkey.org
-reprinted with permission from the Women's International Net newsletter, Issue 95A, October 1999. To subscribe, visit their web site http://welcome.to/winmagazine
You can also contribute to Turkey through Campus Crusade for Christ, Canada by going to:
http://www.crusade.org/opportunities/odev/index.html and click on Give Online