Promoting Menstrual Hygiene
Management (MHM)
RDI works with adolescent girls and women, promotes and facilitates reproductive healthcare awareness, education and services mainly in the rural and mountainous region of Uttarakhand. One of its important components is empowering girls and women towards MHM and has continuously been conducting trainings on adolescent health, women’s health and school health and hygiene along with educational activities. On the occasion of Menstrual Hygiene Day on 28 May 2019, RDI conducted menstrual hygiene education session for women and girls from its field areas. Collaborating with Living Guard, the manufacturer of Saafkins, a reusable sanitary napkin, an online talk with their MHM expert was organized. She talked about the importance of hygiene during menstruation and how should women and girls maintain it.
Sensitization on the proper disposal techniques of sanitary napkins was demonstrated as well. Total 26 adolescents and women participated in the activity. The session helped the group to understand a lot on the management of their menstrual periods using sanitary napkins. Later, sanitary pads were also distributed among participants.
RDI Is Enabling Inclusive Approaches
RDI has been supporting and working with people with disability (Divyang), their families and communities for last decade. It works with two-pronged approaches: On one side, it facilitates self-reliance among people with disability and on the other it promotes and sensitizes multiple stakeholders of the society, viz. teachers, health functionaries and service providers towards disability-specific needs and issues. In this series, RDI organized the following activities for people with disability.
Training Workshop on Activities
of Daily Living (ADL)
ADL skills play a major role in a child’s overall functional growth, confidence and independence, especially in case of children with disability. These essential skills include the child’s ability to feed themselves using utensils appropriately and to perform toileting, bathing and grooming activities. Recently on 27 June 2019, RDI organized a one-day training workshop on ADL. The objective of this training was to sensitize participants of selected villages of Bahadarabad block of Haridwar district on disability related challenges faced by people with disabilities and their care givers on day to day basis and to train them how to address such challenges.
Total 32 participants including ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists), Anganwadi workers (Integrated Child Development Scheme workers), people with disabilities and their parents attended the training.
Participants actively attended sessions regarding disability-specific understanding, the needs of people with disabilities, stimulation exercises experiencing disability and finally what should be done to bring about a change. Activities conducted during the training conveyed the message that people with disabilities are not a burden on the family or society and with little support and training they are also capable of doing their daily activities on their own.
Training Workshop on Inclusive
Education (IE) for Teachers
Training workshop was conducted for the school teachers of villages of Bahadrabad block of Haridwar district on 13 July 2019 on inclusive education. Total 8 female and 7 male teachers participated from 9 schools including junior high schools, high schools and intermediate colleges. The main objective of the training was to sensitize the teachers on inclusive education.
Inclusive education refers to having an inclusive system of education for all students, at all levels, (early childhood, primary, junior, secondary and senior secondary) with the provision of supports to meet the individual needs of students with disabilities. The teachers were sensitized on characteristics of inclusive education, main components of inclusive education, and its benefits through different adult learning techniques and methodologies like power point presentation, brainstorming exercises, role plays, games and case studies. Different government policies for people with disabilities were also shared with them. Teachers also shared their experiences with students with disabilities and clarified their doubts on inclusive education from the resource persons.
Exposure to Children with Disability
Excursion visit was organized for 18 children with disability on 16 July 2019 to the Regional Science Centre Jhajra, Dehradun. This centre had many interesting facts, models and display of devices on board. Children observed and enjoyed Science Park encompassing dinosaur park, outer interactive exhibits based on scientific laws, planetarium, fun science gallery, Himalaya gallery, frontiers of technology gallery, innovation hub, 3D theater, auditorium of 200 sitting capacity, exhibition hall, library and meeting hall. Some of the attractive features of the scientific law based interactive outer exhibit in science park were gravity chair, whispering garden, musical bar, sympathetic swing, birding cage, eco tube, and perspective house along with proposed planetarium. The science centre museum had informative and innovative ways to teach about science experiments. The children interested in research science asked several questions on various models. Children found the visit very informative and learned innovative models related to chemistry, physics and mathematics.
