Strength TogetHER - 18

December 29,2021 With added excitement from the previous week, we started our session at Jyotidaya Cooperative Secondary School at Chapagaun. Our topic for the week was, “My First Period Story”. We had asked the participants to share their first-period stories so we could open up and talk about them more.  Our first participant started her story as: I was in grade 7 and we had an event (Sworsaradha puja) at our house. My mother was pregnant with my younger brother at that time, and it was quite a busy day. I realized that I had gotten my first period and rushed to tell my mother. She told me that I would not be allowed to be involved in the puja and I couldn’t touch or help around. One of my sisters had come over for the puja and helped me with putting the pad. I had some idea about it, but I couldn’t figure out the front and the back but my sister helped me with that. I was then shifted to the ground floor of our house where I stayed for 22 days, this was mainly because my grandmother

18 December 2021. Strength togetHER facilitated by Lokopakar provides a safe platform for girls to share their personal stories, ideas, and feelings. We have been conducting our sessions physically at different schools. Now, we have started our physical session at Jyotidaya Cooperative Secondary School at Chapagaon. Jyotidaya Cooperative School in Chapagaun, a community in the outskirt of Kathmandu Valley, is a model school that offers an alternative to expensive private schools and low-quality public schools. Run by a group of young people, the school is the only community cooperative school in Nepal. Jyotidaya School is developed as a model nonprofit, community school where tuition is at least 40% less than comparative private schools, and 1 in 7 children, mostly orphans and children from poor families, study for free. We were really excited to see girls from Jyotidaya Cooperative Secondary School dressed in their sports dress. We could see 27 girls sitting in a semi-circle all shy a