Captain Poprocks Helps Days for Girls

Recently my mother and sister came across the charity Days for Girls, an international organisation who provides women around the world with washable sanitary pad kits.  

From their website:

"What if not having sanitary supplies meant DAYS without school, DAYS without income, DAYS without leaving the house? Girls use leaves, mattress stuffing, newspaper, corn husks, rocks, anything they can find...but still miss up to 2 months of school every year. It turns out this issue is a surprising but instrumental key to social change for women all over the world. The poverty cycle can be broken when girls stay in school."

I can't even imagine not having access to safe, reliable sanitary supplies, for something that happens every month! 

Over the last few months, we have been working on sewing the components of the kits - shields (which look like normal panty liners with wings, and have a waterproof layer in them), liners (flannelette squares to be folded and inserted into the shields for absorption), and drawstring bags for the whole kit to go into. We have also been buying and collecting underpants, face washers and hotel soaps for the kits. Here is a pinboard showing what goes into each kit. 

Yesterday we had a working bee with 20 wonderful volunteers to make a mountain of liners for the sanitary kits. We finished over 600 liners start to finish, as well as completing 100 liners that were already partway through the pipeline, and have another 500 started. 

Of course, Captain Poprocks came to lend a hand, and had a very interesting afternoon... 

...hiding under piles of flannelette... 

...learning how to use the overlocker and the sewing machine...

...and crowing over the stacks of finished liners! 

It was an incredibly successful working bee, and we are so very grateful to the wonderful volunteers who came with donations of underpants and time :) 

If you are interested in finding out more about Days for Girls or making a donation of money or materials, visit their website or send me a message! 

There will be a special Global Sew-a-thon on 11 October 2014 to celebrate the International Day of the Girl.  We are still working out what we might be able to do to celebrate this occasion and help this wonderful charity even more! 

Bushfire season in Australia

It's bushfire season here in Australia, and it's going to be a ripper this year.  Conditions are already perfect for whipping up enormous fires - hot, clear weather, high winds, and lots of dry dry grass, trees and other plants to fuel the hungry beast.

This post is, I guess, more for the benefit of those reading who are not in NSW or Australia - there's been close to saturation news coverage here of the fires.

Since last Wednesday, over 200 families have lost their houses, mostly in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.  More people are being told to leave their homes and seek shelter tonight.  Last I heard, over 40,000 hectares of land has been burned out, just in the Blue Mountains! There are also fires burning on the Central Coast and Newcastle areas north of Sydney, in the Illawarra south of Sydney, and in the Southern Highlands south west of Sydney.  This is a photo taken by a Channel 7 cameraman, Paul Walker, of the largest fire near the town of Lithgow in the Blue Mountains:

Photo credit to Paul Walker, Channel 7 News

Firefighters are doing an unbelievable job to save towns and houses, farms and animals. A lot of the firefighting is being done by the Rural Fire Service, which is chiefly staffed by volunteers.  They are doing a lot of backburning around towns and properties under threat to try and stop the advance of the fires by starving them of fuel. Here's what the RFS managed to achieve with backburning around Raymond Terrace:

Photo credit to Barry O'Farrell (@barryofarrell)

Conditions are forecast to get worse over the next few days, with heat and winds increasing. A little rain is forecast, but it'll just be like spitting on the fires rather than being any use to actually put it out!

While we are safe in the city, there is lots of smoke and debris around.  This was the view from our balcony last Thursday:

Please keep in your thoughts the firefighters as they do their work and the people who are having to make terrible decisions about leaving their houses, as well as those returning to burned out towns and properties. It's times like these you realise that no matter how much we wrangle and reshape nature, she is always in charge!

If you can help financially, these are the three main organisations accepting donations now:

St Vincent de Paul Society

Salvation Army

Red Cross

On a more cheerful note, tomorrow I am going to start making gravadlax, a Swedish cured salmon, and I will take lots of pictures of that process for you!