Christine Khatima is an ambassador for Days for Girls Nairobi, Kenya. In her role as team leader, she conducts training sessions and travels across the region to educate and assess the need for sanitary pads for girls and young women. Then, she makes the pads using her own materials to meet the need.
Her dedication stems from a painful past riddled with challenges. She grew up in rural Kenya and has few memories of her mother.
“My mother left me when I was five years old,” Christine told The Weight She Carries. “When I reached the age of menstruation I (was lost because) in my culture it’s not easy for parents to talk about menstruation. Even family members don’t talk about it. So when I started menstruating, I was very young and didn’t have any guidance on what to do or how to take care of myself.”
Christine was just 10 years old when her period began. Whenever she told anyone that she had blood coming out of her body, they would just brush her aside and didn’t want to talk about it.
“Whoever did listen would pass judgment and conclude that I was just sleeping around or that I had been raped,” Christine said. “So, I didn’t have proper education on menstruation and it was really bad.”
“Most of the time I would just go and hide in a maize plantation because I couldn’t go to school during my menstruation. And even if I did, they would just send me home because I would mess myself and mess up my clothes. I grew up as a daughter who had no family because my mother left, and I was growing up with my stepmother who never cared whether I had panties or not. And even if I had something to manage my menstruation, I never had panties, so it was a very big challenge for me.” – Christine Khatima
Not knowing what was happening to her body, Christine hated menstruation and concluded that something eerie must have caused this strange condition.
“I thought maybe because I never had panties and I always went into the bush, maybe a snake had bitten me,” she said. “But just to think that I had aunties around me who never advised me or told me how to clean myself really makes me sick even to this day.”
“Many times I wondered why did it have to happen to me. Why did I have to be the person in the family who had a bleeding problem? They took away the mattress because I stained it and then I’d have to sleep on the floor. And when the blood would go on the floor, I would have to clean up the mess. I had a lot of negativity in my life and I looked at myself as a bad person who had a bad omen.” – Christine Khatima
Christine stopped attending school altogether, and by the time she was 12, she couldn’t take life at home anymore and left for Nairobi in search of greener pastures.
She found work as a maid, but she struggled to keep up with the demands of the job. The woman of the house was particular, and try as she might, Christine couldn’t meet her expectations.
“The woman of the house had to send me away, but by that time I was already pregnant by her husband. I was 13. While I had been working there, he offered to help me because he knew I was struggling, and he knew that his wife had a certain standard. He used to help so that when she came, she wouldn’t find the house in a mess. But at the end of the day, he wanted something in exchange. And when this was discovered, I was thrown out to the street.” – Christine Khatima
With nowhere to go because she didn’t have any relatives in Nairobi, she wound up on the street and found a family whom she started living with as a street family.
“It was really terrible because there was no protection, and if the bigger boys wanted sex, they would come and have it their way. Life on the street was very violent and harsh, and because you are on the street, you are also judged harshly. It wasn’t a good experience at all,” she said.
When she was 8 months pregnant, Christine met a policeman who thought she was a refugee from Ethiopia and insisted on seeing her living conditions. He was interested in her romantically. Disturbed that she was homeless and only had a cardboard box for shelter, the man looked for a small house in the slums and paid 300 Shillings ($3 USD) for her rent.
He proceeded to buy her a mattress and a stove, so when she came from the hospital after giving birth to her daughter, Christine had a place to live.
Three months later, he disappeared after being transferred to another police station far away. Christine never saw him again.
The owner of the house took it back, and from that point, Christine and her baby were back onto the street.
“I would wash dishes and dirty clothes in exchange for food. When the baby got a little bit older, I would leave the baby and find people who needed their clothes washed, and I would do that for money,” she said.
Her father and stepmother had no idea where she was or whether she was even alive. She knew her mother worked in Nairobi, but she wasn’t allowed to have visitors so Christine couldn’t go and see her.
It was a depressing time. Christine was desperate and alone. She had nothing.
One rainy day, Christine and the baby were hungry and had nothing to eat. There was a lady who spoke the same language as Christine did and sometimes gave her clothes to wash in exchange for food. With her baby crying of hunger, Christine went to the woman’s house to beg for food.
“It was raining and we were really in bad shape. We were smelling and everything was terrible. She had visitors at that time, so when I knocked on the door, she told me to get away from her home because she had visitors and I was smelling,” Christine said.
Christine told the woman that she couldn’t go anywhere because she had a child who was crying and needed some food.
The woman refused, saying she had guests and could not afford the disruption.
“I think one of the visitors heard us having a confrontation and so the lady told me to go to the toilet and she would bring some food there,” Christine said. “So we went to the toilet and this visitor was curious to know what was going on because he saw the woman coming out with food and he wanted to know where the food was going.”
The man made his way to the bathroom as though he needed to use it and found Christine and her baby there eating.
“He asked what I was doing in the toilet with a baby and eating. I said, ‘Well, we are eating because we are from the street, so we are not allowed in people’s houses.’ He really felt bad and asked me what my name and if he could come back and see me again. I said yes.”
The following week, the man came and decided he wanted to give Christine and her baby a place to stay.
“He took us to his family in Western Kenya and we started living with his family, although the family was not happy because they came to know that I was from the street and they never wanted a girl for their son from the street. So, it was really bad. But at least they accommodated us for a year,” she said.
When the abuse from his family escalated and became unbearable, Christine left and returned to Nairobi. She went back to working and washing clothes for money. And when they paid her, Christine used some of the money to invest in herself.
“I didn’t have any skills, but I learned how to sew pads. Then I met a lady who had come to visit one of the churches I was attending,” Christine said. “She was really determined to talk to me, which was not very easy because I could not speak English well, but she really wanted to communicate with me so she gave me her email address and told me to send her an email with the help of somebody.”
Christine became determined to learn to speak and write English. Her kids began helping her complete sentences and eventually she enrolled in classes.
Sometime later, Christine met another woman, Carrie Petersen Grubb, who inquired about how she managed her periods. She was an ambassador for Days for Girls.
“When I told her my story and what I had to go through, she decided to take me to Uganda to study with Days for Girls. That was my turning point,” Christine said. “Now I work with girls who have never gone to school because I understand the pain that they have gone through. I know those challenges. I mostly work with street families because that’s where I was; that was my home.”
To fund her venture, Christine often solicits help from her friends on Facebook and asks them to donate so she can make the pads and take them back to the girls and women on the street.
“I don’t want them to go through the same challenges. I was there, I know,” she said.
Christine said another woman who has stood by her and tirelessly supported the girls in the community is Heidi Rasmussen Totten.
At this point in her life, Christine is taking a personal development course in science of the mind, and is focusing on healing from her painful past and doing what she can to make a difference.
“I have reconnected with my father and my mother. Although there’s still a lot of healing to do, we communicate once in a while. I have forgiven them, but I am still trying to heal. It has taken a lot of understanding and loving myself to find out that I am a good person. Whatever happened to me was a lesson that I was supposed to learn so that I can know how to stand with these girls today.” – Christine Khatima
Vimbai E. is a content marketer, ghostwriter, and the founder of The Weight She Carries. With hundreds of articles and stories publishing online, in print and for broadcast, her love of language and storytelling shines through every piece of writing that bears her name.