Dignity...Period!

It's very rare I read an article in a magazine, especially in the Daily Mail's Sunday magazine, that makes me cry and feel very very humble. There's a story in the Sunday magazine today about Thabitha Khumalo.
Thabitha Khumalo is a Zimbabwean woman who just won the 2006 woman of the year award for setting up Dignity.Period!, a campaign to try to get the Zimbabwe government to stop repressing women and destroying their dignity by making sanitary products available to all. This amazing woman was married young, as is expected from all Zimbabwe women, and has a daughter. Her husband was a control freak who enjoyed trapping her arms in doors and beating her up before they had sex. Eventually she left him, her mother would not take her in because she hadn't given her marriage a chance. She took her daughter and got a flat and a job, she even took in her cousins illegitimate son and raised him as her own. Her job as a cashier led her to realise just how unjust things were, she became a trade union activist. Her work as an activist eventually led to 28 veteran soldiers accusing her of selling Zimbabwe to the white man. They gang raped her and tortured her, they even inserted an AK47 into her vagina leading to her needing 47 stitches. Many many people would have given up by now, I know I would have given up at the mere hint of a threat but Thabitha kept going. One day she saw a woman walking awkwardly, the woman told her she was going home from work because she was having her period and couldn't afford sanitary protection. Companies who made sanitary towels and tampons had left the county and the cost of inflation had risen so much the average cost of a box of 20 tampons cost the equivalent of £6, more than half the monthly wage of the average worker.

Reading the story made me very angry that this basic product that I take for granted is not available to all but reading about Thabitha and how she has continued to fight even after appalling torture made me feel so small and humble. This woman was not able to attend the meal laid on by the organisers of the woman of the year award. She is so unused to so much food she couldn't bring herself to eat it, she also couldn't bring herself to see it going to waste so she left her seat and waited outside.

Thabitha Khumalo - an amazing human being