Growing up, Kavitha Emmanuel remembers being one of the fairer members of her family. She still used skin-whitening products, but it was meant to preserve her skin tone. “I was not born a campaigner for ending colourism,” she says, “I contributed to the endorsement of the bias in my own way.” Kavitha, like many Indians, … Continue reading
Nadeesha* has worn a burqa for 15 years, and the abaya for twice as long. Last week, when she heard that a ban on face-covering was in place, she knew there was a difficult time ahead. “This is a lovely country, it is my country. It has been a paradise on earth, and we have … Continue reading
There are few people who know their way around a Sri Lankan garbage dump as well as Dr.Randika Jayasinghe. However, while you might expect the research scientist to be studying landfill composition or whether toxins are leaching into the groundwater, Randika is actually more interested in talking to the communities in the area. “I look … Continue reading
In a small room down a warren of streets in Kithulwatte in Colombo, Fathima Rifka is making her own sanitary napkins by hand. This is the 24-year-old’s first job. One year in, she has been promoted to the position of a trainer, and has begun to teach other women from this low-income neighbourhood how to … Continue reading
It’s easy to assume that once you have stood on the summit of Everest, the world laid out before you, that no other climb will offer quite the same challenge. However, hanging from ropes on the icy face of Aconcagua’s glacier in South America, their bodies shuddering uncontrollably with cold, their fingers at risk of … Continue reading
Southern Province, Sri Lanka – Lochana is 10 years old. Every morning, he gets up and lights an incense stick, which he places in a three-wheeled auto-rickshaw parked outside the family home in Sri Lanka‘s coastal Southern Province. The vehicle is a bright shade of pink and as the fragrant smoke fills the interior, Lochana says a … Continue reading
Vraie Balthazar remembers thinking: “This can’t be normal.” Her periods had taken on a kind of life of their own. She would bleed not just three or four days, but seven days. Her sanitary napkins needed to be changed every two hours. She would layer them together, two-pads deep, to make a kind of adult … Continue reading
