When she was a child, Verónica’s mom sat her and her sister down to talk to them about the menstrual period, a topic that’s still a social taboo that not all families talk about. And although they did talk about it in her home, Verónica doesn’t have the fondest memory of it.
“She explained to us a lot about what menstruation was, but she spoke to us from a very dramatic, very tragic and very panic-stricken place, because mommy always suffered from menstrual cramps,” she said.
And the unfounded fear from that initial conversation was compounded by not feeling “normal.” As she grew, she saw changes in the bodies of other girls at school that she didn’t experience: their hips widened, their breasts grew, and they got their periods, as menstruation is commonly called. But she started high school and still hadn’t gone through any changes. “Until I was 14, I was still that weirdo, a [flat] little board,” she recalled.
Building a better relationship with her body and her cycle took her almost two decades. But today, as a public school educator in Nandayure, Verónica Fernández Gullock wants her students to grow up with a better relationship with their bodies and their menstrual cycles, in order to learn to manage it very differently than the way she went through it.
She wants to fill an information gap in family conversations and in the material taught in schools, which has an emphasis on fertility and pregnancy, as detailed in an academic study by the University of Costa Rica (UCR).
Every year, from her little school nestled in the mountains of her canton, 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from the center of Nandayure, this 31-year-old teacher organizes a workshop for her students at the Bellavista School given by a menstrual educator.
This year, she also succeeded in giving a workshop aimed especially at mothers and, with sponsorship from the organization Nosotras Women Connecting, she managed to give the girls kits with pads and panty liners in order to help them combat period poverty. This term refers to limitations that women face in getting menstrual products, in having hygienic facilities or in having education on how to manage their menstrual health.
Talking about menstruation, talking about feminism
When Verónica arrived in Guanacaste in 2019, she began to learn about the reality of other rural and coastal women.
“Guanacaste was the place that opened my eyes. It took off a blinder that I had on and made me see a reality of rural women that I didn’t know existed.” Since then, she decided to approach women activists who are members of groups such as the ones in Tamarindo, Nicoya and Sámara.
And on that path of feminist awakening, she came across Menstruando Ando, an Instagram account in which a menstrual educator, Yazmin, shares knowledge on this subject. Verónica also began to learn and decided, after 10 years of taking birth control pills, to stop taking them and manage her fertility without hormones. Since then, she says, she has tried to “make friends with menstruation.”
It was through getting to know Yazmin that she came up with the idea of workshops for the girls of Nandayure, which ended up helping her personally. “The workshops with Yaz have helped me a lot, incredibly; even though they are for my girls, I have learned a lot too.”
And she hasn’t been the only one. The mothers who have joined the workshops also begin to ask questions that, after decades of living with their own menstruation, they had never had answered.
“I’m a very open mother. I always explained to them how to put on a pad and everything, but these workshops are super detailed and they are super happy because they are explained how their body works,” said Kimberly Castillo Abarca, mother of two of Verónica’s students.
Verónica Fernández Gullock is a 31-year-old educator. Since 2019, she has lived in Guanacaste, the province that – in her own words – “took her blinders off” about other injustices experienced by women in rural areas. She decided to fight period poverty from her classroom. Photo by César Arroyo Castro with collage artwork by Sheyla Santana
Information as a superpower
Talking about menstruation in the classroom has not been easy. “Many times they clearly don’t like it at all, especially the parents,” Verónica noted. They have filed complaints or have decided not to send the girls to the workshops.
“I don’t justify them, but I do understand that it comes from a place of not knowing and that they were never informed that this was important for their daughters. So why are they giving it now?” Verónica commented.
She chooses to focus on the change that this means for the girls: they get to know themselves, they learn that there is no “normal” body or cycle, that everyone goes through it differently. She sums it up as knowledge that empowers them.
“Any way that we women are informed is a way of fighting gender violence. The fact that we learn that our body isn’t just made for gestation, and that they form a friendship with their menstrual cycles once and for all,” she said.
And she adds: “It gives them this strength to say: I am a girl, I am menstruating, but I can also continue playing ball, I can play tag. And that they come with this strength to say, ‘No, no, no, hold on a moment. I‘m menstruating and it hurts. I need to go home,’ and that they have that strength and courage to tell the teacher and understand that limit.”
In 2023, Broad Front legislator Priscilla Vindas presented a bill called “Law on menstrual leave for women and menstruating workers and day of rest for students with menstrual cramps” (file 23,706). With it, students could have a day of rest if they require it as a result of suffering menstrual cramps.
In October of this year, the Women’s Commission ruled in favor of the bill and will now be discussed in the legislative plenary.
Until there is a substantial change that introduces the topic into the classrooms, Verónica says that she will do everything possible to continue talking about “periods” and to continue going through the change hand in hand with her students:
“I started to get to know my body, to know the way in which I menstruate, to realize that it doesn’t have to be in a painful way, and to get used to even seeing blood on my hands without being scared,” she said.
“It was a process for Verónica as an adult, but if we [women] had had this information from an early age, I would have known that I was okay, and that I wasn’t a weirdo. It didn’t happen, and so here I am healing from this space.”
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