cycleduc® involves the senses
We decided on a piece of cloth, a needle and threads in three colours: the cycle calendar is stitched.
This way it is also suitable for women with reading difficulties or illiterate women, who are often very familiar with textiles and handicraft. Young girls in particular can be given more intensive access to their cycle through daily manual engagement. They learn the relationship between menstruation and fertility. Future decision regarding a possible pregnancy can now be made consciously.
Daily preoccupation with your body can lead to a greater acceptance of your own menstruation, as the monthly bleeding for women and girls is often associated with handicaps, especially in developing countries.
The daily stitching of a cross and the proven counting method according to Knaus-Ogino make the female cycle visible individually month after month. The constant length of the luteal phase between 12 to 16 days for all women can be used to retroactively delimit the period of the ovulation that has taken place. Counting 15 days backwards from the day before the next bleeding defines the most likely day of ovulation. The marking of the 8 days around this date sufficiently reflects the range of a possible ovulation. Thus, over the months, an individual window for a woman's fertile days arises.
Another important aspect is the individual cycle duration. This is also mapped in each cycle and shows more and more precisely the time for the upcoming menstruation. It can be predicted more and more precisely so girls and women can mentally and practically prepare for these days.
Conclusions
Girls and women are given an increasingly precise and individual cycle image that depicts the changing hormonal situation over the course of their lives. After only a few months, women who otherwise have no further medical information about their bodies already have a very good overview of their cycle and the associated fertility. They get to know themselves and the biological rhythms of their bodies, they can understand them and shape their lives accordingly.
The application of this method generates a short-term but also a long-term benefit.
Short-term benefits: fertility and menstruation
Knowledge of your own fertility and acceptance of menstruation is conveyed and serves self-determination.
Long-term benefits: Gynaecological endocrinology
The constantly changing hormonal situation is documented and serves gynecological health care.
Realisation of our vision
As a first step migrant women in Munich (Germany) prepare the plaid by stitching off measured linen. Together with the three colored threads – measured and bagged – the coloreful kit, created from individual pices of cloth arrives as a small bag at local NGOs.
The organsations are in contact with us and interested in communicating the contents of cycleduc within their own structures and methods. Ideally, these are projects where teachers and mentors deal with girls and women on a daily basis, which is happening in various schools, shelters, educational centres and hospital wards around the world anyway.
This way we save getting staff from A to B first. Our material is self-explanatory, even for women who cannot read in the conventional sense. We work with visual language in the form of pictograms, which can be used directly as teaching aids.
For us, sustainability is the command of the hour. That's why the tool for cycleduc® is made of materials that are easily accessible and "zero waste".
It can hardly be more environmentally friendly.