Girl forced to live in a hut as she was menstruating, dies in a Cyclone

NP NEWS 24 ONLINE – A girl when come to the age bleeds from the private parts in a week of the month. This time span is called as period.

A period happens because of changes in hormones in the body. Hormones are chemical messengers. The ovaries release the female hormones estrogen and progesterone .

These hormones cause the lining of the uterus (or womb) to build up. The built-up lining is ready for a fertilized egg to attach to and start developing. If there is no fertilized egg, the lining breaks down and bleeds. Then the same process happens all over again.
Is it so difficult to understand ? On this background menstruation taboo has taken life of girl in Gaja.

A teenage girl succumbed to age-old menstruation taboo that has still gripped parts of India. The 14-year-old girl died in a cyclone after being forced to sleep separately because she was menstruating.

Her family said that she was trapped in the hut on November 16 when Cyclone Gaja made landfall in Tamil Nadu.

The Class 7 student was killed on November 12 when a coconut tree, uprooted by the cyclone, fell on the thatched barn. Her mother who was sleeping next to her was injured and is undergoing treatment in the hospital.

“This is some tradition in this part of the state. When a girl comes of age, the family asks her to stay separately in a thatched hut for at least a week. She is asked to come inside the house only after the rituals are done on completion of a certain number of days,” the report quoted Pattukottai DSP Ganesamoorthy as saying.

The family of the girl, S Vijayalakshmi, lives in a house next to the hut but they survived the storm. Her grandmother, S Visalakshi, said they couldn’t rescue her as a coconut tree had fallen on the hut, which made it impossible to reach her.

“I told them to take her to a different place. But within hours, the cyclone had struck and we couldn’t move anywhere,” she told.

“We are shattered,” she told. “When we saw the tree, we lost hope. We waited for villagers to help us remove the tree and pull her out of the hut.”