Sentiwan Lekilia – one of the amazing women on our Nkirreten team – tells us why making masks is so important to her.
I work at the GZT Nkirreten workshop at Grevy’s Zebra Trust’s field camp in Westgate Community Conservancy. I have been working with GZT for two years now, making reusable sanitary pads for girls and women within my community. It has been a very rewarding experience and I can see the positive impact we are having on the lives of women and girls within the community. It was about the time when we were going to make our first sanitary pad distribution for the year to the first of twenty schools when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world! We were all scared and stressed. We didn’t know where to get masks to protect ourselves. Our project changed temporarily from making pads and we started making face masks for our communities to prevent the spread of the disease. 
I was so anxious to learn how to make a face mask; I woke up earlier than usual to head to the workshop and spent even more hours than usual frantically making as many masks as I could. Damaris, our mentor from GZT showed us how to make the face masks with two layers of striped material and a filter layer in between. When I arrived home from work I found my neighbour waiting for me to see if I came back with a few masks so she could have one and I was grateful to have carried a few which I shared with her. She thanked me for giving her a mask – “Ashe kinchoo mask!” and I thanked Grevy’s Zebra Trust for empowering me and other women in my community.
