FARGO -- Molly Secor-Turner, her mother and five of her nursing students were packing crates with medical supplies in Molly's living room when her then-2-year-old son, Emmett, came downstairs carrying a pair of his shoes, pajamas and a toy truck.
"I want to give these to Kenya!" the little boy told the women, who were preparing for their April 2012 trip to the impoverished East African country, where they've been doing community outreach for years.
Emmett was emulating the giving nature of his mom, a nursing and public health professor at North Dakota State University, and his grandmother, Sharon Secor, who first introduced Molly to the people of the Tharaka-Nithi region of Kenya when she was 19.
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Now 39, Molly recently expanded her engagement there as programs director of For the Good Period, an all-volunteer nonprofit she helped create with founder Kayce Anderson and Sadler Merrill, co-owner of cloth diaper company Thirsties.
For the Good Period works with schools, community leaders and families to provide school-age girls with reusable menstrual pads and reproductive health education, helping remove one of the primary barriers to girls' education in rural areas -- lack of access to menstrual products.
Because of their inability to fill a basic women's health need, girls often stay home from school during their periods, increasing their vulnerability to early marriage, HIV infection and female genital mutilation, explains Kate Lapides, a Colorado-based photographer and writer who accompanied Molly on her most recent trip to Kenya in September.
For the Good Period found its beginnings in Molly's annual pad-making event, Pints & Pads, held in 2014 and 2015 at Fargo Brewing Company. She created the fundraiser as a way to get people involved here in the Red River Valley.
"I had no idea it'd gain so much momentum," she says.
Between the two projects, Molly estimates a total of 7,000 pad packs -- the equivalent of 21,000 pads -- have been distributed to girls in Kenya and Malawi. But there's much work to be done. Molly and her collaborators recognize that they can't do pad distribution indefinitely.
"The ultimate goal would be to have a way we could support local manufacture so it wouldn't depend as much on donations. It's really expensive to fly there and do it all," she says. "People there have the skills and knowledge to do it."
Their efforts, however, are working. They saw the results firsthand in September when they visited with girls who received pad packs during a previous visit. They remembered Molly's health presentation, they've gained confidence, and their attendance is up from before, when they had to scrounge for fabric or plant material to control their periods.
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"There were girls who could recite some of the things I'd told them word for word about puberty, making healthy choices and staying in school," she says. "It was a year and a half later."
Back home, Molly's a driving force behind other health education efforts. For the past few years, she's primarily worked on a program with Brandy Randall, a human development and family science professor at NDSU, made possible by a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services.
They partner with local educators to provide comprehensive sexuality education to teens, including foster-care youth, Native Americans, new Americans and college freshmen in the Fargo area, addressing topics such as healthy development, relationships and pregnancy prevention.
She's also the health and wellness coordinator for the Lincoln Elementary School PTA. Her primary responsibilities there are coordinating vision screening and flu shot clinics.
"I think I'm lucky in some ways, because the work that I do is about family and is about adolescence and about figuring out how to help support families to be healthy, so logically, I know all those things, and I think sometimes it also makes me unlucky because I have a high standard of what I think I should be doing," she says.
Instead of striving for work-life balance, she aims for work-life integration, a concept she recently read about that struck a chord with her.
"When you can integrate those things and address the needs of both, even at the same time, that's how you achieve true balance," she says.
Molly's work has given her family -- husband Ryan, son Rees, daughter Madeleine and son Emmett -- life-changing experiences. Last summer, she arranged for her whole family to join her in Kenya at the beginning of May, after she'd been there a month with her nursing students.
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"I really wanted them to understand where I was going and what I was doing," she says.
Ryan, a manager for sales teams that sell computer software, was able to work from home, working evenings to keep U.S. hours.
Their children, ages 11, 8 and 5 at the time, missed the last month of school in Fargo but attended school there, at the Chogoria Complex Primary School.
"It was almost the end of the school year, and they'd already met the school-year standards," Molly says. "The principal said, 'I don't think you need to worry about it. They're going to learn a lot of life lessons there.' "
The kids adjusted well, even though life in rural Kenya meant no TV or toys. Instead, they played soccer and made forts out of banana leaves. They learned Swahili words and phrases and made new friends. They got to share their experience with their grandparents and Sharon's four sisters, who also joined.
Sharon, who'd been visiting the region for 20 years doing her own health outreach, appreciated the unique opportunity to see her beloved second home through both her daughter's and her grandchildren's eyes. The relationships she's developed there were integral to Molly's own work, helping open the door to sensitive topics.
Regardless, like most parents, Molly sometimes questions how her decisions affect her kids.
"I tell myself someday they'll look back and say, 'My mom stood up for what she thought was important, she stood up for other people, and she wanted to make the world a better place,' " she says. "Hopefully I inspire them to do the same."
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Connect with For the Good Period online at www.forthegoodperiod.org , on Twitter @ForTheGoodPeriod and Instagram @ForTheGoodPeriod.
