Photographing the Devastating Impact of Breast Cancer in Uganda

( intro music )

In 2013, I was asked to cover breast cancer in Uganda. Breast cancer has less than a handful of oncologists in the whole country. A woman who has breast cancer thinks of it as a death sentence. Most of the resources in Uganda went to HIV-AIDS. So cancer is something that is sort of just seen as a curse.

This is Mary. She had been living with tumors for several years but didn't want to tell anyone; she was ashamed. There was a team of American doctors from Seattle who went to try and bring ultrasound technology to detect tumors early. When she took off her shirt, this is what we saw, and they did a biopsy on Mary. It turned out the cancer was very localized, and she was able to get a mastectomy and survived.

This is Jolly and her husband. She had gotten a mastectomy a year before and did not follow up, and I spent five days with her until she died. And this is her daughter seeing her mother in the casket. She didn't even know her mother had passed away. She just got a call and was pulled out of boarding school, and when she came into the truck, they just opened the lid, and... there was her mother.

And I was crying so hard when I took this picture; it's completely out of focus. And that's Jolly's bed about half an hour after she died. They're cleaning it and getting ready for another woman. And this is, there is one radiation machine that serves four countries. It works 24 hours a day.

This is Jessy; she was trying to get chemotherapy. She had two sons and was determined to stay alive. But she didn't have $10 to take the bus back home to see her children in between chemo treatments, so she slept outside of the hospital for two months. She had to change her own bandages every day because there was no one available to do that.

This is her finally getting chemo, and she is leaving the hospital to go see her children. This is her on the bus ride back and her sister washing her when she gets home. And this is her with her children. And Jessy died about six months after that story.