MY WORLD OF TRUTH
Friday 28 April 2017
THE ISLANDS SUFFERING FROM THE SHORTAGE OF WOMEN
There's a shortage of women in the Faroe Islands. So local men are increasingly seeking wives from further afield - Thailand and the Philippines in particular. But what's it like for the brides who swap the tropics for this windswept archipelago?
When Athaya Slaetalid first moved from Thailand to the Faroe Islands, where winter lasts six months, she would sit next to the heater all day:
"People told me to go outside because the sun was shining but I just said: 'No! Leave me alone, I'm very cold.'"
Moving here six years ago was tough for Athaya at first, she admits. She'd met her husband Jan when he was working with a Faroese friend who had started a business in Thailand.
Jan knew in advance that bringing his wife to this very different culture, weather and landscape would be challenging.
"I had my concerns, because everything she was leaving and everything she was coming to were opposites," he admits. "But knowing Athaya, I knew she would cope."
There are now more than 300 women from Thailand and Philippines living in the Faroes. It doesn't sound like a lot, but in a population of just 50,000 people they now make up the largest ethnic minority in these 18 islands, located between Norway and Iceland.
In recent years the Faroes have experienced population decline, with young people leaving, often in search of education, and not returning. Women have proved more likely to settle abroad. As a result, according to Prime Minister Axel Johannesen, the Faroes have a "gender deficit" with approximately 2,000 fewer women than men.
This, in turn, has lead Faroese men to look beyond the islands for romance. Many, though not all, of the Asian women met their husbands online, some through commercial dating websites. Others have made connections through social media networks or existing Asian-Faroese couples.
For the new arrivals, the culture shock can be dramatic.
Officially part of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Faroes have their own language (derived from Old Norse) and a very distinctive culture - especially when it comes to food. Fermented mutton, dried cod and occasional whale meat and blubber are typical of the strong flavours here, with none of the traditional herbs and spices of Asian cooking.
And, although it never gets as cold as neighbouring Iceland, the wet, cool climate is a challenge for many people. A good summer's day would see the temperature reach 16°C.
Athaya is a confident woman with a ready smile who now works in the restaurant business in Torshavn, the Faroese capital. She and Jan share a cosy cottage on the banks of a fjord surrounded by dramatic mountains. But she's honest about how difficult swapping countries was at first.
"When our son Jacob was a baby, I was at home all day with no-one to talk to," she says.
"The other villagers are older people and mostly don't speak English. People our age were out at work and there were no children for Jacob to play with. I was really alone. When you stay at home here, you really stay at home. I can say I was depressed. But I knew it would be like that for two or three years."
Then, when Jacob started kindergarten, she began working in catering and met other Thai women.
"That was important because it gave me a network. And it gave me a taste of home again."
Krongrak Jokladal felt isolated at first, too, when she arrived from Thailand. Her husband Trondur is a sailor and works away from home for several months at a time.
She started her own Thai massage salon in the centre of Torshavn. "You can't work regular hours with a baby, and although my parents-in-law help out with childcare, running the business myself means I can choose my hours," she says.
It's a far cry from Krongrak's previous job as head of an accountancy division in Thai local government.
But she is unusual in that she runs her own business. Even for many highly educated Asian women in the Faroes, the language barrier means they have to take lower-level work.
Axel Johannesen, the prime minister, says helping the newcomers overcome this is something the government takes seriously.
"The Asian women who have come in are very active in the labour market, which is good," he says. "One of our priorities is to help them learn Faroese, and there are government programmes offering free language classes."
Kristjan Arnason recalls the effort his Thai wife Bunlom, who arrived in the Faroes in 2002, put into learning the language.
"After a long day at work she would sit reading the English-Faeroese dictionary," he says. "She was extraordinarily dedicated."
"I was lucky," Bunlom adds. "I told Kristjan that if I was moving here he had to find me a job. And he did, and I was working with Faeroese people in a hotel so I had to learn how to talk to them."
In an age when immigration has become such a sensitive topic in many parts of Europe, Faeroes society seems remarkably accepting of foreign incomers.
"But we've seen problems when you have people coming from other cultures into places like the UK, in Sweden and in other parts of Europe - even Denmark. That's why we need to work hard at government level to make sure we don't isolate people and have some kind of sub-culture developing."
But Antonette Egholm, originally from the Philippines, hasn't encountered any anti-immigrant sentiment. I met her and her husband as they moved into a new flat in Torshavn.
"People here are friendly, she explains, "and I've never experienced any negative reactions to my being a foreigner. I lived in metro Manila and there we worried about traffic and pollution and crime. Here we don't need to worry about locking the house, and things like healthcare and education are free. At home we have to pay. And here you can just call spontaneously at someone's house, it's not formal. For me, it feels like the Philippines in that way."
Likewise, her husband Regin believes increasing diversity is something that should be welcomed not feared.
"We actually need fresh blood here," he adds, "I like seeing so many children now who have mixed parentage. Our gene pool is very restricted, and it's got to be a good thing that we welcome outsiders who can have families."
He acknowledges that he's had occasional ribbing from some male friends who jokingly ask if he pressed "enter" on his computer to order a wife. But he denies he and Antonette have encountered any serious prejudice as a result of their relationship.
Athaya Slaetalid tells me that some of her Thai friends have asked why she doesn't leave her small hamlet, and move to the capital, where almost 40% of Faroe Islanders now live. They say Jacob would have more friends there.
"No, I don't need to do that," she says. "I'm happy here now, not just surviving but making a life for our family.
"Look," she says, as we step into the garden overlooking the fjord. "Jacob plays next to the beach. He is surrounded by hills covered in sheep and exposed to nature. And his grandparents live just up the road. There is no pollution and no crime. Not many kids have that these days. This could be the last paradise on earth."
HOW TO WORKOUT AT HOME
Exercise is key for a healthy lifestyle and complements a balanced diet, but getting fit doesn't have to mean costly gym fees. Khalid Shakir, rehabilitation and fitness specialist at Harley Street Health Centre in London, shares his top tips and exercises for working out at home...
Exercise 1: Squats with half-arm raises
Exercise 5: Ankle touch
WHY TALKING TO YOURSELF MAKES SENSE
on people’s teeth. Then, three years ago, he decided to give up his life’s work to become an entrepreneur.
There was just one problem: he was no good at business. As his ideas failed, his confidence plunged.
He could have gone back into dentistry but he was determined to succeed in the business world. So, he hired a business coach who gave him an odd piece of advice. “He told me speak out loud,” says Gamble, who helps wealthy people invest in residential real estate.
That’s right. He was instructed to talk to himself.
“It was weird, because it was something new to me,” he says. “I didn’t believe that it could work, but once I tried it – it made perfect sense.”
You don’t know everything you’re going to say – you can even surprise yourself
Talking to ourselves may seem strange because we tend to associate speaking out loud to nobody in particular as a sign of mental illness. However, there’s a growing body of research to indicate that self-talk can help memory recall, confidence, focus and more.
“It’s not an irrational thing to do,” says Gary Lupyan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, who has studied how hearing ourselves speak can impact our memories. “You don’t know everything you’re going to say – you can even surprise yourself.”
His work, which is one of the most cited studies in this field, had people look at objects on a computer screen. Some had to say the name of the item out loud, while others were instructed to remain silent and keep the word in their head. The result? The ones who said the word out loud were able to locate the objects on the screen more quickly.
A similar experiment had people say the names of common grocery store items out loud. They then had to find those items by looking at photographs. The ones who said the words found the foods faster.
Saying a name out loud is a powerful retrieval cue
While we all know what a banana looks like, saying the word aloud helps the brain activate additional information on that item, including what it looks like, he says. We will, of course, find the banana at the store regardless, but we’ll find it faster if we speak the name.
“Saying a name out loud is a powerful retrieval cue,” says Lupyan. “Think of it as a pointer to a chunk of information in your mind. Hearing the name exaggerates what might normally happen if you just bring something to mind. Language boosts that process.”
Feel better with self-talk
Anne Wilson Schaef, a former psychologist and now author and speaker, often encouraged her clients to speak to themselves. Not only did it improve her clients’ memories, but it also changed the way many of them felt. For instance, if a patient was angry, she’d tell them to say out loud what they were upset about. The anger would then disappear.
She believes it has something to do with who is listening to the words. “All of us need to talk to someone who’s interesting, intelligent, knows us well and is on our side and that’s us,” she says. “We’re probably the most interesting person we know. Knowing ourselves and how we feel can help us improve.”
We have to say the right words for this to work
Studies suggest that Schaef is onto something. In 2014, the University of Michigan’s Ethan Kross released a paper saying that self-talk can make us feel better about ourselves and instil a confidence that can help us get through tough challenges. However, we have to say the right words for this to work.
Kross, along with several colleagues, conducted a series of experiments that had people describe emotional experiences using their own names or words like “you,” “he” and “she.” He found that talking in the third or second person, helped people control their feelings and thoughts better than those who spoke in the first person.
In another study, Kross, who outlined his research in the Harvard Business Review, asked people to refer silently to themselves in the second or third person while preparing for a speech and found they were calmer, more confident and performed better on tasks than those who used only first-person words. The results were so profound, wrote Kross, that he now gets his young daughter to speak to herself in the third person when she is distressed.
Talking to ourselves has many other benefits. “Our findings are just a small part of a much larger, ongoing stream of research on self-talk, which is proving to have far-reaching implications. “Not only does non-first-person self-talk help people perform better under stress and help them get control of their emotions, it also helps them reason more wisely.”
Improving muscle memory
While Gamble is not yet talking to himself in the third person – he finds it too strange – his coach has told him to repeat self-affirming comments out loud, such as “don’t do your best, do whatever it takes.” He has taken that advice to heart and says it works.
Self-talk has also helped him nail presentations
Self-talk has also helped him nail presentations. Before he meets with a wealthy investor he goes over his presentation out loud. Gamble first writes it down and then reads it out over and over again, fixing words he stumbles upon. By hearing himself speak, his can better organise his thoughts, he says. He also remembers the presentation better. “It’s muscle memory,” he says. “It’s like how I was taught to play the piano. I’d keep playing the entire piece until I could fix the weakness.”
Talking to ourselves out loud is sometimes frowned upon – and we may not want to chat constantly with ourselves in public – which is why most of us do not do it. Children do, however, and there is a lot of research that shows that self-talk among kids is an important part of their development. A 2008 study, for instance, found that five-year-olds who talk to themselves out loud do better at motor tasks than when they’re quiet.
Gamble believes he now has more confidence than ever. While there are other things that have contributed to his successful transformation from dentist to real-estate entrepreneur, talking out loud has certainly played a part.
“Sometimes I have to take a step back and say is this really happening? Is it really this effective?” he says. “I can tell you that I’m in a much better position now than I was in three years ago. Talking aloud has produced results.”
WHY HONG KONG IS TAKEN OVER BY WASTE
When I first meet Chan King Ming at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, it is difficult to imagine that the region is facing an environmental disaster. We are speaking on a crisp spring morning, in the leafy university campus in Hong Kong’s New Territories. Between the trees, I can see the harbour glistening under the gaze of the city’s skyscrapers and the steep climb of the mountains behind. There is not a single discarded plastic bottle or used newspaper in sight.
But appearances are deceptive. Hong Kong may be clean on the surface, but its public services are straining to keep a lid on its rubbish. Despite attempts to clean up its act, the region produced 3.7 million tonnes of municipal waste in 2015 – the highest figure for five years. It has already cycled through 13 landfill sites, which are now being repurposed as parks, golf courses, and sportsgrounds, with just three sites remaining open. At this rate, it will only be a matter of a few years before those too begin to overflow. “If Hong Kong continues in this way, we will reach breaking point by 2020,” says Chan – an estimate supported by Hong Kong’s own Environmental Protection Department.
Hong Kong could be a warning for many other countries, as more and more people feel the lure of city living
Chan is both an environmental scientist and a politician for the Neo Democrat Party of Hong Kong, experience that has given him an unparalleled view of the social, economic and technological difficulties of saving the city from this deluge. “We are moving in the direction of unsustainable urbanisation,” says Chan. And that could be a warning for other countries, as more and more people feel the lure of city living – meaning that environmentalists across the world will be watching Hong Kong’s next steps closely.
With around seven million people, crammed into an area of 2,000 square kilometres (772 sq miles), Hong Kong is currently the fourth most densely populated place in the world (after its neighbour, Macau, and Singapore and Monaco). With space at such a premium, there is precious little room to build new landfill sites.
Hong Kong's tourism now brings around 60 million additional people to the islands per year
Hong Kong’s tourism has only piled on the pressure. As the region’s industries moved to mainland China, the region made an active bid to attract more visitors from the mainland to boost its economy. It now brings around 60 million additional people to the islands per year (nearly seven times the permanent population), with around 70% coming from mainland China. Hong Kong’s cuisine and shopping malls are both among the key attractions, meaning that each of those visitors will generate a lot of additional food and packing waste. “We need them to boost our economy, but there are also drawbacks,” says Chan.
Compounding these problems is Hong Kong’s status as a ‘free economy’, which means that the government is reluctant to impose regulations that may threaten trade. “It’s supposed to be the most free economy in the world, so government officials try their best not to intervene in any way with our production lines, or consumer behaviours,” says Chan. For this reason, there is currently little legislation on product packaging, for instance, or any other measures that could reduce waste.
Operation Green Fence
Along with many other countries, Hong Kong had once offloaded some of its rubbish to mainland China for recycling. While Chinese businesses were able to make use of scrap metals, plastics, and rare metals in electronic goods, it also often came with unusable and contaminated leftovers (including food and medical waste) – creating further environmental issues for Chinese cities. As a result, the government decided to ban the importing of unprocessed materials – a move known as a “Green Fence” – in the hope that other countries would clean up their material before selling the valuable stuff.
Unfortunately, Hong Kong has not yet developed enough of its own recycling plants to compensate for the changing policy. “So stuff that would have been sent to China to be processed is just being put in the landfill,” says Doug Woodring, an environmental campaigner and co-founder of the Ocean Recovery Alliance, who I meet after my conversation with Chan.
The result is that despite repeated warnings, Hong Kong’s municipal waste had continued to grow over the last five years – and the government will need to act quickly before all the territory’s landfills have been exhausted.
The ‘trash glacier’
As if Hong Kong’s own waste wasn’t serious enough, its beaches have faced an increasing deluge of rubbish by sea. Environmentalists are unsure of the source, but it seems to come periodically with changing weather patterns. “We could be getting stuff from Taiwan coming down, and the Philippines and Vietnam coming up,” says Woodring. It may also be flowing from Mainland China – possibly through illegal dumping or seasonal floods that washed rubbish into the sea along the Pearl River Delta. “A lot of stuff has Chinese writing on it, but where it entered the water, you don’t really know.”
People in Hong Kong are also increasingly concerned about an illegal landfill on the Chinese island called Wailingding, around 20km south of Hong Kong. Some have compared it to a ‘trash glacier’ that keeps on sliding down the hill and into the sea. “That thing is twenty stories tall, that wall of trash. If there was a big typhoon, and it hit the right direction, the waves could come into the bottom and collapse the whole thing,” says Woodring. “It would be a natural disaster for Hong Kong.”
The Ocean Recovery Alliance has recently launched the Global Alert app. It allows people across the world to report rubbish hotspots in their rivers and on their coastlines, which Woodring hopes could bring greater international awareness to these issues and encourage local communities to take more responsibility. Simply tying bamboo across the width of a river can catch floating rubbish and make it easier to collect, he says – small steps that may make all our oceans a little cleaner.
One big step will be the introduction of a “waste charge”, which would force locals to pay around $0.11 Hong Kong dollars (around £0.01) for each litre of rubbish collected. The new legislation, announced earlier this year, should take effect by 2019, and the South China Morning Post estimates that it amounts to around $33-54 Hong Kong dollars (roughly £3-5) per household, per month. The legistlation’s proponents point across the sea to Taipei in Taiwan, and Seoul in South Korea, which both managed to reduce waste disposal by more than 30% using similar schemes.
Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department is also forging ahead with plans for a $10 billion dollar incinerator on Lantau (the largest of the territory’s islands, towards the south east of the region). Burning the waste should shrink it to around a tenth of its size. Even so, it can only burn so much waste – about 30% of the city’s total output overall, according to Chan’s estimates. The solution is far from popular with the locals, who are understandably concerned about the increased air pollution it may bring.
Chan is more enthusiastic about plans to build a food processing plant on Lantau, which would recycle waste from the commercial kitchens around the airport. He points out that horticulturists currently import a lot of their garden compost from as far away as the Netherlands – whereas the decomposed food waste would be a natural local source. Such plants may also produce biogas to fuel cars. “By our rough estimation, we’d need 20 factories of that size to deal with our food waste,” Chan says. “But I think it’s worth doing, because we need to recycle as much usable material as possible.”
The territory may also benefit from further e-waste ‘upcycling’ factories, allowing manufacturers to extract valuable raw materials for export – a move that could further boost Hong Kong’s economy. But these schemes need further government support, including a better system that forces families and businesses to separate the different kinds of waste – food, plastics, glass – at the source, before it is collected. “Right now that’s lacking,” Chan says.
The sheer volume of waste, coming from so many people, makes it too difficult to sort the good from the bad after collection. “The problem is that right now, everything is put in one bag – food, grease, and then your paper, then your plastic – and that neutralises the value of them all,” says Woodring. “Even if you sort wet waste from dry, it’s so much easier for anyone to get some value from it.”
Woodring would also like people and companies to calculate a “plastic footprint” – akin to the “carbon footprint” for greenhouse emissions – so that people are more conscious of the waste they are creating. “Because if you don’t know what you have, you don’t know how to manage it.”
As Chan and Woodring both point out, environmental measures do not need to challenge Hong Kong’s existing businesses: it can offer ways to generate new revenue. Woodring, for instance, points out that Pacific Coffee (one of the city’s ubiquitous US-style coffee houses) has recently implemented its own recycling scheme, where you can return your used lids in return for a free refill, which helps the company to collect recycled materials while also increasing customer loyalty. So far, these kinds of strategies are rare in Hong Kong, but it’s a move in the right direction, he says.
Chan’s impatience is clear throughout our conversation: the problem has been apparent for at least a decade, he says, but progress has been slow, with endless discussions in place of decisive policy. “We’ve wasted all this time.” As the deluge of rubbish continues to rise, inaction is now not an option.
Wednesday 26 April 2017
THE 'SILENT KILLER' OF AFRICA'S ALBINOS
On stage, Sixmond Mdeka goes by the name Ras Six. He is a successful reggae singer in his homeland of Tanzania, yet despite his fame, he is haunted by another name – East Africa Yellow Man.
Mdeka has albinism – his skin, hair and eyes lack melanin, the pigment that gives skin its colour and helps to protect it from damage by ultraviolet light from the Sun. It is a genetic disorder inherited from parents who both carry a faulty gene that prevents the skin from making melanin properly.
Tanzania has a dark relationship with albinism. Witch doctors hunt those suffering from the condition for their body parts, which are used in potions to bring good luck and wealth. Victims can be kidnapped and then dismembered by hired killers, or even sold by unscrupulous family members, with body parts fetching up to $75,000 (£60,000). The UN estimates around 80 people with albinism in Tanzania have been murdered since 2000.
But these brutal attacks are not the greatest threat to people with albinism in Africa. They face a slower death from a disease known as the “silent killer”. Without melanin to protect them, they have a much higher risk of getting skin cancer.
“When you have no melanin, no protection, you’re just getting dinged, these insults from the UV radiation, you’re getting it all the time. It’s not just when you’re at the beach,” says Dr Marc Glashofer, a fellow of the American Academy of Dermatology.
“The closer to the equator you are, the stronger the Sun, the stronger the rays, the more risk of skin cancer.”
Albinism groups say more than 90% of people with the condition in Africa die before they reach 40-years-old. Mdeka is that age now – and the clock is ticking on his life. Last September the singer needed an operation to remove a melanoma near his left ear. "Sun is our number one enemy," he says.
Sun is our number one enemy – Sixmond Mdeka
But in the shadow of Africa’s highest mountain, there is an attempt to give a lifeline to people like Mdeka. Kilimanjaro Suncare, or “Kilisun”, is a sunscreen that has been specially designed for people with albinism. However, getting it to the right people – and encouraging them to use it – is far from straightforward.
The Kilimanjaro Sunscreen Production Unit, based in Moshi on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro, produced 15,000 jars of Kilisun last year, says Mafalda Soto Valdes, the Spanish pharmacist who developed Kilisun with Tanzania’s Regional Dermatology Training Centre.
Wiping some of the cream on her hand, Soto Valdes explains how Kilisun is thicker than normal consumer products while also being more resistant to water and heat. It has an SPF (sun protection factor) of 30+, and the pharmacist says people with albinism need to put two milligrams per square inch of skin, twice a day.
That’s like a “tequila shot” of sunscreen for the exposed parts of the body says Glashofer, who thinks SPF 30+ is the minimum needed to protect people with albinism in Africa.
But using so much sunscreen so often is beyond the means of most people. "In Tanzania we’re talking about a country where 80% of the population lives with less than $1.50 a day,” says Soto Valdes. “And the cost of sunscreen is around $10, $15.”
That’s for a bottle of normal consumer sunscreen that lasts two months. Soto Valdes says a bottle giving the kind of protection people with albinism need can be as much as $20.
Most sunscreens in Africa are imported or donated. The continent’s largely black population has less need for protection because dark skin – which has more melanin – doesn’t burn as quickly.
The sunscreen industry in Tanzania, however, is growing to protect its albino population, which is greater than in most other parts of the continent. Although there have been no wide-ranging studies, it’s generally thought that around one in 1,400 people have albinism in Tanzania, while in most other parts of Africa it occurs in one in every 5,000 to 15,000 people. With a population of around 50 million people, that makes albinism a major public health issue in Tanzania. In Europe and North America, by comparison, albinism is estimated to only affect between one in 17,000 and one in 20,000 of the population.
When Kilisun came out in 2012 it was used to help 25 children. Now it’s given free to 2,800 people at clinics that take place every four months. Over half of those receiving the cream are children.
Mdeka’s family rejected him because of his white skin – he was seen as a curse and spent his childhood living on the streets
Mdeka can tell you that beating skin cancer starts when you’re young. His family rejected him because of his white skin – he was seen as a curse and spent his childhood living on the streets.
”I used to go all around the town without protective clothing,” he recalls. “I was burned by the Sun everywhere."
Life on the streets set Mdeka on a dangerous path, which led to the melanoma on his ear following his battle with the Sun.
Mdeka was able to get an operation for his melanoma at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Moshi, which is a general hospital. The only specialised hospital for cancer treatment in Tanzania is the Ocean Road Cancer Institute in the capital Dar es Salaam.
Children with albinism, and their parents, often don't know about the importance of wearing hats, sunglasses, long sleeves and sunscreen, says Peter Ash, a Canadian with albinism whose charity Under the Same Sun helped raise funds for the Kilisun factory in Moshi.
“We’ve actually had some parents who will take their children with albinism and put them out in the Sun to darken them up,” says Ash. “They’re trying to cause them to blend in and make them look normal. So they get all these dark-coloured lesions and they [the parents] think, ‘Oh good, they’re improving,’ when actually they’re getting skin cancer.”
The Kilisun team is trying to address this by spending time and funds educating sunscreen users and their families. They are also trying to teach health workers and teachers about the risks of skin cancer and the best way to protect against it, says Soto Valdes, as she continues her Kilisun demonstration.
The cream she wipes on her hand during her demonstration leaves a white smear – the robust formula, a water in oil emulsion, isn’t designed to look good and blend into the skin like most sunscreens.
That might limit Kilisun’s appeal in some parts of the world, says Dr Andrew Birnie, a dermatologist at East Kent Hospitals in the UK, but in Africa, “the mentality is that they want to be able to see and feel that they have something on.”
Kilisun doesn’t reach all parts of Tanzania – and finding funds to care for more people is one of Kilisun’s ongoing challenges. Mdeka uses his music to raise money to buy cream, hats and sunglasses for those who can’t afford them.
Skin cancer has killed most of the important people in the singer’s life: his mother, father, sister – and last year, his brother. “He knew how to protect himself,” says Mdeka. “But it’s very hard to sit in the shaded places waiting while [he didn’t] have anything to eat. He was not employed.”
Poverty trapped Mdeka’s brother in a vicious circle, as it does many people living with albinism in Africa
Poverty trapped Mdeka’s brother in a vicious circle, as it does many people living with albinism in Africa. “They end up working outside, peddling or trading or farming,” says Ikponwosa Ero, the UN Independent Expert on albinism. “And that exposes them to skin cancer.”
At the moment, Kilisun relies on donations from big corporations and international NGOs to continue providing cream to those who need it. The Tanzanian government also helps by providing staff.
Kilisun’s work is part of a growing understanding around Africa about the dangers of the Sun. In 2015, the government in neighbouring Kenya said it would spend around $1.5 million (£1.2 million) to provide free Sun care products to over 3,000 people with albinism. And earlier last year it was reported that a Senegal-based company had produced 5,000 sample bottles of a new sunscreen.
But having enough of the product and being able to distribute it to those in need are not the only challenges. Even if sunscreen were available all across Africa at an affordable price, some people with albinism might not use it.
Twenty-two-year old Ismaili Ally from Dar es Salaam could be one of those people. At the moment he prefers to visit a traditional healer, believing oils and ointments made from plants and trees are the best way to fend off skin cancer.
That’s where Vicky Ntetema, who runs Under the Same Sun in Tanzania, sees another vicious circle involving skin cancer. “It’s ironic that witch doctors are after them [people with albinism] and they will still go to witch doctors to find the cure for cancer,” she says.
Ally’s healer Abdul Aziz insists there’s a big difference between his traditional remedies and witchcraft. Ally uses the products to treat the damage the Sun has already done to his skin. “The medicines are good,” he says. “When I use them, the rashes and wounds dry up within one week.”
Soto Valdes, however, insists that prevention is always going to be better than a cure. She hopes the Tanzanian government will start buying Kilisun so the cream can reach all parts of the country. She also plans to take Kilisun to another African country – Malawi is one being considered – and bringing out a stronger cream with SPF 50+.
Gradually, albinism’s silent killer is starting to be heard.
