Today I lost my favorite aunt, and here’s why.
Today my father is back from an urgent visit he made to his sister, my aunt, in Algeria. She just died from a breast cancer and my family is grieving. What I hate is that this situation could have been avoided. My aunt lives with a very narrow-minded husband in a very narrow-minded city in Algeria. There, women must obey to there husbands and they make the decisions. When she started to feel ill, he refused to take her to the doctor; he waited until it got really bad to finally take her there. She was finally diagnosed with a breast cancer at a really late stage where it spread everywhere. Today she’s not one of us anymore.
The reason why she died, at 35, is because in this part of the world, they are really narrow-minded, talking about breast-cancer is taboo, young girls aren’t taught anything about that, and there are no preventive campaign telling them to go to a cancer screening, and I don’t think they even exist there.
What I want to tell you today is to take everything seriously, she didn’t have the chance that is offered to us. If she lived in France, she could have gone to a screening mammography and she could have been diagnosed earlier. We are given a chance to make our life better and healthier, I would hate it that you miss it for a stupid reason; because you didn’t care, didn’t have the time or because it happens to others but not to me. She also lives in a world that isn’t as modern as ours, feminists have helped women’s conditions a lot but it isn’t enough. I really hope someday that the position of women will evolve there.
She left this world at an early age, 35, leaving behind here children with their father who doesn’t even care.
