October is here, and if nature chose brownish, yellow and orange colors to dress up before winter, many humans chose to wear pink. Pink is the color someone picked one day to represent the fight against breast cancer. And because someone else decided this cause would deserve a full month of communication, somehow they picked October.
I’ve been involved with an organization for 10 years now… the mission is to empower young people around the globe with breast health education and support. And of course, at The Keep A Breast Foundation, we have many events, campaigns, strategies, to reach out to as many young women as possible, in order to get them to know their body, love their boobies, and learn how to perform their self-exam, monthly, using our self-exam cards or Check Yourself! App. I love to log in in the back-end of our system and see how many people downloaded the App, where they are from, and try to find the story behind this App download. It is great to achieve goals, to see that your strategy in place actually works, and to tell yourself that by knowing how to do her self-exam, she’ll go see her doctor soon enough to be cured. But the best feeling I have is when I actually don’t know how I got where I’m at. It’s like when you go for a hike, you know what you expect to see, but you get lost, and you find the most impressive landscape you could have expected, or you end up in a hut in a village, welcomed by a tribe you couldn’t have met without getting lost.
Well sometimes, I see that our CheckYourself! App has been downloaded in India, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Yemen, in Viet-Nam… I have no control, and it is the best feeling to know that somehow, the mission I serve is impacting someone’s life: someone who has no access to education, someone in a place where October is anything but Pink, someone who won’t buy the Pink Organic Juicer benefiting a non-profit he never heard about. Someone who’s wondering if there is anything she can do to prevent breast cancer, because she loves and respects her precious life, loves her family, her friends. This consciousness she has, that yes she can have breast cancer, that it can happen at her young age, and that knowing her normal she can detect something wrong when/if it appears, this consciousness is a great example for all women around the globe. I wish I could meet her, tell you her story, how she performed her self-exam in a country where Pink October does not exist, in a country where women do not vote, do not drive, do not surf, do not get money for their work.
But I’m always telling myself “if that woman found the way to download our Keep A Breast App CheckYourself! , in a language that is not her native language, how come all other women having access to new technology does not?” It is just three clicks away from you reading this article. It is made for you, it is so simple, there is nothing to be afraid of, it is telling you to love yourself, to check yourself, once a month.
So, for “Pink October”, I’m not asking you to run in Pink so that we can send 20 000 self-exam cards to Morocco, I’m not asking you to make a donation to pay the traduction of our App in Wolof, or in Indie; I’m only asking you to download the CheckYourself! App, to schedule your monthly reminder, and to Check Yourself!. Because for The Keep A Breast Foundation, all breasts matter… even male’s !
