Business Solutions Advisory and TVET Training Hub LETFED Africa Institute is turning beauticians and dressmakers into breast cancer champions as the month-long Pinktober Awareness draws to a close.
The hub has adopted dramas and advocacy materials to train these women to step down the education in their hairdressing salons and fashion houses.
The intervention which will be a mop up exercise for the breast cancer awareness month is to ensure that early detection and prevention education, reaches every woman.
With the staged dramas and presentations; the hairdressers and dressmakers acquired a practical appreciation of breast cancers to enable them sustain the breast cancer fight all year round.
Advocacy Nurse Alberta Nkrumah told Ultimate News how such interventions could help burst myths about the causes and treatment of breast cancers.
“They think it is a spiritual disease which can be healed with herbal medicine or by a chief priest or a man of God. Some of them also thought immediately you had the symptoms, it meant you were doomed for a surgery to remove the breast.”
“Through these teachings we have made them aware it isn’t that way.” She noted.
Out of 4000 women diagnosed with breast cancers annually in Ghana; 70% of cases are detected at the late malignant stage.
Aside the call for regular breast screening, Alberta Nkrumah called on women to pay close attention to these symptoms of discharges, visible dotty dents on the breast and abnormal lumps, for early attention.
Ebenezer Owu-Ewie Executive Director of LETFED AFRICA Institute, indicated that the outreach is to give back to the largely female population the institution trains and interacts with.
“With the kind of work we do, most of our beneficiaries are women. This year’s theme is ‘no one should face breast cancer alone’ and we want our women to understand that we are with them even if they get the cancer.”
“… But the most important thing is that they need to visit the hospital regularly for routine checkups because we need the breast in a good shape both for us and for them,” he admonished.
Beneficiaries pledged their resolve to step down the education in their dress making and hair dressing salons as their contribution to the fight against breast cancers.
A Salon owner, Hanah Manu indicated she had already begun sensitizing her clients about the need for regular breast screening to avert the possibility of harboring untreated cancers.
““This morning I begun speaking to people about noticing changes in their breasts. They need that for early care,” She indicated.
“Hence forth, I will be of help to anyone who complains but feels shy to talk about pains in their breasts,” a hairdresser Akosua Afrieyie assured.
Agustina Otoo, CEO of Kiki’s Beauty Salon told Ultimate News, “Television scenes about breast cancers SCARED ME. But I’ve come to learn; it is something that can be treated early.”
The beneficiary women were drawn from the Tafo; Pankrono and Buokrom communities.
By: inewslens.com/Ivan Heathcote – Fumador.
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