But even more important is the bravery that each of these individual women have shown in standing up and telling the world their stories so that other Africans can learn from them. The message they are trying to impart is a vital one for women in every country, not just the countries of the developing world. Your body is nothing to be ashamed of, do not be embarrassed to seek help if you are sick - it's not your fault, it really is better to lose a breast than to lose your life, and you will be no less of a woman for its removal.

Reading the individual stories I could not even begin to understand the struggles they endured in their attempts to seek treatment or the difficulties they faced. To hear one woman casually talk about traveling first to India for treatment, and being so sick she could barely walk, but coming home anyway because she couldn't afford to stay any longer was heartbreaking enough. That the same woman was only able to continue her treatments at home because she purchased the medicines required for treatment herself, was incomprehensible. For a person used to free access to fully equipped state of the art hospitals, it's impossible to even begin to understand the level of courage any of this required.

Brave Faces is not only a book of poetry and prose about the courage to live one's life to the fullest no matter what is thrown at you; it's also about people working together in common cause. Look at the opening pages of the book and who has paid for its development and creation. Everyone from the Prime Minister of Tanzania, who wrote the foreword to the book, private corporations like Avon and DHL, and medical professionals have come together on this project. Then there are the people who translated the book into both English and Swahili so it could be read all over Africa and around the world. Most important though, are the women themselves who volunteered to tell their stories, for without them there would be no book.

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the world after lung cancer, and the most common malignancy among women. The incidences of breast cancer have increased steadily from 1 in 20 women in 1960 to 1 in 7 in 2007. It is an epidemic among women and nobody knows why. The only positive is that if breast cancer is caught early enough, the chances of survival are high, which makes being able to comfortably talk about it and access to screening procedures vitally important.