How the U.S. got accused of sending canned goods that cause cancer (aka notes from the field)

For the most part we've been relatively well received by the different groups of women that our contact has been able to drum up from different settlements. We have them take a survey and after give a 10 minute presentation about breast cancer in the Bahamas and the importance of getting mammograms for early detection. Last night was a different story; it started off well enough, despite the fact that some of the participants were rather snarky and shrugged off any offer of help (some were looking blankly at their surveys for over 15 minutes) and would look at us and laugh behind their hands.

After the presentation, during question and answer time, a more outspoken lady with a mohawked, bleached stripe of hair running from her forhead to the nape of her neck, started to ask us why breast cancer was becoming so much more of a problem now. Without giving us any time to address her question, she started going into this rant about radiation and how foods from the U.S., including our produce, were making people sick; she claimed that the canned goods from the U.S., with their labels of "export only," were the reasons the Bahamas shouldn't buy food from the U.S., and that they never had this problem in her granny's day (I guess granny lived to be 92). She did a good job stirring up the crowd, which started getting heated and talking all at once, not giving us a chance to say that 1). it's way better to eat fresh vs. canned anyway, 2). a big part of the reason people are so fat and unhealthy here is because they don't eat any fruits and vegetables whatsoever (lay off the conch fritters people) and 3) that people should stop inbreeding in order to prevent the BRCA gene mutation from spreading (we'd never actually tell them to stop inbreeding but seriously, with such a small island and cousins marrying cousins, that's the bulk of the problem as far as genetics goes).

this is pretty much how I felt last night. via

Now I don't know about this whole U.S. "export only" thing, but maybe the reason why white stripe was so unhealthy is because she's a major smoker (believe me I could smell her and heard that phlegmy smokers cough). She also didn't feel any qualms about taking a huge plateful of the free cookies we have for after the presentation. In general, with a thing like cancer it's hard to give people one definitive reason for the cause, which many have found frustrating. I'm hoping that overall we at least reached one person in the crowd last night, and that we won't find ourselves run out of any more meetings.