A dozen years before Jiji Jally was born in the Marshall Islands, the US conducted the Bravo test, the single largest aboveground nuclear detonation in the world.
The US’s nuclear bomb testing in the Marshall Islands amounted to the equivalent of detonating 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every single day for 12 years. The Bravo test on Bikini Atoll alone was the nuclear equivalent of more than 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.
Jally’s family, like hundreds of others, has lived with the scars of this ever since.
“Everybody I know in the Marshall Islands has stories of cancer in their families,” Jally, who lives in Tumwater, Washington where she works as a court and medical interpreter, told Truthout.
Her brother died in 2012, leaving behind his wife and two young boys. Given that he died in the Marshall Islands, which lacks any facilities to diagnose and treat cancer, the cause of his death is unknown. But Jally explained that he had a tumor, and believes it was from cancer.
“Then my cousin passed a few years ago, who was in her mid-thirties,” she added. “And she died of breast cancer, and left three boys and a girl behind.”
For Jally, working as a medical interpreter highlighted the health care disparity her Marshall Islands community faces, even here in the US. She has therefore become an advocate for their right to health care.
“People from the Marshall Islands are moving out of there looking for healthcare,” Jally said. “But some of them come to Washington and are told they don’t qualify for health insurance or health care. A Marshallese man in our community is undergoing chemo from his cancer that he got from the bombings, and now he has to stop his chemo because he can’t afford to continue the treatment. It’s really sad to me what we are having to go through just to get health care now, given what happened.”
The injustice of this is not lost on her or on others in her immediate community. However, most Americans have little understanding of what the…