More than 25 years ago, photojournalist Kate Geraghty travelled to Timor-Leste to document the struggles of the Timorese people as they wrestled back their independence from a decades-long, and often brutal, Indonesian occupation.

Last year, Geraghty returned to Timor-Leste, with health editor Kate Aubusson, where they witnessed a devastating legacy of this struggle: a deep, cultural tradition of withstanding pain.

Coupled with a shame about cancer, and a lack of resources, a diagnosis of cervical cancer often equals a death sentence in Timor-Leste. And this in a place only 85 minutes away by plane from Australia, which is on track to become the first country in the world to eliminate the cancer by 2035.

Today, Kate Geraghty and Kate Aubusson, on the Australian and Timorese medicos, who are helping the women of Timor-Leste fight this entirely preventable cancer.