A pharmacist in Chile lives with albinism on her terms

Mafalda Soto Valdés dispenses medication and answers patient questions from behind a pharmacy counter. She also has albinism, and the two facts coexist without contradiction in her daily life.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, through the mandate of the Independent Expert on Albinism, published her account as part of an ongoing series of personal testimonies from people with albinism around the world. The series documents the lived realities that statistics and policy reports rarely reach.

Soto Valdés describes navigating a profession built around close visual work — reading labels, verifying dosages, tracking small print — with the low vision that albinism typically involves, according to the OHCHR account. The specific accommodations she uses, and the colleagues or institutions that have helped or hindered her, are details the source holds. What the account makes clear, according to OHCHR, is that she built her career without waiting for the conditions around her to change first.

Her story is one entry in a record the Independent Expert has been assembling across countries and contexts. The mandate, created by the UN Human Rights Council, was established in part because the experiences of people with albinism — particularly in professional and educational life — remain poorly documented at the international level.

Chile is not among the countries most frequently cited in UN albinism reporting, which has tended to focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and the ritual attacks documented there. Soto Valdés's account adds a different geography and a different register: the quieter, daily negotiations of living with a visible condition in a professional environment where visibility and precision both matter.

The Independent Expert's testimony series does not frame its subjects as exceptional. It frames them as people whose experiences carry information the world needs.