Leprosy Hospital
Photo by Julia Volk
The narrow road from Murree wound through the Himalayas, descending 7,500 feet onto the sweltering, Indus Plain. The journey in the back seat of a speeding mini-van left me nearly revisiting my breakfast. I was a high school freshman on a field trip to the Rawalpindi Leprosy Hospital.
Murree Christian School was a boarding school for children of missionaries stationed in Pakistan. My parents were atheists. My father worked as a civil engineer on the world's largest earth-filled dam that spanned the Indus river. He agreed to pay higher tuition for my older brother and me to get the best education possible. When fall term began, my mom gave me a bible, and I was relinquished to be raised and educated by strangers.
“Lights out, girls,” shouted my dorm mother.
Miss Rupe was closer to our age than most dorm parents, more like a big sister rather than a mother or aunt. Her hair was a short blonde afro, and her cheeks were always rosy from laughter.
“Big day tomorrow, girls. No funny business tonight,” she said.
In boarding school, there was always a funny business.
Watching pine shadows sway across the wall above my bunk bed, I wondered if my parents would approve of me visiting a leprosy hospital. Could I catch leprosy? What if a leper touched me? Jackals screamed like terrified babies outside my window. My stomach tightened.
It was a hot, dust-devil morning when we arrived on the outskirts of Rawalpindi. The city was a mirage in the distance, with interludes of camel and oxcarts. We stood outside the massive white-washed walls that surrounded the Rawalpindi Leprosy Hospital. Towering above, deep-green Himalayan cedars nearly touched a pale blue sky, their canopies full of bickering Hooded crows.
We wore our off-campus clothing. Out of respect for Muslim culture, modesty was mandatory for girls. Most of us wore blue jeans and long-sleeved shirts to hide our form. Some wore shalwar and kameez, the native attire: baggy pants, tunic, and headscarf. They were the American girls born onto the mission field, the ones who spoke Urdu and could blend in.
A crowd gathered; they always did. Blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin were their beacon. Men and children appeared from nowhere to gawk at us, but never the women.
The air smelled rank. I knew the stench of water buffalo bathing in stagnant water, dogs foraging through wet garbage, open sewers of urine and diesel, mixed with curry simmering over a fire fueled with cow dung. Those were the familiar aromas of Pakistan.
The hospital gate opened to a Western woman dressed in a pale green shalwar and kameez. A white scarf draped over her short, gray hair.
“Welcome to the oldest leprosy hospital in South Asia, founded in 1867,” she said. “My name is Miss Agatha.”
A polite woman in her fifties, Miss Agatha, wore oversized spectacles that magnified her eyes.
“Before we go in, I want to reassure everyone; you’re in no danger of contracting leprosy,” she said.
I still felt anxious.
Miss Agatha was one of the “Pindi-Sisters,” three women from a Christian sisterhood in Germany who had operated the hospital since the late 1960s.
Inside the main gate, the grounds were lush and shaded. Manicured pathways lined with marigolds and zinnias led to white-washed colonial buildings. It was a striking contrast to the miserable, outside world of dusty beige. We followed Miss Agatha to an encampment of tents.
“This is where our residents live,” she said.
I tried not to stare as we walked among the lepers.
All I saw were gaping-holes where noses used to be and twisted, gnarled lips. Nodules like mushrooms sprouted on their cheeks. I was horrified, yet I couldn’t stop gawking. Contorted hands wrapped in bandages kept flies from lapping infection. Without feet, lepers crawled, or they rode on the backs of others.
Miss Agatha told their stories of pain and suffering. Although doctors cured their leprosy and taught them how to care for themselves, they couldn’t change the way society treated them.
No longer contagious; the lepers could never return to their villages. They were shunned as unclean, eternally damned and forgotten.
A woman with empty eye sockets rested on her haunches in front of her tidy home. She pressed a lavender headscarf over her mouth with her fingerless stump and spoke quietly to Miss Agatha in Urdu.
“Girls, I would like you to meet Yasmine,” she said, massaging the woman’s stump.
Yasmine looked well beyond her years although she was twenty-six.
“Would you like to touch her?” said Miss Rupe.
I didn’t know how to respond.
“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered.
The woman’s stump felt dry and thick like leather in my sweaty hands.
Strapped to a crude wagon, a scruffy man with no legs darted between us. His hands, wrapped in dirty bandages, propelled his ride with dexterity.
A senior man stopped us, excited to demonstrate his walk. Afterward, Miss Agatha explained his joy. The hospital’s shoe center made him a therapeutic boot that fits over the end of his stump to even his gait, and now he could walk without stumbling.
Everywhere I looked, I saw hideous human beings. I felt repulsed yet drawn to them; somehow I wasn’t afraid.
I’d seen lepers in the city before, begging for money. Mostly I looked the other way, covering my mouth until it was safe to breathe. But now, I felt ashamed.
Inside their oasis, away from prying eyes like mine, the lepers flourished. They fell in love and married. Clean, uninfected children were born. They found their usefulness tending gardens or cleaning while others washed bandages.
After visiting clinical wards, we toured the laboratory. Through a microscope, leprosy bacteria looked unassuming to my untrained eyes, like tiny grains of rice. Miss Agatha said leprosy was one of the oldest diseases in the world. She called it the “painless disease” because of its numbing qualities that secretly devour the flesh; without pain, cuts and burns decayed, resulting in bleeding ulcers and loss of limbs.
The drive home to Murree Christian School was solemn. There was no singing, only the hum of our diesel engine climbing the Himalayas toward glacier-covered peaks. Far below, green terraces contoured the steep foothills until the tree-line returned to pine. The air felt crisp again. It was clean air, and I couldn’t get enough. After rounding the last curve, the familiar old British Garrison Church that housed my school appeared and I was glad to be home.
Thirty years after visiting the Rawalpindi Leprosy Hospital, I contacted Miss Rupe through Facebook. Struggling to find a deeper meaning to my haunting experience, I asked her why she took me to see the lepers at such an impressionable age. She wrote that it was a privilege to have physical contact with those who had suffered much and put their gnarled hands in the hands of Christ.
I understood. It was never about me touching the leper; it was how the leper had touched me.
