This week, we delivered noodles, cooking oil, laundry detergent, notebooks, and other much needed supplies to a community founded in the 1960s to quarantine people suffering from leprosy. Most of the current residents of the colony do not actually have leprosy themselves and are,instead, the descendants of the much older lepers who have been living in isolation at the colony for over forty years. As a result of the social stigma surrounding leprosy and those who come into close contact with people suffering from the disease, it is extremely difficult for these individuals and their families to incorporate themselves into mainstream society.

The struggle faced by the children at the Leper Colony, children whose futures are inescapably marred by the fate of their relatives, really hit me when we visited the community's small schoolhouse. Nothing other than social stigma separates these children from their city dwelling peers, but the lasting effects of widespread non-acceptance of colony members consequently leads to the children being treated as if they were lepers themselves; I felt great empathy with the sole female member of the fourth grade class, as I remember how important the companionship of girl friends was to me at that point in time in my life. As she will most likely never be accepted completely into mainstream society, this girl will probably never get to know this joy, an notion which deeply upsets and angers me. While I am very glad that we could provide the residents of the Leper Colony with much needed supplies, I also hope that the future will bring increased awareness to the continued injustices being served to the residents as a result of outdated and misinformed intolerance.

To get to the Leper Colony, we had to travel around half an hour by boat. It took a group effort to load all of the supplies, after which we discovered that, due to the weight of the goods, the boat was stuck on shore. Everyone got out and pushed though and we were finally on our way!
The boat ride to the colony itself was a breathtaking experience.
Undoubtedly, loading is always followed by unloading.
When we first arrived, it was truly eerie how desolate the area was. For the first half hour or so we spent there, I saw only dogs, no people.
Goods to be given out to the residents
Residents waiting for said goods!

The third, fourth, and fifth grade students are all taught in one classroom by one teacher.

Aside from being a wonderful opportunity to provide aid, the afternoon took on a bit of a more personal significance to me, as it dredged up memories from childhood that I had long since forgotten.

From the time I was five years old, my mom has traveled to India for six weeks nearly every summer to teach American law students studying abroad in the foothills of the Himalayas. When she first embarked on her yearly journeys in 1995, affordable and readily available trans-Atlantic communication was hard to come by; one or two brief phone calls made from stuffy STD booths surrounded on all sides by the bustling commotion of hill station life in Shimla were the extent of our familial contact in those earlier years (When I visited India in 2006, it was hard not to laugh at all of the signs advertising "STDs HERE". While venerial disease seeking folks might be disappointed, the acronym actually stands for Subscriber Trunk Dialing, or as we call it in the U.S., "Long Distance Phonecalls"). Conversations were collected and internalized in snippets,with my mom rapidly rattling off the details of her new and exciting daily life, details which were not only unfamiliar but also easily misunderstood as a result of the phone being passed quickly and often without warning from one daughter to another.

Under such compromising circumstances, it is understandable then how my initial confusion regarding the difference between leopards and lepers came about. While I have long since come to understand how the two nouns are unrelated (one being a furry jungle cat and the other a term for a person affected by the infectious disease leprosy), after this week's visit to the Leper Colony, I still stand by the bizarre logic inadvertantly espoused by the malapropism I coined at the tender age of five. I argue, half jokingly but mostly serious, that there are more similarities between lepers and leopards than the average person is willing to admit. I.e.: Both parties are endangered--leprosy is, most fortunately, close to being completely eradicated. Sadly, certain breeds of leopard, in particular the snow leopard, fare a similar but far more tragic fate. Also, both lepers and leopards tend to live, by choice or by force, in isolated environments far removed from the hustle and bustle of society. One more: when confronted by either a leopard or a person afflicted by leoprosy, people tend to avoid close contact.

I have no real intentions in arguing these similarities other than to make myself feel better about the fact that for years, I pictured my mother sharing meaningful character building moments with panthers and did not think there was anything wrong or strange about this. From all that I learned during our visit to the Leper colony and from the little I know about leopards, I think that it is safe to say that to be either a leper or a leopard is to endure a rather difficult fate.