Like Real People (1)

I still remember the first time I walked among them in the humble day area of the hospital. Everywhere my eyes turned, I saw a new horror - a hand with no fingers, a foot with no toes, a face ravaged and torn as if attacked by a fierce animal. This leprosy ward in the midst of tropical Africa was one of the last places I'd ever imagined I'd visit, or would ever want to.

My wife, Rosemary, had been looking for a way to reach out while I was working at a nearby college, and she'd found it there - teaching leprosy patients and their children how to draw and paint. As she worked with them, many of these people produced amazing works of art out of the ugliness of their tragic lives. Bold colors, happy scenes. I wondered how any them could even imagine beauty.

Yet they were really just ordinary people in spite of their strange disease, which left them rejected and feared, just like the lepers in the Bible. Their families had abandoned them; their friends considered them as good as dead. Even the nurses wouldn’t touch them unless they had to, and then with gloves on so that skin wouldn’t touch skin.

One of the patients came to my wife a few weeks after she started teaching. He hesitated, then said, "I want you to know that we like you." He paused. "You make us feel like we're real people."

Even now it brings tears to my eyes to imagine these poor souls, who once had all the hopes and dreams of the rest of us, doomed to a future of losing their bodies, forsaken, denied even the comfort of a human touch. To be treated like a real person is something we expect, something we even demand. But for these people it was a totally unexpected blessing to have someone walk among them without gloves or mask and teach them about beauty without shrinking back from their ugliness.