A call

Just the other day I took a call from a lady from the main land at work asking about camping places and which island to go to for best camping sites.  I gave her all the information I know for Oahu camping sites. But told her if she wanted more peaceful setting to go to Molokai Island. She asked me more information and I don’t know if innocently or maybe just because I love history I told her to camp somewhere in Kauanakakai town and then maybe visit by mule ride to the Kalaupapa leper colony which is now a historical part of the island.  

The reaction I got was a bit disturbing. “Eww no! Are you serious real leper colony? I am not even going to go near that island than!” Are we still that ignorant to not understand what Kalaupapa and leprosy is all about?  In a midst of mixed anger and sadness, I proceeded to try and tell her what it really was all about, but she hung up as disgusted, as I was when I heard the dial tone.     I wish I could send her all the books I have read about Kalaupapa, and share with her my eagerness to learn of these people’s lives, how they were ruined by than an incurable disease.  Yes it was a scary, this mai’pake (Chinese disease) now known as the Hansen’s disease, but its curable now.  At the cost of so many lives of testing and institutionalizations of patients, the easier patients to test were the children who were given opium (sometimes on a daily basis) to anesthetize the pain of clipping a piece of their nostrils to research the a cure for the disease, than making them life time addicts. 

The point of it all is we have so many resources, nowadays that technology offers us to reach out and learn about the world, and maybe about our own surroundings. But we choose otherwise to fill our lives with materialistic things that cause  the ignorance and forgetting that there’s a history to learn.  Not only the history here in Hawaii but all over the world that we use to learn from our mistakes and those mistakes of others. But I guess the hardest lesson learned is that what we learn ourselves. I hope that lady learns someday.