Molokai History:
(from “The Separating Sickness: Ma’i Ho’oka’awale: Interviews with Exiled Leprosy Patients at Kalaupapa, Hawaii” by Ted Gugelyk and Milton Bloombaum, Ma’i Ho’oka’awale Foundation, Honolulu, HI, 1979)
(continued from yesterday)
The Long Road — from Papakolea to Kalaupapa to a University Degree
Part-Hawaiian Male
Blind
43 years old
31 years in confinement
On October 3, 1947, I was sent to Kalaupapa, because I had family there. The Board of Health sent anybody. Adults, children, anybody. If you were not responding to treatment, away you went. The same week I went, many other patients were also being transferred from Kalihi to Kalaupapa. A few years before that, patients were either sent on a steamer, or sometimes, on cattle barges. Yes, they were sometimes sent as steerage. But we were lucky. I had a one-way trip by air to Kalaupapa. Lawrence Judd was the administrator of the settlement at that time. He helped start the air service.
But when I arrived at Kalaupapa it was a surprise. I didn’t know what to expect. Kalaupapa was a real community, a small sleeping town. Everything was well kept, and I thought, there are so many cowboys and cowgirls here. You see, patients walked around the town with handkerchiefs around their necks. I thought they looked like cowboys in the movies. But they had had tracheotomies. So they wore the handkerchiefs around their necks to cover up the holes in their throats. It kept them breathing. But I thought, what a town, filled with cowboys and cowgirls!
Blessings, much pule and much pono to you from me,
Fr. Brian, ss.cc.
Priest
Topside Molokai