The Leper Spy (15 page)

First I want you to know that I am happy to suffer in God's love…. For what joy can be greater? It would
not be human if I were to tell you that I am never otherwise for that would not be true. There are moments of unspeakable loneliness, of unexplained longings and yearnings and too many contretemps in which one's heart is tried to the core. But I feel that our Lord desires this strange hidden life for me for reasons I shall never know until He calls me Home. So I have made my oblation and only ask that He give me grace and strength enough to follow His will. I look forward to heaven and the thought keeps me forever joyous and young in heart.

But my companions are not so easily led like children as I am and are, I am afraid, grown bitter or despairing, futile or helpless, depraved or hateful. The rest are simply apathetic or cynically indifferent. The moral, physical, and spiritual degradation will bring a sob to your throat. I desire so much to be able to alleviate all this human misery, and wish, at least, to instill once more the feeling of hope and make their lives once more wholesome and brighter. But I am only one of them segregated and isolated, of myself, I can really do nothing. I need your help. Perhaps you will be our fairy godmother and with your magic wand help to make the leper's life less despairing, less miserable and ease the sense of futility in his heart. How wonderful that would be for us lepers! God bless you and love you Miss Marie, for your kind understanding and sympathy.

There used to be over six hundred lepers here, but during the Japanese regime, several hundred died of starvation or malnutrition. There are only ninety of us here right now. However, two hundred and fifty some are arriving sometime at the end of the month. The place will be overcrowded. As it is there are only ten run-down cottages, all leaks and broken shutters and one great longish building divided into two which serves as infirmaries
for the very sick and bed-ridden. All of the roofs need repairs, for more often than not, the rains come and the rotting wooden flooring is flooded and the poor, helpless patients get all huddled in one corner to escape getting drenched. There isn't a single decent bed. All of them are dirty, rusty, and sagging in all places, rickety and there isn't one thing that is not run down. The whole place is a disgrace.

Malaria abounds in this region and mosquito nets are truly a necessity. However the patients are so poor, most of them have neither decent mosquito netting, pillow, bed linen…. In fact, most of them are in rags. Food is terribly insufficient, but I guess this can be remedied as soon as things get to normal, or will it?

Medicine? Even that is not adequate. We have no laboratories here, we have not sufficient medical help, we have no complete medical instruments…. In short this is not a hospital…. It is a prison for the patients classed no better than common criminals.

Why does science, medical science, do everything for other diseases? Other hospitals have practically every necessity for their patients but the leper, as usual, gets the raw side. All the others must have this, must have that, but the leper can wait. Usually he waits in vain. They say the government is poor, yet it has funds for everything else otherwise. Why? Is it because the world has conspired against the leper? Because, once a leper, always a leper?

But I am being furious for nothing perhaps. I suppose the lot of the leper is like this. Or is it? Or should it be? Then, I want to do something about it. The administration thinks the leper is cursed … he is a hopeless element. Is the leper utterly to be blamed if he has learned to take the law in his hands, has become rebellious, covetous, nay, almost repulsive in his sense of values? Living
here, I have learned that perhaps the blame does not lie wholly on the leper himself…. The world should stop by for a few moments from its fast and turbulent pace and give the leper a passing glance. But the world has gone all smug and materialistic and the leper has become as a-grain-of-sand-in-a-mighty-ocean in insignificance … no one remembers that he exists. Yet, he is as human as anybody's next door neighbor and he is starved for solicitude and affection. Most of us here are completely abandoned and forsaken by our own families … the rest have no one.

We have no lights, no water, nothing to amuse us by way of recreation. I have tried to get us all together every Sunday afternoon to sing and tell stories. I have been begging from friends for a guitar, a ukulele, a mandolin, and a banjo, so we can make some music … we have nothing as yet. I'd like us to have a radio with phonograph and records (popular and classical music)…. I have been begging for game sets like chess, ping-pong, badminton, volley ball, basket ball, backgammon, checkers, etc., books to read, comics, papers…. Oh Miss Marie, if you could see how hungry my lepers are for these things … poor ones, all they have is an old, out-of-tune harmonica…. Please wave your magic wand and send us at least a guitar and a set of dominoes to play with and if your magic wand can work wonders and produce most of these things, all we can do is say “thank you” from the bottom of our hearts. We shall never be able to repay you in this world, but Our Lord is never outdone in generosity … we can only keep you in our prayers. I shall keep you always in mine.

I am afraid I have tired you with this dull monologue of our petty troubles and wants, but we are in need of a true friend. I was assured that you would be and if I have imposed on your charity, I beg that you understand and forgive my audacity. I am a little girl at heart … I have
only spoken in utter disregard to Miss Emily Post…. I'm afraid I have no conventions. I say what I want and feel … please excuse me.

Some day soon I hope you will come to our lovely country, no longer very lovely because of the ravages of war, but the countryside is still verdant and green after the rains … some of it is still very lovely anyway. We look forward to better times.

My own home with everything in it is gone up in smoke and the few pieces of clothes I have are generous gifts from friends. I have lost the little I have but no matter … some of us in this crazy world are asked to offer some sacrifice. But our good God sustains us in all our troubles and vicissitudes and He makes us suffer according to our ability to bear them without losing patience or faith. He knows the destiny of our souls as it were.

And now really I mustn't go on tiring you this way. Please write, won't you and tell me all about your work and yourself. I hope my narrative hasn't made your heart heavy … I have not meant to be inconsiderate.

Goodbye then and our Lord bless you and keep you.

As ever sincerely in the Hearts of Jesus and Mary,
Joey Guerrero

When Marie Dachauer received the letter, she forwarded it to Father Abbot Paul at the only US leprosarium, in a little backwater town called Carville, Louisiana. Father Paul in turn passed it along to Ann Page, a patient at Carville who was on the staff of the patient newsletter, the
Star,
which had an impressive nationwide circulation and emblazoned its mission on the masthead of every issue:
Radiating the Light of Truth on Hansen's Disease.
Ann Page wasted no time in sharing the letter with her friends at Carville, who began to organize a drive to deliver clothes, linens, and games to their peers on the other side of the earth.

“We felt we had to help,” Page would say.

The patients came forward with apparel, games, books, and magazines. The Filipino patients paid the shipping charges on the first boxes.

Page wrote back to Dachauer, asking for Joey's address so they could send the goods. Then she wrote to Joey directly, being careful not to sound pitiful. As desperate as Joey's situation sounded, Page knew there were promising discoveries being made in the treatment of leprosy, and most of them were happening right there at Carville.

November 5, 1945

Dear Joey,

Miss Marie Dachauer of Sacramento, Calif., has sent a copy of your letter to our resident Catholic Chaplain, Father Abbot Paul who in turn has furnished us with a copy of it. We read it with a great deal of interest as we, patients of the National Leprosarium, are deeply interested in victims of Hansen's disease all over the world. Your address was not on the letter so I am writing to Miss Dachauer and enclosing this letter to you with the request that she send it on to you.

I am known in Carville as Ann Page. I have been here for a number of years and am employed as the school teacher and librarian.
The Star
is our monthly magazine, printed and edited entirely by patients. As soon as you furnish us with a more complete mailing address we want to send it to you regularly so that you can be posted on everything that is going on here and all that we know about the new drugs.

We also wish to send some games and books to the patients at your hospital. We have more than we need of these things and it is a pleasure to share them with you good folks. Our Medical Officer in Charge has consented
to our sending these things to you. We are constantly trying to contact English speaking patients and to bring patients of different colonies into correspondence with each other. We feel that all of us have a mutual bond and that we are better off for being in touch with each other. Is it difficult to get things mailed to your hospital? By that I mean is there a regular system of mail delivery. We receive our mail daily here but you spoke of the inaccessibility of your home and the terrible roads to it.

Diasone is used here on a number of patients. Those patients able to tolerate it seem to respond. Streptomycin is not used because there is not enough of it available to even supply the needs of the armed forces. Promin is given to some 125 of us by daily intravenous injections. They have been using this for something over 4 years and it definitely has been beneficial. The health of the average patient now is far better than it had been before the Promin treatment. With both Promin and Diasone the blood count must be watched closely. We are given blood counts every third week. The red blood cells are prone to be broken down and to avoid this we are constantly given vitamins. If our blood does drop we are taken off of the shots until it rebuilds. This has been wonderful in preventing total blindness where it has been given soon enough. For acute red eyes penicillin is given in large doses for a couple of days and where the pain used to continue for months now it is over in a day or two. Victims of Hansen's disease must take courage now for while we have had the treatment already it will come to each and every one of you.

Mr. Perry Burgess, President of the Leonard Wood Memorial, will leave for Manila this month. He is being sent a copy of your letter and we are asking him to look you up and see what can be done for you people in a
medical way at least. Housing, etc. will, I assume, have to be taken care of by your government.

Do let us hear from you, Joey, and remember to tell the patients to take heart for our lot is not the black picture it once was—science is rapidly moving forward in our behalf.

Our best wishes to you and your fellow patients.
Anne Page

The same day, Page wrote to Perry Burgess, whose offices were at 1 Madison Avenue in New York. Burgess's organization had been named after Leonard Wood, an American soldier who had served as governor general in the Philippines and greatly promoted the cause of the leper, spending nearly a third of the total public health budget in the islands trying to eradicate the disease. A decade after Wood's death in 1927, Burgess had written a book that told the story of an American soldier in a Philippine leper colony, and he made regular trips to visit colonies in the Philippines.

“From Joey's letter you can readily see that these people are desperately in need of help and we feel that the Leonard Wood Memorial can be of assistance, providing for some of their immediate physical needs,” Page wrote. “We hope that you will have the opportunity of personally visiting the particular place and we would like to have a first-hand report from you concerning conditions there. We realize, of course, that the entire Philippine set-up is in a deplorable post-war state.”

She informed him that packages weighing up to seventy pounds, if marked “Chaplain Supplies,” could be sent to the Philippines. Marie Dachauer was collecting mosquito netting, and Betty Martin, another patient at Carville, was trying to get her hands on musical instruments and books and magazines. Page apologized for being a burden and asked Burgess if he could lend a hand as well.

Burgess went to Tala, in Novaliches, to visit Joey the following week and reported back to Page and the Carville patients that all
was as bad if not worse than Joey had said and that Joey herself was a “lovely, cultured person.”

Soon Page heard directly from Joey, who still sounded in shock that a modern country, no matter how war-torn, would leave its most vulnerable cases in such awful conditions.

“During the Japanese regime and during the liberation, the horror, the massacre, the unspeakable devastation and ruin are beyond comprehension,” she wrote. “Then I came here to stay to find sick, crippled, starving people lying on pallets, pieces of straw on the floor, everything a filthy mess, the patients moving around like skeletons on strings, bundled or hardly covered with clothing, eating cats and dogs. When I saw these things it took every vestige of courage and stamina I had. I felt like just leaving the place in a great hurry. I have never seen a case of leprosy, except my own, until I went to Novaliches. You must know how I felt. Now everything is different because they all depend on me like little children. I have found great peace and happiness in this forced exile and everything about me has taught me to be a better person. I have become tolerant and understanding of others.”

Joey was working as a schoolteacher for the children at Novaliches, on top of ministering to the sick and burying the dead. The aid from Marie Dachauer and Ann Page and the patients at Carville, while helpful, had only lasted a short while. Joey's next appeal was to the Bureau of Health for medicine, but she was told they had no money.