Religion: The Lepers of Tala

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An Air Force chaplain went with some G.I.s on a sightseeing tour of the country around Manila. At a village called Tala, he saw a sight that horrified him. The people of Tala were all lepers.

These, thought the Rev. Anthony L. Hofstee, are surely the most unfortunate people on earth. He could not forget them. He wrote a prayer: "Dear Jesus... let me see in the need of the leper, Thy need; in his cry for help, Thy cry. Let me see in every leper, Thyself, O Lord, that I may always serve Thee through him." Five years later, his prayer was answered. Father Hofstee, after going home to the U.S. for his discharge, went back to Tala, to stay, he hopes, until he dies.

Tala is now the second biggest of the six leper colonies in the Philippines. There, 16 hours a day, six days a week, 48-year-old Dominican Father Hofstee lives and works among Tala's 938 men, 529 women and 225 children. He knows them all. Everywhere he goes—in markets, infirmaries, schools and streets—he stops to chat. For children he has jokes and candy. He cheers the men ("You're a bright boy; you should try and write stories to keep yourself busy") and joshes the women. "Ah, my pretty doll," he may say, "you're looking wonderful today." To an old crone with a shapeless, corroded face he will sing, "You are my sunshine."

Tuesday is Father Hofstee's day off. He climbs into his battered Dodge truck and bounces 20 miles south over the rough road to Manila, where he spends the day doing errands for his lepers, visiting their relations and raising money. The four years he has been there have made quite a difference in Tala. The village is a community now, instead of a human dump heap. Though the population has increased by more than 100%, the lepers are well housed and well fed, with a library, two schools, a nursery, weekly dances, movies and an elected government which Father Hofstee (a man not without humor) calls "the cleanest in the country."

But his transformation of Tala is not simply a matter of goods and services. More damaging than the disease itself, he thinks, is the leper's lonely sense of being abhorred, cast out and forgotten. Father Hofstee's chief effort is to give the lepers a real world of their own, with love |n it and bright things to hope for. If you ask Father Hofstee, he will tell you that Tala is the best thing that ever happened to him. Says he: "If you put me out of here, you cut my head off. This is my life, my whole self."