Photo Essay

For anyone who is interested, I have posted a short photo essay on leprosy at www.americanphotojournalist.com (search my name under "portfolios"). Comments would be most welcome!

A Different View of Leprosy

Spent the last week visiting remote villages in the state of Orissa, about 700 kms south of Calcutta. What an experience to travel to rural places and photograph leprosy cases in their homes and places of work. The treatment and support services are fully integrated into the health care system and I witnessed an incredible commitment to the elimination of this disease from the state leprosy officer all the way down to the volunteer health care workers in the villages. I wasn't prepared for how physically hard this project would be. We spent on average 12 hours a day visiting communities on bad roads and temperatures of 35 to 40 degrees. It was all worth it. The face of leprosy is very different in the communities. The stigma related to the disease is slowly being replaced community support. Photographs will be posted when I get back to Toronto.

An Afternoon In The Community

I spent the afternoon on the back of a motorcycle visiting the communities surrounding the hospital. The objective was to photograph people who had been cured and who were living a normal life (a rarity before free multiple drug therapy was available). I visited a tea-seller. Noone knows that he had leprosy (if they did, they would stop buying his tea) and so I pretended to be a tourist, which meant taking photos of everyone in the village also. The tea seller treated his disease early, and therefore, there is no sign of deformity. He is able to live normally in the community without anyone suspecting that he had leprosy. His tea selling business was funded partly by a grant from The Leprosy Mission.

Just Another Day At The Leprosy Mission

Spent the morning taking portraits of patients at the leprosy mission. Their stories are fascinating and sad. Photographed one man who was a farmer and had been away from his family for 10 months. When I asked him about his future, he was worried about this time gap and whether his family would want him back. Sometimes, leprosy patients are not wanted by their families, because in tight knit rural communities, the family is often alienated as much as the leprosy sufferer. Therefore, either the whole family moves to another community or the person with leporosy is sent away. There are some real success stories in the hospital too. The trick is catch the disease early before there is any sign of deformity. Even slight deformities can be corrected by surgery and I spent the afternoon in "greens" photographing an incredibly complex hand operation. The hand is cut across the palm and the tendon of each finger is tightened or loosened to correct the hand deformity. Badly damaged tendons are fixed by grafting a tendon from a different part of the hand - called a tendon transfer. All this is done with minimal facilities and few staff. A prayer is said before each operation.

First Day in Leprosy Hospital

Spent the day at The Leprsosy Mission Hospital just outside Delhi. Hospitals are still situated outside cities because of the stigma attached to leprosy. Despite their terrible suffering, most patients would Nameste and smile every time I walked into a room. Nobody objected to me taking photographs despite their terrible deformities. The hospital is situated in the middle of several leprosy colonies. Colonies are the only place these people can go after being cast-out by the families. They are totally self-sufficient communities within communities. The suffering is devastating. The Mission Hosptial specializes in reconstructive surgery and physical rehabilitation in addition to drug distribution and diagnosis. The staff nurses and doctors are simply incredible.