When We Are Called to Part: Hope and Heartbreak in the Vanishing World of the Kalaupapa Leprosy Settlement by Brooke Jarvis

Author:Brooke Jarvis
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The Atavist
Published: 2013-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

Seven

For decades, there was no firm plan for what would happen to Kalaupapa once the last patient was gone. The National Park Service, which started operating on the peninsula in 1980, at the behest of patients who wanted the settlement’s history preserved, began formally drafting one only in 2009. Crafting the plan required striking a delicate balance: preserving the peninsula’s historical seclusion and sacred status while gradually opening it up to the outside world.

Kalaupapa and its residents had been a source of international fascination for the better part of a century—largely on account of Father Damien, whose story was the subject of books and films as early as the 1930s. As the process of canonizing Damien and Sister Marianne advanced in Rome, reporters and miracle seekers alike began to make pilgrimages to Kalaupapa. Over the course of a few decades, the settlement’s patients went from having their outgoing mail fumigated to receiving audiences with Pope John Paul II.

Ever since the patients of Kalaupapa had begun determining their own future in the late 1960s, however, they had carefully guarded their privacy. Many of the modern rules that keep Kalaupapa so isolated—the ban on children, the limits on outside visitors, even the prohibition against surfing (for fear that if residents could surf, outsiders would be tempted to sneak down the trail) had come not from administrators but from the patients themselves. Now the residents of the changeless town found themselves asked to face—and weigh in on—the imminent end of their world. Many simply wished that it would not end, that nothing would change. No development or commercialization, no hotels or camping. Many of them opposed the idea of unescorted visitors, or of visitors staying overnight; a few wanted to maintain the ban on children.

But the end was coming in any case. One of my Bay View Home neighbors was a park employee named JJ, whose job was to tag and organize items that would one day be displayed in a Kalaupapa museum—likely after the patients were gone and more visitors allowed to come. He was cataloging aloha shirts and orthopedic shoes, rosaries and photographs and wheelchairs, musical instruments and specialized tools designed by patients to make everyday tasks easier: opening a soda can, holding a spoon, turning a key, cutting with scissors. Eventually, the curatorial project claimed the foot-dressing chair from the Bay View porch, the one we used to sit on to watch the sunset. It was strange to see it years later, tagged, filed, and de-spidered in a temperature-controlled room filled with furniture and shelves of old prostheses, one of them with a shoe and sock still on it.

Inside a gray curatorial cabinet in another room, beneath a piece of protective white muslin, hung an old Kalaupapa Lions Club T-shirt that I was pretty sure was identical to ones still being worn around the settlement. On a low shelf, I noticed a cinder block that a resident had used to keep a car’s broken hood from flying open—it was painted with a dancing cartoon dog and the words “Hold Down Da Hood.

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