Father Damien and the Colony at Molokai

In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Damien De Veuster stepped off a cargo ship onto the shores of Molokai, Hawaii. He had volunteered for an assignment no one else wanted — to serve the leper colony at Kalaupapa, where the Hawaiian government had exiled hundreds of men, women, and children suffering from Hansen's disease. The colony had no doctor, no proper shelter, and no one willing to touch the afflicted.…