Father Damien's Hands on Molokai

In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Damien De Veuster stepped off a cargo ship onto the rocky shore of Kalaupapa, a leper colony on the island of Molokai. The Hawaiian government had banished over eight hundred people there — men, women, children — to die in isolation. No doctor would come. No official would visit. The colony had no clean water system, no proper shelters, and graves that were little more than shallow ditches.…