The Priest Who Became Salt 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 remote peninsula on Molokai where the Hawaiian government had banished hundreds of people suffering from leprosy. No one was forced to go. Damien volunteered. What he found was a place the world had abandoned. The sick lay in makeshift shelters without clean water or medicine.…