We Lepers" — Father Damien's Chosen Kinship

In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Father Damien de Veuster stepped off a boat onto the rocky shore of Molokai, Hawaii. The island's Kalaupapa peninsula was a government-enforced leper colony — a place where eight hundred men, women, and children lived in exile, abandoned by nearly everyone they had ever loved. Damien chose to stay. He bandaged ulcerated wounds without gloves.…