On her first night in India, Becky Douglas lay awake thinking about beggars. It was not just their mangled, leprous bodies that troubled her, but her own repulsion. Earlier that day, a woman had crawled on her belly toward Douglas' car, scratching at the tires to get her attention, and Douglas had tried to avert her eyes.
So, as she tossed and turned in her hotel that night, Douglas prayed. "'I'm just a housewife. Tell me what I should do.' And the thought came to me: 'You can at least look at them. You can at least acknowledge that they're suffering.' And the next day I did."
Six years later, Douglas is now a veteran activist fighting to end leprosy in India. The organization she started around her kitchen table now works with 20,000 people who live in 45 leprosy colonies, providing them with microloans, mobile health clinics and schools. This Sunday her Rising Star Outreach nonprofit will be featured in a PBS documentary, "Breaking the Curse," which will air on KUED-TV tonight at 6.
Douglas grew up in Utah, graduated from Skyline High School in 1970, went to college, married an Atlanta boy and settled down in Georgia to raise nine children. It was the death of her oldest daughter, Amber, that eventually led her to India.
Amber, who had suffered for years with bipolar disorder, committed suicide in 2000. When Douglas was cleaning out her daughter's dorm room she discovered that Amber had been sending part of her college money to orphans in India, so in lieu of flowers Douglas asked that Amber's friends and family donate money to the orphanage. It turned out to be so many gifts that the orphanage asked Douglas to be on its board. The next year she took her first trip to India.
Leprosy results from a microbacteria, a genetic propensity and a lowered immune system. But the disease's rotting flesh and disfigurement have for millennia led people to believe that people who contract it are being punished by God. India has outlawed the caste system, but "it's still alive and well," Douglas discovered, with Untouchables on the bottom rung. "Even their shadows are considered cursed."
When Douglas first started her nonprofit organization, she admits, she was afraid to touch the people she wanted to help. "Now we hug them and kiss them and high-five them. And the touch we give them is the greatest thing we can do."
Because they've always been ostracized, people with leprosy have long banded together in colonies — filthy places, with open sewers and no trash collection. Diets consist of rice and dirty water, further weakening their bodies. Because no one will hire them, the people in the colonies travel to bigger cities to beg. And because they beg, says Douglas, they know that the worse they look, the more success they'll have. Begging, she says, "reduces you to your worst possible self."
At first, Douglas and her volunteers took beans and saris into the colonies. "But it didn't take us long to figure out that if we fed them today we'd have to feed them tomorrow. It would be endless." And, too, the recipients were so ungrateful. The saris weren't the right color. Why weren't there more beans?
Not long after that, Douglas met Padma Venkataraman, daughter of a former president of India, herself an activist working to bring microlending to the leprosy colonies. The concept had been a hard sell in the beginning; in her first colony, nearly 450 people walked out on her when Venkataraman tried to explain how they could become self-sufficient.
Teaming up with Venkataraman, Rising Star has provided microloans to help start 1,000 tiny businesses in the colonies. Sometimes it's just $5 to buy a carpentry tool or a chicken. One man, whose leprosy had left him with two stumps for arms, took out a $30 loan to buy a teapot and two cups. Now he has a small business selling tea in a nearby village, to a shop whose owner used to shoo him away.
Thank heavens for greed, says Douglas, noting that the very people who once wouldn't go near a person with leprosy now are eager to do business — because the people in the colonies sell their products and services so cheaply. Which is not to say that there isn't still resistance, or that the logistics of setting up microbusinesses are easy (one simple loan to buy a cow, for example, also means hiring a veterinarian, building a well, planting a fodder field, building a fence around the field, and so on).
"Our goal is to end leprosy in this generation in India," says Douglas.
In addition to microlending, her volunteers run a mobile medical clinic to help with wound care, and also run children's homes and schools for nearly 1,000 children — "so they won't be the next generation of beggars," Douglas says. Unlike some organizations that run children's homes, she says, "we try to keep the families bonded," so that the children don't turn away in shame from their parents.
"We're light years away from getting those colonies into healthy places to live," says Douglas, who admits she gets impatient. "Becky, slowly, slowly," her friend Venkataraman always reminds her.
Nearly 100 Rising Star volunteers a year travel to the leprosy colonies to help. Leprosy, Douglas explains, requires prolonged contact and a compromised immune system to be contagious, and only 5 percent of the world's population is capable genetically of contracting the disease (Hawaiians are particularly susceptible).
Douglas will be heading back to India next week, her 23rd trip. "It's the most expensive thing I've ever done in my life," she says. Like everyone in the organization except a paid executive director, Douglas volunteers her time and pays for her airfare and other expenses.
She's had invitations to expand her program to other parts of India, as well as South America and Pakistan. And just this week she met with the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which wants to study how her program lifts depression.
Douglas has story after story of changed lives, including the one about the depressed woman in one of the colonies who sat in the corner of her hut all day with a gunnysack over her head. When a volunteer offered her a baby turkey to raise, she shooed it away. But the baby turkey persisted, pecking away at her sari until the woman picked it up. Today, the woman is a successful turkey farmer and has been voted leader of the colony.
"Madam, I am so happy," said the woman who had once been waiting to die. And she just bought herself two gold earrings, Douglas reports.
For more information: www.risingstaroutreach.org.
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com