Father Damien and Kalaupapa

The peninsula of Kalaupapa sits on the north coast of Molokai, three miles wide and cut off from the rest of the island by sea cliffs that rise more than three thousand feet, among the tallest in the world. There is no road that does not require a descent of more than seventeen hundred feet. The Hawaiian government chose it in eighteen sixty-six precisely because it was a place that people could not easily leave.

Beginning that year, anyone in Hawaii diagnosed with leprosy, the disease now known as Hansen's disease, was subject to compulsory removal to Kalaupapa. Families were separated without legal process. People were transported by boat and put ashore. Over the following century, more than eight thousand people were sent to the peninsula. The majority were Native Hawaiian. Many were children. They did not choose to be there.

In eighteen seventy-three, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian Catholic priest named Joseph de Veuster arrived at Kalaupapa voluntarily. He was known as Father Damien. He built houses, organized sanitation, dug graves with his own hands, and dressed wounds. In eighteen eighty-four, he was diagnosed with leprosy. He died on April fifteenth, eighteen eighty-nine, at forty-nine years old, from the disease he had contracted among the people he had come to serve. Pope Benedict the Sixteenth canonized him on October eleventh, two thousand nine.

A Franciscan nun from New York named Marianne Cope arrived at Kalaupapa in eighteen eighty-eight, the year before Damien died, and served there for the next thirty-five years. She was canonized on October twenty-first, twenty twelve. A small number of people who were sent to Kalaupapa as patients lived out their full lives there and never left. As of the early twenty-twenties, a handful of elderly survivors still resided on the peninsula.