Kalaupapa: Home of the Heart
This excerpt from Sally-Jo Keala-o-Anuenue Bowman’s book, The Heart of Being Hawaiian, alternates between chronicling the experiences of Henry Nalaielua, a modern day Hansen's disease patient, and Father Damien, who ministered to the “leper colony” at Kalaupapa, Moloka‘i, from 1873 until his death in 1889 and will be canonized by the Catholic church this month on October 11, 2009.
Bowman met Nalaielua in 1993 by chance, and in 1995 he generously hosted her and a photographer at Kalaupapa for the purposes of writing the article excerpted here, published as “Kalaupapa: Home of the Heart” in Aloha magazine. Five years later, the two co-wrote No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa, a record Nalaielua's life. He was born in 1925 and passed away earlier this year, in April 2009, having spent most of his 84-year life at Kalaupapa, the home of his heart.
The rest of “Kalaupapa: Home of the Heart” can be found in The Heart of Being Hawaiian, a collection of Bowman’s articles and essays. Read more about Being Hawaiian here at HawaiiReaders.com.
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1995
This July day was insufferably hot in Honolulu. Henry Nalaielua sat perspiring at the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace, even though his chair was in the shade. He and some 500 others had listened all morning to prayers and hymns and speeches.
And then, near the end of the long ceremonies and ecumenical service, it was Nalaielua’s turn. The notes for his speech were under his ginger lei, in the pocket of his aloha shirt—his best blue one. He shuffled the few steps to the lei-draped lectern on hobbly feet that reminded him of his mission of honor. He had come to the palace from his home at Kalaupapa on Moloka‘i, where he was sent as a Hansen’s disease (leprosy) patient before World War II, and where he has lived most of his 70 years.
Up to that point, Nalaielua was sure he was going to use the notes. But all of a sudden something else came up in his mind. He couldn’t deliver his talk by looking at a piece of paper.
He rested his hands on the podium and looked up through his sunglasses. His resonant Hawaiian voice rang rich and warm as spontaneous words flowed out of his mouth from his heart, as if from a freshwater spring.
He spoke of a man long dead, a man he never knew, a man who nevertheless is his friend and neighbor and part of his daily consciousness—a Catholic priest who was beatified in Brussels just a month earlier, while Nalaielua watched in a chilling Belgian rain. Nalaielua spoke of Father Damien de Veuster, a man honored on this hot July day in Honolulu before his relic was to be returned to the remote peninsula of Kalaupapa, where he volunteered to serve leprosy patients who had been exiled there, and where he died in 1889.
Father Damien, Nalaielua said, “came, saw and conquered, not shrinking from what no one else wanted to do. Yes, he came, and yes, he delivered.” His message rolled through the crowd surrounding the palace bandstand. “And yes, he brought out the best in his fellow ladies and gentlemen of that time.”
The noise of the crowd rising from its folding chairs rippled in the still, hot air. It took Nalaielua a moment to realize that the standing ovation was for his words. Words from his heart.
* * *
Blessed Damien. This Catholic priest of the Order of the Sacred Hearts is so much the hero of all Hawai‘i that his statue stands as one of the state’s two choices for Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Beatified by Pope John Paul and titled “Blessed,” Damien is now but a single step from sainthood in the Catholic scheme of things. His feast day is May 10, the day in 1873 that he arrived at Kalawao, the village on the windward side of the Kalaupapa peninsula to which the kingdom of Hawai‘i condemned people with leprosy beginning in 1866 in a futile effort to stem an epidemic.
To the world at large, the 33-year-old Belgian priest soon became a celebrity. To Hawai‘i health authorities and his Catholic superiors in Honolulu, Damien became somewhat of a nuisance, badgering them for supplies and support. To the 600 residents at Kalawao, he became doctor, nurse, carpenter, engineer, farmer, legal advocate, plumber. And priest. In his first year at Kalawao, Damien dug 100 graves.
To the patients—the vast majority of them Hawaiian men—Damien was simply “Kamiano.” Though he contracted leprosy after 12 years at Kalawao and died of its complications, he triumphed over his chosen adversity by love and spirit and bigness of heart. That spirit pervades Kalaupapa today, in the very air whistling in from the sea, in a kind of mana that emanates from the land shadowed by the world’s tallest sea cliffs. Some of the five dozen patients remaining at Kalaupapa settlement freely give of their stories with the same bigness of heart as Kamiano.
* * *
One day in May 1936, a school nurse inspecting fourth graders in Ninole on the Big Island’s Hamakua Coast dismissed the class—except for Henry Nalaielua. She asked if he knew his home phone number.
“Yes,” said the boy. “Three longs and two shorts.”
She called the plantation house and talked to his mother.
Recalls Nalaielua, “That nurse gave me one look, and boom! I’d never heard of leprosy or knew I was sick. She told my mother they had three days to get me to the hospital in Honolulu. By the time I got home, my parents were crying.”
His father could go only as far as Kawaihae Harbor because of his duties as a sugar plantation luna. But his mother accompanied him to Honolulu’s Kalihi Hospital, a quarantined leprosy treatment station. The three of them left Ninole—“a two-horse town with a post office the size of a two-hole outhouse”—at one in the morning to reach the harbor by 5:30 a.m. There they had to wait to board the steamer while ranch hands from Waimea loaded cattle on the deck.
Nalaielua had had some fevers and pain, but now he didn’t feel sick. He looked in a mirror. He didn’t look sick. His mother wept, but he didn’t understand why—that he was embarking on a one-way trip, condemned for having an infectious disease for which there was no cure. Nalaielua was 10, and he was having an adventure. He still remembers the thrill of watching mounted men reining and spurring their horses this way and that, herding hundreds of cattle bawling and pawing and snorting in that dawn at Kawaihae. The scene was a boy’s dream come true. He recalls, “I’d never seen real cowboys before.”
* * *
Damien spent his first several weeks at Kalawao sleeping near Saint Philomena’s Church under a puhala, a pandanus tree, ignoring the scorpions, centipedes and other creatures living in the aerial roots at its base. He took his meals on a nearby flat rock, ignoring the insatiable wind and the cold shadows of the 3,000-foot cliffs rising a few hundred yards to mauka. In his book Holy Man: Father Damien of Moloka‘i, historian Gavan Daws describes Damien’s ministry as one “of ghastly sights and suffocating smells, of the most awful physical and spiritual misery.” Damien took up pipe smoking to combat the obnoxious odor of infected sores caused by the disease.
The four-square-mile peninsula of Kalaupapa, Daws wrote, was “an unlikely place for people to live...hard to get to, hard to get away from...a natural prison...in which a watcher could see what he wanted, beauty or desolation or both.” For his first decade on Moloka‘i, the courageous priest was the only non-patient in permanent residence.
Damien lost his repugnance for Hansen’s disease within two weeks. And he hardly had time to ponder either beauty or desolation in Kalaupapa, or ancient relics like abandoned taro terraces, rock windbreaks for sweet potatoes, or the rock boundary walls of the three ahupua‘a, the promontory’s land divisions. He simply plunged into his ministry in Kalaupapa with his hands, his carpenter hands, his farmer hands—for he had grown up a peasant on his family farm in Belgium. Kalawao’s tiny churches, the Catholic Saint Philomena’s and the Protestant Siloama, had drawn in some of the patients. But more had turned to drinking and crime.
Shelter for all of them was makeshift, and food, clothing and medicine scarce. They would pick up the little available medicine on fence posts, where visiting doctors would leave it to avoid physical contact with the patients, some of whom ridiculed the treatment as “medicine that doesn’t cure.” Some patients called the kingdom’s Board of Health, which oversaw the settlement, the “Board of Death.”
To Hawaiians, family and physical proximity are paramount. Patients—many turned in to authorities by bounty hunters who were paid $10 a head—often came with a kokua, a healthy family member electing lifetime exile as a companion and nurse. After 1873, those condemned noticed they had another friend—Damien, the priest who learned immediately to wash sores and change dressings. This priest, this haole, was the only one who would touch them.
* * *
Read more from Nalaielua’s own description of the ceremony mentioned at the opening of this excerpt.
Henry Nalaielua and Sally-Jo Bowman, co-authors of No Footprints in the Sand, at their book launch celebration.
Tags: Father Damien, Hansen's disease, Henry Nalaielua, Kalaupapa, Molokai, Sally-Jo Bowman
