Hawaii’s Strictest Pandemic Policies Have Created A Lonely Existence For Kalaupapa’s Surviving ‘Outcasts’ … Kalaupapa’s last living leprosy patients confront state-mandated social isolation policies that continue to prohibit visits by family and friends.
Jutting out from perilously steep sea cliffs, Kalaupapa Peninsula is a remote windswept outpost with a difficult history as the place where thousands of people afflicted with Hansen’s disease were banished to live segregated from the rest of society.
Conditions were so deplorable in the early and mid-1800s that being cast off to Kalaupapa was synonymous with certain death.
Nine patients remain of the many former leprosy patients who chose to continue to live in Kalaupapa despite the 1969 repeal of the Hawaii law that exiled them there until death.
Ranging in age from 80 to 97, these last living patients reside in the former leprosy colony on Molokai with support from the Hawaii Department of Health, which provides them with furnished homes, nursing staff and stipends for food and clothing.
The settlement’s non-patient inhabitants have made strides to reconnect with the patients, holding their hands when they speak as a gentle reminder that society is no longer afraid of them.
