Carlo Torriani

SWARGA DWAR

The conversion of a catholic missionary

presented by

Card. Simon Pimenta

PIME Publications, PIME Regional House, Eluru - 534 0-07, A.P., India

A PROJECT FOR LEPROSY CONTROL

Letter No. 8, Bombay, September 1975

Dear Friends,

                    When I wrote to you last circular, I was in financial difficulties to start off that project for leprosy control with a minimum qualified staff. Many of you gave a generous answer. I bought a small ambulance and I could assure a salary to the staff. Now the program is in full swing.

Here is how it works. Our purpose is to discover the first sign of leprosy in those persons who are unaware of it. Leprosy starts with a small patch, whitish or reddish, without any pain or itch. That means that the bacillus of Hansen, the cause of leprosy, has started destroying the peripheral nerves below the skin. If treatment is taken immediately there will be no damage to more important nerves and no deformities. That is why we go house to house in the slums and screen all the persons we can find, particularly the children. For this we go in all the schools.

    For this work we have a doctor, a social worker and three paramedicals. Their salaries is the main expenditure in our budget.

    In the slums we also put up a hut or we hire one in which to have a weekly dispensary.

In Sion-Chunabhatti, for example, we have a big hut that people call Sangam, where in the morning we collect the children, in the afternoon we distribute medicines and do dressings, twice a week stitching class, and in the evening I do adult education as in Janata Colony.

When we did the first survey, we collected all the children of the slum. We got around 150. Many had never been to a school. When the schools started, in June, we convinced and succeeded enrolling sixty of them in the municipal school. Now, every morning, a man of the slum, John, collects the children and, in line, takes them to the school. For the younger we started a kindergarten in the Sangam, paying two literate young ladies to keep them busy in the morning. To all the children, with powder milk and other grains we receive from The Catholic Relief Service of USA, we give them a meal every day.

Many of them are children of leprosy patients, to them we give preventive medicines and we always keep them under observation. We are also thinking to put some of them in some boarding school.

If it is the will of God and with your continuos help, we will do also that. For now we are happy to send them to public school and do what we can.

    In the evening, always in the Sangam, we teach English and Tamil to the youth.

There are also consolations. When we see these sixty children, shabbily dressed, going out of the slum, in line, to the school, in our heart we feel it is a success. I see a symbol in that “going out of the slum in order”. School and education will help them to move out, for ever, of these appalling slums of Bombay.

    Greetings to all of you from all of us: Sr. Luigina, Sr. Julia, and Dr. Berardinelli, 53, just come from Italy, determined to spent his pension for the service of others.