Hawaii - James Michener [334]
If anyone in those years had wished to see humanity at its positive lowest, humanity wallowing in filth of its own creation, he would have had to visit Kalawao, for not only was the peninsula cursed by leprosy; it was also scarred by human stupidity. The peninsula had two sides, an eastern where cold winds blew and rain fell incessantly, and a western where the climate was both warm and congenial; but the leper colony had been started on the inclement eastern shore, and there the government insisted that it be kept while the kindly western shore remained unpopulated. The eastern location, being close to the towering cliffs, received its first sunlight late in the day and lost it early in the afternoon; but on the western slope there was adequate sun. Most ridiculous of all, even though the cliffs threw down a hundred waterfalls, none had been channeled into the leper settlement. At first a little had been brought down by an inadequate, tied-together pipe, but it had long since broken, so that all water had to be lugged by hand several miles, and often dying people with no kokuas to help them would spend their last four or five days pleading helplessly for a drink which they were never given. For six indifferent years no official in Honolulu found time to concern himself with such problems or allocate even miserly sums to their solution. In ancient times it had been said, "Out of sight, out of mind," and rarely in human history had this calloused apothegm been more concisely illustrated than at the Kalawao lazaretto. The government had decreed: "The lepers shall be banished," as if saying the words and imprisoning the leprous bodies somehow solved the problem.
IT WOULD NOT be fair, however, to say that during these appalling first years no one cared. Brave Christian ministers from other islands sometimes visited Kalawao to solemnize marriages of dying people who did not wish to live their last days in sin. Catholic priests and Mormon disciples occasionally made the rough crossing to the lazaretto, and their arrivals were remembered long after they had left. Dr. Whipple had come, at the age of seventy, to see what the settlement needed, and he reported: "Everything." At one point a group of religious lepers had actually started a church, and leafing through their treasured Bible had come upon that glowing passage of hope in which the Apostle John reported: "And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents: . . . He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam. ... He ... washed, and came seeing." The lepers called their church--it had no building, for Honolulu could spare no lumber--Siloama, and it kept their hope alive, for every leper was convinced that somewhere in the world there must be a pool of Siloam, or a medicine, or an unguent that would cure him.
Because Nyuk Tsin was pregnant, she escaped the attentions of Big Saul and his ruthless gang, but as her birth time approached she forgot him and suffered apprehensions of a different nature. For one thing, the lack of water troubled her, and she wondered what her husband would do when the baby came, for he had only one small receptacle for water and no fire at which to heat it. Mun Ki promised: "I'll ask some of the Hawaiian women to help, and they'll have buckets." But Big Saul would