“I have stopped stepping out my house because every time I hear people say ‘look at you, what happened to your face, we cannot eat with you,’ I feel distraught and even more different than I actually am from the rest of the society,” said Shabana, a 30-year-old leper, hospitalised at Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre (MALC) in Karachi.

Leprosy remains one of the most stigmatised diseases across the globe, and Pakistan is no exception to this rhetoric. However, so many myths that engulf leprosy and lepers are quite untrue and need to be eradicated from the society.

On World Leprosy Day, I decided to take a tour of one of the biggest leprosy hospitals in Pakistan and met people who are no different than you and me. Their smiles and gratitude could not hide the pain and afflictions brought onto them when they are considered a pariah by their own families.

“Educated people do not show the disgust that they feel when they meet us but other people openly judge us for a disease which is not caused by of our own doings.” Said Reyaz-ul-Hasan, a 65-year-old man, who formerly served as a librarian, in one of the most renowned schools of the city.

The most common myth prevalent in the uneducated section of our society is that people who are ‘disliked’ by God face his wrath in the form of leprosy. However, what many people do not know, and the fact which I will reiterate, is that many of our prophets cured lepers which proves that God does not ‘hate’ lepers.

It is wise to say that leprosy is contagious but what many people do not know is that over 75 per cent of the people are born with a natural immunity towards the disease and can never catch it. Another interesting point is that once the disease is detected and the patient is administered with the appropriate medicines, he/she is unable to transmit the disease after 48-72 hours. Hence, any contact with a patient who is undergoing treatment is harmless.

It is necessary to mention also that many organisations have gradually started creating awareness about the issue, however, the stigma and fear is still present.

Dr Mataher Zia, a renowned leprologist working for MALC, narrated shocking stories in which people refrain from sharing the news of their disease with even their own children because revealing this information is distressing.

“A young female patient was disowned by her in-laws and husband because she had leprosy and developed some blisters on her face. Another patient committed suicide because she was not accepted back into her own family,” said Dr Zia.

We are still living in oblivion and refuse to accept the stark realities of life. Leprosy is more curable than diabetes and other chronic ailments, then why are we not giving lepers their due share in life and society.

It was extremely inspiring for me to meet the head of the cooking department at MALC. Pir Ali, who hails from Batagaram in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, is a rehabilitated leprosy patient who did not go back to his hometown and decided to stay back. For him serving the lepers is his own way of paying back to the society, one that ironically refuses to accept lepers.

Sultana from Peshawar was another success story who was diagnosed with leprosy at an early age. With no clear deformities she smiled and said, “I was an orphan and was brought to the hospital when I was young. I fell in love with a patient in the male ward and we got married.”

These courageous people, battling against the odds, were overwhelmingly ‘alive’ and happy to share their stories with me. The echoes of the head nurse shouting somewhere at the son of a patient to be more attentive and visit him more often, will sooner or later fade from my memory however this visit has left a mark on my soul. On the ride back from the hospital, I kept asking myself: “How can we be so cruel?”

Perhaps what struck me most was how none of the patients complained. Not a negative word was uttered about how they’ve been mistreated by their families and the society. However, on a departing note Reyaz-ul-Hasan said, “Everyone should be considerate towards other people. Even an animal can tell when his master is in pain and people who do not possess the capacity to be kind are carved out of stone.”