Leproville

The Education Center is situated within an area belonging to a hospital called Masanga Leprosy Hospital. The name has its clear historical roots. Before the civil war lepers were expelled from their communities on account of the contamination risk. Homeless and discouraged many of them were left to their destiny in the jungles of Sierra Leone. At some point some of them had come together to make a simple home for themselves near Masanga.
They for found by the Seven Days Adventists from Denmark, who later build a hospital to treat the patients and a church to christen them. All of this was left empty at the outbreak of the 11 year war.
After the war a Danish doctor, Peter Bo, found himself with some leftover machines from his hospitals, which couldn’t be used in Denmark, but which he thought of being too good for throwing away, when people were suffering from lack of hospital equipment all over the world. After exploring the opportunities for this equipment he stumbled upon the left hospital-buildings in Masanga and decided to take action.
Today Masanga got a well functioning hospital seeing over 200 patients a day without charges (unlike other hospitals in Sierra Leone). Also Masanga is home to a number of enterprises – such as a bike shop, a wood shop for carpenters, a tailor shop, a poultry farm etc. – the profits of which should ideally in the long run help to finance the hospital. And then there is us – to advance the level of knowledge among the locals.

Today the remnants of the leprosy community remain visible. All over Masanga you can meet people with deformed hands or feet. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the small ghost-like village of Leproville – a somewhat morbid name in my opinion. Leproville is a gathering of seven of so small cottages housing 12 lepers. Everyone here has suffered greatly – even for a Sierra Leonean. But yet it is a place of hospitality and hope. This is where I have made friends such as the blind Abdul Deen, who hopes to by a small piece of land this year to do agriculture (!!!) and the very talkative, wheel chaired Daniel Mansaray, who can’t wait to learn more about using a computer. Both have badly misshaped hands – but obstacles are there to be defeated, I guess.

This is where we bring the food that is left from our meals. We bring it there in a big bucket – like the ones you use for feeding hence. In a way it seems inhumane and cruel. But there is beauty to be found in this arrangement in my eyes. When we deliver the food, a leper woman is responsible for distributing the food – in the best socialistic manner – among the villagers. Greed doesn’t seem to be inhibiting towards this arrangement. Maybe I just haven’t witnessed it. Or maybe greed is more of a privilege of the rich.

The people condemned to life as ghosts in a ghost town – ghost to their families, ghosts to their old community and ghosts to the government – seems to be clinging to existence, and nourish at the hope of a better future. Leproville is definitely coming to life in my eyes.