In the space of 30 years he travelled a distance equal to 35 times around the world, visiting 102 countries and many out of the way islands where tourists never go. On one occasion in 1933, while he was working as a journalist in Africa his car broke down in Nigeria. There was only one possible source of help in an area of hundreds of miles – a leper colony! Quite by chance, this young journalist found himself thrown on the mercy of a group of wretches who were rotting on the fringes of the society that had cast them off. Their colony was like a concentration camp where they were compelled to live in misery, undernourished, badly housed and with only the most primitive sanitation. They were abandoned in these appalling conditions not out of cruelty but because of fear.
This man was Raoul Follereau and he recalls, “They were so kind and so happy. They were not at all terrifyingly ugly as they are made out to be. Some certainly were ugly, their features were rotting away, but many were fine beautiful people who showed little signs of the disease. It was on that day that I realised that there exists an unpardonable crime not intended for any punishment whatsoever, a crime without remedy or amnesty: leprosy,”
From then on this exuberant, fiery Frenchman plunged into the battle of trying to appeal to people’s conscience about the treatment of these unfortunate lepers whom he called “the saddest of oppressed minority of the world”. He set up an organisation known as the Order of Charity run from his own modest apartment in Paris by voluntary workers. “I set out to break down the criminal fear of leprosy which makes it impossible for them to be taken care of efficiently. My task is still to cure healthy people of their unreasonable fear. Another task for which I have been agitating for years is to get the lepers out of their prisons and put them into proper sanatoria. But we have still before us the tremendous task of caring for thousands of them who are treated like criminals forced to expiate some sin when the only crime they have committed is that they are ill.”
Born in Nevers in 1903, Follereau was a brilliant advocate at the Paris Bar and a playwright of great promise. He was a man of great courage who travelled more than anybody else in the world in the service of the most abandoned minority of the human race and was the greatest authority on the conditions of life of leprosy sufferers. According to a Japanese journalist, “he is the man in whom 15 million human beings have put all their hope and trust”.
He was an officer of the Legion d’Honneur, member of the Academy of Overseas Sciences, Laureate of the Academy of Moral and Political Science, winner of the Montyon Prize of the French Academy on two occasions and holder of the Medal of Honour of the city of Paris, as well as Commander of the Ordre de Merite National Francais. These are only some of the many distinctions he received for his one-man onslaught against the world’s most ancient and terror-ridden plagues – Hansen’s disease.
After the fall of France in the Second World War he became an anti-Nazi pamphleteer – active enough to get his name on the Gestapo’s wanted list for his outspoken criticism of their cruelty. He went into hiding in a nuns’ convent in the country near Lyon where the sisters hoped to establish a leper colony on the Ivory Coast. The lepers had been transported to a hell of an island in the river to live or die as they could and where the crocodiles made sure that they did not escape. These people were marked with the most horrible stigmata and, with putrefying and often bleeding hands, built shacks to shelter in. But the good nuns lacked the necessary funds to relieve the sufferings of these unfortunate people. “Let me raise the money,” said Follereau.
As a practising Catholic, Raoul Follereau was reminded of the passage in the Gospel of St Luke and could not remain indifferent: “Now a leper came to him, kneeling down and saying, ‘If you will, you can make me clean’. Jesus, moved with compassion, stretched out his hand, touched him and said, ‘I will, be cleaned’. As soon as he had spoken, immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed. And he took the Lord’s word to heart 'For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.’
After the war, Follereau wheedled Paris theatre owners into letting him have empty houses for free. A highly effective lecturer, he portrayed the miserable condition of lepers. He got radio stations to organise his “Hour of the Poor” on which listeners were asked to contribute one hour’s earnings a year. Some 46,000 people eventually joined Follereau’s Order of Charity. Their response climbed from £5,000 in the first year to 54,000. In four years he toured the world giving 1,200 conferences on behalf of the Ivory Coast lepers. Soon jeeps splashed through shallow rivers in central Africa delivering sulphone drugs, which suppress or cure the malady, and a 600-bed hospital was eventually built.
Then this energetic man began travelling round the world, a lone man against the accursed and hopeless disease with something like 15 million victims, always drumming on one thing – treat lepers like sick human beings, not like outcasts because leprosy is curable. On one trip he covered 62,000 miles in a hundred days, visiting forty leper centres and 50 hospitals. Estimates indicate that hundreds of thousands of lepers, once doomed, were returned to useful lives because of his efforts. Even so, he admitted that no more than a start had been made because less than a third of the world’s millions of victims were receiving treatment. This man has done more than any other to make the Afro-Asian countries believe in the good will of the West.
Since the 1980s, when WHO initiated its Leprosy Elimination Project, more than 14 million cases have been cured. However, the number of new cases being detected annually is raising the unanswered questions about the infection source, transmission, and incubation period of leprosy. In other words, why are so many new cases detected in the midst of such a dramatic drop in the numbers of people living with the disease? This may be attributed to a number of factors including intensified efforts in case detection, and/or high transmission of the disease in certain poor areas. Another question often asked is: How many people suffer from this disease today? Nobody knows exactly, because figures from countries where leprosy is a problem are both incomplete and unreliable. Approximately 6.5 million is a conservative estimate of the number affected by leprosy and only one in four is getting regular, effective treatment.
In 1954 Follereau founded World Leprosy Day, which is now celebrated in more than 140 countries on the last Sunday of January. He wished that day to be a powerhouse of love, bringing to the sick even more than considerable material help, the happiness and pride of being treated like men. But it was in 1946 that he founded the Order of Charity, nowadays more commonly known as the Raoul Follereau Foundation. This Order of Charity reached Malta in 1963, exactly 45 years ago. At present it is made up of some 1,500 members who each year make a donation that goes to help some 20 internationally-based and Maltese-sponsored organisations and missions which work directly among lepers in Third World countries. The sum collected amounts to about €20,000 which we would like to increase.
In 2009, this Order of Charity (Malta) came under the auspices of the Grand Priory of the Order of St Lazarus, the patron saint of lepers. This is an ancient Order that was founded in Palestine at the time of the Crusades to help and defend the pilgrims to the Holy Land. It also set up hospitals to cater for the lepers, a mission it is still doing today in many parts of the world to cure and eradicate leprosy, which, as already stated, is unfortunately still rampant. If you would like to become a member of the Order of Charity (Malta) and help this worthy cause, please send a donation to The Order of Charity, The Catholic Institute, Floriana FRN 1441. If you prefer, you can make use of a direct bank deposit through BOV San Gwann Branch, account name: Order of Charity 40018786910.