Hello there.

I've got some very special people for you to meet „
EAMONN ANDREWS, appealing on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday 29 January told us that they belong to a very special world. the world of leprosy. Putting their stories together would make a strange This is your Life". Much of it is a sad. sad tale. And then comes an almost miraculous turn in their lives bringing yringoiuny incredible happiness. You come into the story too. That happiness is going to depend a bit o Deep in the heart of the African bushland a missionary chanced on a forest clearing. Amongst the trees stood twelve shelters made of mud and palm branches. Slowly, painfully the people emerged from the shelters. There were 45 of them and every single one, man, woman and child was a leper.
Leprosy had worked all its ravages on them. Destroyed limbs and features. Utter destitution. Their water supply a muddy hole. Their food a few vegetables and a little rice. Their shelters were filthy. They had been there for years, rejected, unknown, uncared for.
Care for the 45 began forthwith from the nearest leprosy centre, many miles away. A stretch of swampy land was drained and good food grown on it. A well was dug. Clean wattle huts were built. Rags were replaced with clothing. Sandals fitted to ulcerated feet. Some would need carrying to the centre for surgery. Some would need artificial limbs.
But they needed not only medical care but also friendship. They were outcasts. They had lost all human dignity. The caring process took four years. The tragedy is that only a fraction of the victims of leprosy can be helped. A single leprosy centre may have 6,000 or more victims of leprosy to look after with more and more being discovered month by month. There are 15 million victims of leprosy in the world today. Twelve million of them are getting no attention whatever.
The doctors and mission workers can't possibly cope. Worse, they often have to turn people away from the dispensaries. And why? Because their stock of medical supplies is exhausted and ... there's no money left to buy more. And delay means losing the battle against leprosy. I've got a letter here. A letter from the field, so to speak. I'd like to read you a bit of it. See what you think of it. "What hits you hardest", it reads, "is to see what leprosy does to a little child. A mark appears on the child's arm — you know what that means — and you watch and watch with dread for the first signs of the ravages of leprosy on the little fingers and face. And you look round at the old, old leprosy sufferers with their faces like masks and their fingerless hands and ruined limbs. And you try not to picture the kind of life that awaits that child. The agony of it is that it need not be."
It need not be. These leprosy workers reckon that for every ten pounds scraped together they could save a child from the misery of a lifetime of leprosy. That's all ... TEN pounds. And this is where St. Francis Leprosy Guild comes in. It's an association of people who beg for the pounds that will save the victims of leprosy. It was started incidentally, at the end of the last century by a young London woman, Kate Marsden, who was touched and horrified by what she had seen on her travels. Today the Guild answers appeals for help from over 100 leprosy centres around the world.
For the old there can be no cure. The years of their life are past recall. All they have to say about their lives as they look across the years is: I have been a leper.
We would start with the young. To slip a gift into one hand of a leprosy worker so that soon he might hold in the other the wonderful medicines that cure, and to say to some little Asian or African child: Look, little one, This is your life!
Send your gift to me. It will help to transform a life. r