Today has been absolutely AMAZING so far. My group was assigned to do medical work, so after about a 2 hour drive in a (somewhat) air conditioned van we found ourselves in the smallest colony that RSO works with, called Moot. Once a colony with forty leprosy patients, it is now down to about seven or eight, loosing the rest to this horrible disease. One of the women who lived there did not have leprosy herself but had committed herself to life in a leprosy colony anyways, because her husband has it and she did not want to leave in. Learning this helped us see what a truly wonderful person she is because staying with a leprosy infected spouse is not common in India, in fact it is almost unheard of. There are so many negative stigmas associated with having leprosy that most people are completely abandoned by all friends, loved ones, and family upon contracting the disease. To see that this woman (whose name I cannot remember at the moment) stay with her husband, despite everything that society in India told her to do, speaks to what an amazing woman she is.

Going to Moot and seeing how these people live their lives and yet how happy they are was a very humbling experience. Each couple lives in a two bedroom house that is no bigger than my bedroom. They survive off of rice, that RSO brings them every two weeks and water that has not been purified. Most of them are missing limbs, whether it be legs or arms or both, and all of them have at least begun to loose their fingers. And yet through all of that they are still some of the happiest people I have ever met. They were so excited to see that the volunteers were coming today, each of them greeting us as we stepped off the van, hugging us and kissing our hands. One man, whose name is JayRaj, did not stop singing, dancing, and laughing the entire time we were there. He probably knows a total of eight English words and yet he still had us busting up laughing with his jokes. It literally brought me to tears to see a man with absolutely nothing and no one still be in such high spirits and so happy. It was obvious that he is the one in the colony who keeps all of them alive, all of them happy, and all of them proud of who they are.

Here is just a quick idea of what we were doing on the medical team today: we set up stations outside their homes where each patient could get their monthly (? i think they are visited about once or twice a month) check ups. Each station did something different for them. I took their blood sugar, which meant pricking their fingers (if they had one) which was a little bit difficult to do. The other stations took blood pressure, washed their wounds and oiled them, trimmed their fingers and toe nails, and bandaged them.

I felt so much love and gratitude today when I was in Moot, both from the other volunteers and the leprosy patients. Having a woman, who weighs no more than forty lbs and moves by lifting herself with her hands because she no longer has any feet, kiss my hands and thank me for helping her get a drink of water is probably the strongest love I have ever felt from someone. I never want to forget this day or the people that I met. I am so grateful for them and for what they taught me because in many ways I think that they have done more for me than I could ever do for them.