Word: leper
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...pleased to read your Aug. 20 article on Father Hofstee at Tala. When I first heard of him, a few years ago, he was living in a makeshift hut in the leper colony, eating canned goods that he cooked over a portable stove. I hope your article will inspire some readers to assist him in the tremendous task he has assumed of rehabilitating these unfortunate people...
These, thought the Rev. Anthony L. Hofstee, are surely the most unfortunate people on earth. He could not forget them. He wrote a prayer: "Dear Jesus... let me see in the need of the leper, Thy need; in his cry for help, Thy cry. Let me see in every leper, Thyself, O Lord, that I may always serve Thee through him." Five years later, his prayer was answered. Father Hofstee, after going home to the U.S. for his discharge, went back to Tala, to stay, he hopes, until he dies...
Tala is now the second biggest of the six leper colonies in the Philippines. There, 16 hours a day, six days a week, 48-year-old Dominican Father Hofstee lives and works among Tala's 938 men, 529 women and 225 children. He knows them all. Everywhere he goes-in markets, infirmaries, schools and streets-he stops to chat. For children he has jokes and candy. He cheers the men ("You're a bright boy; you should try and write stories to keep yourself busy") and joshes the women. "Ah, my pretty doll...
...transformation of Tala is not simply a matter of goods and services. More damaging than the disease itself, he thinks, is the leper's lonely sense of being abhorred, cast out and forgotten. Father Hofstee's chief effort is to give the lepers a real world of their own, with love |n it and bright things to hope for. If you ask Father Hofstee, he will tell you that Tala is the best thing that ever happened to him. Says he: "If you put me out of here, you cut my head off. This is my life...
Pennsylvania found itself an athletic leper, and a pretty lonesome one. The college continued a token struggle for a few more weeks, but the outcome was obvious. The Quakers decided last Thursday to capitulate to the N.C.A.A. in preference to joining the National Professional Football League...