A Dream Comes True
Georgian's outreach to Indian lepers is bearing fruit

Bill Osinski - Staff
Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Chennai, India --- A woman with one good arm uses it to thresh cattle fodder with a scythe.

A carpenter who had thrown away his tools and turned to begging now runs a woodworking shop that employs 10 people and produces things like doors with intricate carvings of elephants, palm trees and Hindu goddesses.

Thirty thriving preschool children who had been scrounging for a life in the leprosy colonies of India now gaily bounce around a safe, clean boarding school, dancing the macarena before they eat a full evening meal.

Such small miracles have come from the shared vision of two women as different as America and India.

Becky Douglas, 52, of Gwinnett County, a former model, professional violinist and mother of nine children, first came to India a little more than three years ago. There was something in this vast land that had touched the heart of the daughter she had lost.

Padma Venkataraman grew up among the makers of modern Indian history. As a child, she played at the knees of India's liberator, Mohandas Gandhi. She has devoted her life to continuing the mission of service to the poor that motivated her father, Ramaswarmy Venkataraman, a former president of India and a colleague of Gandhi's.

Douglas has a deep passion for India's most impoverished people and a heart that aches for anyone who is suffering. Venkataraman, 62, has a track record of success in working with leprosy colonies and an ability to work within India's often arcane regulatory system. Together they form the nucleus of Rising Star Outreach, a charity agency with bases in two countries and one ambitious goal.

"I want to see the end of the leprosy colonies," Douglas said.

More than one person has asked Douglas what the heck she thinks she's doing, leaving her more than comfortable home in Peachtree Corners five or six times a year to attack a seemingly ineradicable problem on the other side of the world.

One time, she said, a board member of a charitable foundation she had gone to seeking money put the issue rather bluntly: "Do you have any qualifications to do the work with this large an amount?"

"No," Douglas replied, honestly revealing her lack of professional credentials in the charity field. "I'm a housewife."

She is, however, a housewife who knows how to get more than the dishes done.

Rising Star has been incorporated as a nonprofit agency for slightly less than a year. In that time, it has amassed assets approaching $1 million. Within the next two weeks, it will begin operating a mobile medical clinic that will serve leprosy patients in about 30 colonies scattered around the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Within two months, Rising Star expects to begin construction of a boarding school that will eventually have capacity for about 750 children from the leprosy colonies. Also, a second branch of the boarding school Rising Star now operates in Chennai for 30 3-to-5-year-olds will be opened as soon as a suitable facility can be found.

Most of the 30 children who live at the boarding school were with their families in the leprosy colonies when the devastating tsunamis hit Dec. 26. The water's surge stopped just short of the school building.

All this activity has made life pretty hectic in the Douglas household. Douglas and her husband, John, an international finance attorney, had seven children and then adopted two more.

In April 2000, their daughter Amber, then in her early 20s, committed suicide. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Douglas discovered that Amber had been making donations to an orphanage in India, so she went there in late 2001. What she saw compelled her to spend much of the next 2 1/2 years raising money for existing children's charities.

About a year and a half ago, Douglas met Venkataraman, who has spent about 15 years working in the leprosy colonies promoting self-help projects. The two decided that the only way they could run a children's home the way they wanted to was to start one themselves, and that the best way to help the children was to help improve the colonies where their families live.

"You have to attack it on all fronts, or nothing will work," Douglas said.

'The screaming colony'

That philosophy was illustrated on a recent tour of some of the leper colonies that Rising Star serves.

Douglas calls Puth Colony "the screaming colony."

When she started going there about six months ago, she explained, as soon as they pulled into the colony the people would start shouting things like "You didn't bring me the saris you promised!"

Puth is a dusty collection of huts about 40 miles outside Chennai. Some of its 50 or so families live under extensions of their thatched roofs, because the brick walls of their houses are crumbling.

Rising Star has provided seed money for several self-help ''micro-loans.'' The first loans to the people at Puth were made to buy livestock. Then, some fallow land around the colony was made available, and the residents started growing fodder for their cattle and, later, rice.

People whose main source of income had been begging are now earning. On the recent visit, people pointed out a woman who had been among the loudest and most persistent complainers; it was nearly dusk, and she had spent the whole day working in the fields, they said.

A leprosy patient named Saral, now a proud cow owner, said the colony has changed. "We were really hungry,'' she said. ''Now, we have enough."

An attachment to goats

At the Muth Colony, about 20 miles away, the residents are mostly elderly and unable to work. There, Rising Star supported micro-loans to buy a herd of 18 goats --- two for each of the nine residents of the collection of 20 or so brick-walled apartments. The residents pay a nearby villager to tend the goats while they are at pasture.

A Muth resident named Jay Raj said there are emotional benefits from owning the goats. "When the goats come back to us in the evening, it's like our children coming home," he explained.

A showplace of the Rising Star assistance projects is the Bharathapuram Colony, a village of about 500 people on a paved road about 50 miles southwest of Chennai.

Along the road in Bharathapuram is the shop of the man who used his loan to become a carpenter again, and the stall of one who started out selling eggplants and now runs the Indian village equivalent of a delicatessen.

A woman named Rani used money from a micro-loan to take up her former craft of making baskets and handbags. Her hands have become so weak that she needs a man to help her pull the plastic strands tight. Rani said she will give some of the proceeds from the handbags she made to the man who helped her, and she will make an offering to the gods.

Bharathapuram is so successful that it has graduated from micro-loans to regular bank loans. Also, members of the colony are using some of their money to build a new home for their elderly who can no longer work. The home is accepting some elderly leprosy patients from outside the colony --- former charity cases operating a charity.

"You show them how to do things, give them the support they need, and the sky's the limit," Venkataraman said.

Ostracism continues

Nevertheless, negative attitudes toward leprosy patients and their families persist, Venkataraman said. Despite medical progress against the disease, "Society isn't ready to accept them yet," she said.

But things are changing. Last week, while touring Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Hospital --- the hospital that will help operate Rising Star's mobile clinic --- Douglas saw a man she knew sitting on one of the beds.

It was Elumalai, a leprosy patient she had seen in pain three days earlier at Puth Colony. When she had seen the sores on his feet, she had made arrangements for him to be taken to the hospital in Chennai.

Elumalai smiled and told her he was feeling better and had been well treated. His case was the first under the cooperative agreement between Rising Star and the hospital.

"Oh, my gosh!" Douglas exclaimed, tears and a smile competing for face time. "My dream has come true."