Mother slowly breaking 'curse' in India

On her first night in India, Becky Douglas lay awake thinking about beggars. It was not just their mangled, leprous bodies that troubled her, but her own repulsion. Earlier that day, a woman had crawled on her belly toward Douglas' car, scratching at the tires to get her attention, and Douglas had tried to avert her eyes.

So, as she tossed and turned in her hotel that night, Douglas prayed. "'I'm just a housewife. Tell me what I should do.' And the thought came to me: 'You can at least look at them. You can at least acknowledge that they're suffering.' And the next day I did."

Six years later, Douglas is now a veteran activist fighting to end leprosy in India. The organization she started around her kitchen table now works with 20,000 people who live in 45 leprosy colonies, providing them with microloans, mobile health clinics and schools. This Sunday her Rising Star Outreach nonprofit will be featured in a PBS documentary, "Breaking the Curse," which will air on KUED-TV tonight at 6.

Douglas grew up in Utah, graduated from Skyline High School in 1970, went to college, married an Atlanta boy and settled down in Georgia to raise nine children. It was the death of her oldest daughter, Amber, that eventually led her to India.

Amber, who had suffered for years with bipolar disorder, committed suicide in 2000. When Douglas was cleaning out her daughter's dorm room she discovered that Amber had been sending part of her college money to orphans in India, so in lieu of flowers Douglas asked that Amber's friends and family donate money to the orphanage. It turned out to be so many gifts that the orphanage asked Douglas to be on its board. The next year she took her first trip to India.

Leprosy results from a microbacteria, a genetic propensity and a lowered immune system. But the disease's rotting flesh and disfigurement have for millennia led people to believe that people who contract it are being punished by God. India has outlawed the caste system, but "it's still alive and well," Douglas discovered, with Untouchables on the bottom rung. "Even their shadows are considered cursed."

When Douglas first started her nonprofit organization, she admits, she was afraid to touch the people she wanted to help. "Now we hug them and kiss them and high-five them. And the touch we give them is the greatest thing we can do."

Because they've always been ostracized, people with leprosy have long banded together in colonies — filthy places, with open sewers and no trash collection. Diets consist of rice and dirty water, further weakening their bodies. Because no one will hire them, the people in the colonies travel to bigger cities to beg. And because they beg, says Douglas, they know that the worse they look, the more success they'll have. Begging, she says, "reduces you to your worst possible self."

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