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."

At first, Douglas and her volunteers took beans and saris into the colonies. "But it didn't take us long to figure out that if we fed them today we'd have to feed them tomorrow. It would be endless." And, too, the recipients were so ungrateful. The saris weren't the right color. Why weren't there more beans?

Not long after that, Douglas met Padma Venkataraman, daughter of a former president of India, herself an activist working to bring microlending to the leprosy colonies. The concept had been a hard sell in the beginning; in her first colony, nearly 450 people walked out on her when Venkataraman tried to explain how they could become self-sufficient.

Teaming up with Venkataraman, Rising Star has provided microloans to help start 1,000 tiny businesses in the colonies. Sometimes it's just $5 to buy a carpentry tool or a chicken. One man, whose leprosy had left him with two stumps for arms, took out a $30 loan to buy a teapot and two cups. Now he has a small business selling tea in a nearby village, to a shop whose owner used to shoo him away.

Thank heavens for greed, says Douglas, noting that the very people who once wouldn't go near a person with leprosy now are eager to do business — because the people in the colonies sell their products and services so cheaply. Which is not to say that there isn't still resistance, or that the logistics of setting up microbusinesses are easy (one simple loan to buy a cow, for example, also means hiring a veterinarian, building a well, planting a fodder field, building a fence around the field, and so on).

"Our goal is to end leprosy in this generation in India," says Douglas.

In addition to microlending, her volunteers run a mobile medical clinic to help with wound care, and also run children's homes and schools for nearly 1,000 children — "so they won't be the next generation of beggars," Douglas says. Unlike some organizations that run children's homes, she says, "we try to keep the families bonded," so that the children don't turn away in shame from their parents.

"We're light years away from getting those colonies into healthy places to live," says Douglas, who admits she gets impatient. "Becky, slowly, slowly," her friend Venkataraman always reminds her.

Nearly 100 Rising Star volunteers a year travel to the leprosy colonies to help. Leprosy, Douglas explains, requires prolonged contact and a compromised immune system to be contagious, and only 5 percent of the world's population is capable genetically of contracting the disease (Hawaiians are particularly susceptible).