Mrs. Elizabeth Olanrewaju is not a stranger to good life. She once owned a thriving small scale business in the heart of Lagos, where she sold ready-to-wear garments on wholesale basis.
However, things took a drastic turn when what started as skin irritation became a complicated case of leprosy
Truncated comfort
A quite intelligent, ageing woman who reels off dates as efficiently as she does her family background, Olanrewaju takes up the narrative, “I was admitted into this place in 1972. The whole thing started as a skin infection, but it progressed rapidly to the point of sickening blisters. It was worrisome.
“The man I was married to then said he had never seen such a thing and he sent me packing, despite the fact that we already had two children together.
“I returned to my parents’ house, but sanitation officials won’t let me be. At first, my maternal grandmother resisted the officials’ forceful attempt to bring me here, but when my situation continued to worsen, I persuaded her to let me go, and that was how I got here.”
For someone who had known relative comfort before the vicissitudes of life set in, life in the colony was a rude departure from what Olanrewaju once regarded as normal.
While she got her medications which, though stopped the rampaging disease in its track, the deformities she suffered due to what her physicians called the complications of leprosy left permanent deformity. Virtually all her toes are missing, while the hands are a twisted mass of flesh. They are almost useless in their entirety, but for the need to survive the ravages of hunger at all costs, as well as the need to provide for her five surviving children who live with her in the colony. Her children don’t have the disease.
Then, Olanrewaju and fellow colony residents each received a paltry N100 per month — a hopeless amount that could neither feed nor clothe her, much less her retinue of dependents.
With no particular helper — forsaken by the fathers of her children, while her relations had adjusted to the harsh reality that she might never return home alive — she took to farming, which is the only viable engagement the inhabitants of the colony could busy themselves with.
From Mosade Family in Ake, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Olanrewaju currently cultivates herbs and a particular plant that is an integral ingredient of tattoo ink. She takes them to the market for sale. In fact, she was preparing to take her ware to the market when this reporter walked in on her.
As the conversation progressed, some customers came in at regular intervals to make some purchase.
Endurance is it
Looking at the environment, which looks more like a concentration camp, this reporter asked Olanrewaju what it felt like to live in such a place as this. Her reply was terse.
She says, “Life is all about endurance. We’ve learnt to endure the harsh life here.”
Talking about the harshness of life, the miserable landscape says it all. Though the inhabitants keep the expansive settlement as clean as they can, the rows of rooms that line the entrance and others that dot the camp tell so much about the state of poverty they live in. It’s a room to a resident, and those whose kids live with them have no way round it.
Deprived of land
Apart from the stigma that their state of health places on them, virtually all of them lack any requisite skill to engage in any profitable venture outside the camp. As such, those of them who still have enough fingers to hold farm equipment engage in small scale farming — well, until land grabbers invaded the settlement and laid claim to their farmlands.
Under the supervision of their leader, Pa Samson Ogunrinde, farmlands had been allotted to them, and the proceeds hugely subsidise the monthly stipends of N3,000 they now get from the state government.
Talking about land speculators who have encroached on the settlement, some documents obtained by this reporter purport that the Ogun State Ministry of Lands and Housing had ceded certain parts of the settlement to a group of people, sequel to which the alleged new land owners started selling the lands.
A walk round the colony shows various structures in different stages of construction. And, in what looks like psychological warfare, the structures are built menacingly round the lepers’ rows of rooms. The unwritten message seems to be that by the time the new structures are completed, the opulence would naturally crowd out the unwanted inhabitants, and they may be forced to relocate farther from their current abode, which is already in the outskirts of the town.
An authoritative source in the ministry, who declined to be named, confirmed that the documents that were showed to the inhabitants were actually forged, and that government had not authorised any private construction activities in the colony.
But so far, this has been of little comfort to the residents, as their farmlands have yet to be restored to them.
No resting place
With nobody to save them from the land speculators at the initial stage of the invasion, the colony residents watched helplessly as their farmlands were seized by the brigands and sold off to the highest bidder.
And, as if on some ethnic cleansing assignment, the land speculators also desecrated the land on which the lepers used to bury their dead. Instead of what used to be a simple cemetery, uncompleted structures that have been marked for demolition are now scattered all over the place.
Worse still, the toilet facilities were also demolished, and the residents had to make do with ramshackle structures built with rusty corrugated iron sheets behind their rooms.
An attempt to build a communal toilet seems unsuccessful. For one, it is located far from the reach of everybody and the path has overgrown with bush.
Pa Ogunrinde’s attempt to answer this reporter’s enquiry about how residents answer the call of nature became unnecessary, as we were soon covered in stench of human waste, and we had trouble navigating the faeces-ridden bush paths.
Rotary, Lions Club to the rescue
The presence of the Rotary Club International, the Lions’ Club and a handful of other humanitarian organisations in the camp make a lot of difference, the residents confirm. Rotary not only provided potable water, it also provided electricity, the residents say.
Another club, Egba United Society, also built a row of toilets for them, while the Lions Club is also on the verge of completing another row of toilets in another part of the colony.
Blighted hope
While the majority of the women who spoke with this reporter have adjusted to the harsh reality of their existence, most of the male residents feel emasculated and shorn of their human dignity.
That the majority of them grapple with depression is obvious, what with the regretful way they speak, especially about the families they don’t have. One of such is Pa Shuaibu Sule, who has lost touch with reality to the point of despondency.
He also can’t remember how long he has stayed in the colony; and when asked his age, he puts it at 40. However, his physical presentation shows a body that is anything but a youthful 40 years old.
Asked about his wife and children, he replies, “Family? Wife? Children? I’m all alone in the world. I have no friend or relations. My disease has flung me far from human existence into this place. It’s people like you that I regard as my family…”
Looking gaunt and wasted, he remained seated throughout our encounter, peeping out of the lone window that lets in little air into his room, which could barely accommodate a single bed and the odds and ends that are, obviously, all he owns.
With a set of eyes that tell his story of deprivation and lost hope, Pa Sule watches keenly, praying all the time and not hiding the fact that he would accept any gift that may be thrown his way.
Here, money — or, more precisely, the lack of it — is a major headache. The residents confide that going to bed hungry has become a second nature that they are already used to. They intimate that but for the occasional intervention of the wife of the governor, Mrs. Funso Amosun, who sometimes brings cooked foods for them, life would have been harder.
Common lament
One of Olanrewaju’s regrets is that though some of her surviving children had passed through thick and thin to learn some vocations, she has not been able to set them up by way of providing the necessary tools of their trade. Her earnings from the herb sales mostly go to providing meals for the family she heads.
Ogunrinde has the same complaint. He arrived at the colony at age 10, he says, and he has spent more than 40 years in this blistering settlement. He looks like someone in his late 60s though — another testimony to the possible loss of sense of time.
The aged man fights back tears as he asks this reporter to prevail on Governor Ibikunle Amosun to get his only child, a young man named Sunday George Olawale, who reportedly has a degree in numerate discipline, a job. Ogunrinde says the young man had completed the National Youth Service Corps scheme but is still unemployed.
Dearth of drugs
The World Health Organisation says the most effective way of preventing disabilities in leprosy, as well as preventing further transmission of the disease, lies in early diagnosis and treatment with multi-drug therapy. The residents claim that, so far, they have been treated with Dapsone —which used to be a drug of choice for the disease from the 1940s until 1980. The WHO says that due to drug resistance and the necessity for long-term (sometimes lifelong) treatment, Dapsone has been replaced by a combination of drugs. “This combination, referred to as multiple drug therapy, has been highly effective and requires a shorter treatment period,” WHO says.
The residents claim that when they first arrived at the settlement, Dapsone was regularly given to them, but that government has since stopped giving them.
Ogunrinde says the drugs were withdrawn from him about four years ago, while other residents say they’ve not got any drug for over five years now. They, however, say they have access to regular medical treatment at the colony’s hospital whenever they complain of any ailment other than leprosy.
Asked why such an important treatment was withdrawn from the patients, considering their state of health which is far from perfect, the Chief Nursing Officer at the Hansen Disease Centre, located right inside the colony, Mrs. Adebola Adelokiki, explains that, ideally, the drug should be administered on patients for one full year, which the hospital authorities had done already for all the inhabitants. She says the lepers are now free of the disease, but that all the deformities they now have are as a result of the complications of the debilitating disease, mainly due to the fact that they presented rather too late.
Again, when asked if it is normal for the residents’ healthy children to live in a colony populated by lepers, Adelokiki explains that the disease is now in a dormant stage and that the lepers can longer infect anybody, including their children.
Perhaps this informed the decision of Mrs. Derin Osoba, the wife of ex-Governor Olusegun Osoba, to found an elementary school in the colony in 2001. With pupils now numbering about 500, the school currently caters to children from within and outside the colony.
No new intake
Adelokiki also informs that now, the government has decided that persons with new cases of leprosy will not be admitted into the colony.
“What we do now is that when we have fresh cases, the patients are treated promptly, following which we send them back to their families, and, in effect, their communities. This is to prevent the problem of stigmatisation, which is what has prevented the current inhabitants of this colony from getting reintegrated into their respective families and communities,” Adelokiki discloses.
Meanwhile, the residents have found a way round the drug problem, even when it runs contrary to medical advice. Brandishing a half filled pack of Dapsone, one of them informed this reporter that instead of taking the drug daily, he takes it once a week, “because it is very powerful.” That way, he says, he can stretch his private drug supply for as long as possible.
His joy was doused when, on examination of the pack of drug, this reporter informed him that he had up till December 2013 to finish the drug or else he would have to throw it away.
“You don’t mean it,” he says with concern. Being the only one in the colony who could afford to own a pack of the drug, his ego was deflated when he realised that he would soon need money for a fresh supply — a fearful prospect for the majority of the residents.
Though a 30-tablet packet of Dapsone sells for about N1,200, for these impoverished residents who daily engage in a battle to stretch the equivalent of $15 stipend for 30 days, it’s a big luxury that is practically unaffordable.
We don’t want to die
Although Adelokiki says the fear of stigmatisation is what is responsible for the “refusal” of these aged men and women to return to the various families they had left several decades ago, the lepers say their main worry is the fear of being poisoned by their relations.
They allege that some of them who had agreed to return home to their families actually died within days of reaching “home.” “That is why we prefer to stay here; after all, we have lived here all our lives,” they say.
I want to work, but…
Folake Solomon, mother of three surviving adult children, is another resident of the colony. Her overall condition is as pitiable as that of many other inhabitants. Unlettered and unkempt, she neither knows her age nor the date she was admitted into the colony.
Her visage is not only marred by the disease that has ravaged her entire body, she can hardly maintain a balance when she attempts to stand erect. In fact, when she stands, she spreads the legs apart in a bid to distribute her fragile weight. It’s not necessarily because of the undernutrition that many of the residents grapple with, but mainly because, like others in the camp, all her toes, which should have provided grips for her feet, are gone.
“I want to work to take care of my needs, but where are the hands?” she asks rhetorically.
The same frustration is expressed by Madam Maria Adelodun, who says she manages to scoop food into her mouth, using a crude method she has perfected over the years.
She recalls, “The last time I attempted to use a spoon, all my food poured away.”
She limps around with the aid of a prosthetic leg that has seen better days. Worse still, each of her callous hands features stumps of the forefingers and whatever remains of the thumbs.
She was seated when this reporter met her, but she declined to be photographed while wearing what she describes as “rags.” She changed into Ankara fabric and then posed for photograph.
Though she claims to have arrived the camp 20 years ago, the story she tells about one Dr. John Likky, who most residents claim was one of the doctors who was treating them during the civil war of 1967-1970, shows that she has probably been living in the colony for nearly 50 years.
We need more care
Madam Ramotu Agbelege claims to be 60 years old. Twisted and deformed, she says her disease dates back to when she was quite young. All her fingers have been consumed by the disease; and, like others, her toes have not only fallen off, the feet have also continued to shed skins, such that she has to wear socks to prevent them from flies — just like pa Ogunrinde and others do.
She urges the government to step up the care they receive, especially in the area of finance. “The N3,000 we receive monthly is too small, yet the government still owes us,” she discloses.
The residents claim that last year alone, the government only paid them four months’ stipends, leaving an outstanding balance of eight months till date. They also claim that though this year has seen an improvement in the regularity of payment, they have yet to receive stipends for September and October.
They say the inconsistency in the payment of their monthly stipends sometimes forces some residents to take to begging in town. Such residents soon pay for this with arrest, detention and eventual return to the settlement by government officials, with strict warning that they would be sanctioned severely if they repeat the offence.The administration of the colony reportedly falls under the purview of the Women Affairs Ministry. When contacted on the phone, the Information Officer of the ministry, Mr. Kehinde Balogun, said he wanted to clarify certain things from the authorities and that he would get back to this reporter. He had yet to do so, however, as at 8pm on Wednesday, when this report was filed in. Source: http://www.punchng.com
