The Last Word is Love: My Path of Courage through War, Healing and Faith - Softcover

Pfau, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0824523695 ISBN 13: 9780824523695

Publisher: Crossroad Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

If life is an adventure, Ruth Pfau lived it. If love is possible, she proved it. Ruth started as an atheist student in post-war Germany and became a medical doctor and then part of the Order of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary. A visit to Karachi as a young sister started her on her way to dedicating her entire life to the people of Pakistan. Her life is a model of understanding how to live in a world of great diversity. This book is her last one. It is the testament of her life and a testament to the splendor of humanity.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Pfau was born in Leipzig, Germany and after World War escaped to the West. She became a doctor, and joined a Catholic order who sent here to work with lepers in Pakistan where she still resides today.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Last Word Is Love

My Path of Courage Through War, Healing and Faith

By Ruth Pfau

The Crossroad Publishing Company

Copyright © 2017 Ruth Pfau
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8245-2369-5

Contents

Preface, 
Part I, 
1 Homeward Bound: 1984, 
2 The Encounter, 
3 The Long Road, 
4 Vocation-Calling, 
5 More Than a Sickness, 
6 The Enrichment Flows from One to Another, 
7 Journeying Often, 
8 Reflections By the Wayside, 
Part II, 
9 Working for Peace under Wartime Conditions, 
10 Afghanistan — My Dream, My Nightmare, 
11 About Suffering, Norms, Limits, and Freedom, 
12 Working for Peace in Karachi, 
13 The Struggle Against Terror and Violence, 
14 Karachi — City of Death, 
15 Peace, Religious Fundamentalism, and Human Rights, 
16 Islam: Religion Versus Cultural Expressions, 
17 Among Muslims, 
18 The Challenge of Growing Old, 
19 Heeding All My Calls: A Christian, a Woman, a Doctor, 
20 Despite Everything, the Last Word Will Be Love, 
Epilogue, 
Chronological Table, 

CHAPTER 1

Homeward Bound

1984

I often ask myself when returning to Pakistan what this country actually means to me. A clearly defined answer does not easily come to mind, just as life itself, with all its fathomless human secrets, cannot be clearly defined.

But one thing is certain to me: coming back to Pakistan is a return to a place where I actually belong. I have never doubted my life decisions — joining the order and with it the renunciation of married life, a career, and further studies, and the decision to come to Karachi. In this respect my life is firmly anchored and secure. I believe, or rather I know, that I am in the place where the Almighty wants me to be.

Another thing is also certain: I love the people of this country, those with whom I work, my team, my boys, and all those who have devoted their lives to leprosy work. And I love my patients — they need me and I need them.

Each time when I get off the plane (mostly still wrapped up in winter woollies) I am overcome by the sticky heat and tropical climate of Karachi: 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and 80 percent atmospheric humidity. There is an indescribable confusion at the airport, a festive atmosphere full of heat and noise, the clamor of noisy conversations, the persistence of porters and taxi drivers and all those trying to attach themselves to new arrivals in the hope of earning something. When I finally emerge from this noisy, swirling sea of life I know that I am ... at home? No, not at home, but where I want to be.

Then it all starts again, the burning compassion and the nagging guilty conscience. If I were not picked up in triumph by members of my congregation, a minibus full of Punjabi girls who snatch up my luggage, then the boy who tries so hard to offer his services as a porter would be proud to take home a well-earned ten rupees and the taxi driver would also earn his share. And so on.

This pulsating, colorful turmoil, the shimmering sun, the heat, the dust, the ceaseless honking of car horns in traffic that can only be described as chaotic — speeding rickshaws weaving in and out of a mess of heavily laden trucks, gaudily painted buses with passengers packed in like sardines, an occasional decorated camel laden with bundles of cotton — all this has by now become a part of me.

Pakistan, this country of mine, a land of contrasts: the seemingly never-ending expanse of Balochistan, where an encounter with a lonely shepherd is an event, where the camel rider on the horizon seems like a mirage on the edge of an endless nothingness.

And the glacier, glistening in its silent inaccessible majesty; the Himalayas by moonlight; the mothers who have learned to live with life's pain, silently and without complaint; the children, whose only playground is the mud and slime of some illegal hutment; and our patients — Paul, with his stumps for arms, creating riotously colored flowers on paper with a felt pen, and Ahmed, limping every morning to work on his deformed feet. All this is to be found here.

Yes, I love Pakistan. I love it with every beat of my heart, with helpless pain and surging anger when I see the social injustice and the lack of concern.

When all is said and done, I am a foreigner and will remain one. Still, returning is a kind of homecoming for me, because this country, after so many long years, has become my home.

CHAPTER 2

The Encounter

Being an Onlooker Is Difficult

I had not planned on actually coming to Pakistan. I belong to a religious order. My superiors had asked me to go to India and I agreed. But the visa was a long time in coming. I waited for almost eighteen months. Just at that time Pakistan was looking for a lady doctor. Perhaps my dreamed-of goal could be reached there. I seized the chance and took off.

That I had wanted to go abroad at all had a lot to do with the situation in Germany at the time. The "Economic Miracle" was in the making, but it had not yet pervaded all aspects of life. This level of affluence was new to me. In those days Misereor, an international development agency of the Catholic Church in Germany, was distributing the first information on the developing world. I saw how inequality flourished. It horrified me that there were people for whom hunger, cold nights, and homelessness were permanent facts of life, unlike the Germans for whom the postwar period was just a terrible passing phase. If I could not change everything I at least wanted to share this suffering. Doing nothing seemed intolerable.

There is a book titled Gehenna that I read as a child. I do not even remember who the author is. As a twelve-year-old the contents were unintelligible to me. My parents had even forbidden me to read it. The last chapter, however, made a deep impression on my mind. It was about a prison camp. One of the warders could not bear to witness the suffering of the prisoners any longer so one day he simply disappeared. Months later his friend was ordered to carry out a dying person. Shocked, he recognized his friend in the starved heap of bones. The last words of the man left a deep imprint in my heart: "It is much more difficult to stand by and look on than to be there and suffer together."

Opel or Volkswagen?

I could not understand the preoccupation of the Germans of those days. It was a time when one felt that one should amass everything that one wanted. It was a period of gluttony in which one tended to stuff oneself with everything that was previously unobtainable. I surely understood a certain "catching up," but not to this extent. When someone snatches a sweet from a child's mouth the child will naturally start whining and try to get another. But when someone gobbles up too many sweets he will simply ruin his stomach. I was at a loss to understand what amusement there could possibly be in feeling bloated.

Looking back, I remember one day we were sitting in the doctors' mess. I had just earned my driving license. We were discussing among ourselves which kind of car would be the best to buy. The Volkswagen (in Germany, we nickname them "Beetles")? Should it be an orange or dove gray one? Or maybe an Opel would be even better! Suddenly, I thought, was this the only meaning of life — saving money, buying cars, saving more money, changing cars? That evening I called on the provincial superior of my religious order. I wanted to get out. Soon, and if possible, immediately. To Asia, where one lived on just a handful of rice per day.

A Dropout for the Sake of the Poor

Finally, after a long and exhausting wait, I was on my way — fleeing from an array of consumer goods that bored me, fleeing from all this meaningless materialism that had become unbearable for me. I was on my way to Pakistan.

I will never forget my arrival in Karachi. It was my very first flight and I left Paris on a clear blue March morning with a blissfully adventurous feeling. There was a stopover in Rome. The laurel trees were in blossom and the first spring roses had made their appearance. I reveled in the gold and splendor, in the austere beauty of ancient Rome.

Then came the final departure from Europe. I had gone away with the firm decision never to return, to become an Asian, a dropout for the sake of the poor. How disappointed I was when dinner was served on the plane, such a sumptuous menu with so many exotic courses! After a rather bumpy flight we landed in Tehran. Between Tehran and Karachi there was only the desert, spread out like some giant sheet — gray, unreal, fantastic. Shadows and grain looked like a marble floor in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Occasionally an oasis — not like the oases of my childhood dreams — a lonely mud hut under a clump of dusty date palms; otherwise, just wasteland, solitude, oblivion. The long-awaited announcement, after hours of wasteland far below, "In a few minutes we shall be landing in Karachi." Beneath stood a few barracks in the desert sand, some bare and desolate hills, and the sea on the horizon. All this came as a sudden shock. I thought that I must have been in a state of mental derangement to have allowed myself to be carted off to these sands of desolation. It was March and as I disembarked, wrapped in a winter coat, I found it unbearably hot. I had been rather airsick and had not eaten much on the flight.

The room to which they brought me had only a half partition dividing it from the next. On the other side some girls had a radio blaring so loudly that I picked up my suitcase and moved out. I was completely and utterly exhausted and my blood sugar was by now very low. I definitely thought that a young person like myself, in a foreign land, should not have been received so casually. I decided not to stay.

The Morning That Decided Everything

My first subjective impressions of community life in Karachi: in the morning, classes; in the afternoon, washing and ironing clothes. It took me at least three weeks before I could make myself understood in English. Then Berenice Vargas, a Mexican sister who was a qualified pharmacist, took me to the slums. We at once became friends. In the mornings Berenice supervised a kindergarten run by the order. In the afternoons she went to the leprosy colony. One afternoon I decided to accompany her. It was the day that decided everything, that was to change everything in my life. The McLeod Road Leper Colony, to which she took me after a few weeks of comparative comfort in the community house, was an illegal settlement of slum hovels. One of Karachi's most notorious districts, it was situated near the main railway station, beside the busy commercial and banking heart of Pakistan. Here were the poorest of the poor, beggars suffering from leprosy, simply vegetating in huts made of cardboard boxes and bamboo sticks, covered with rotting gunny bags, some just a pair of ragged straw mats joined together, none of them waterproof. And in the midst of everything, this misery, this lamentable and hopeless misery: deformed anaesthetic hands and feet, prey for the rats at night; filth and vermin; drugs and brawls. About one hundred and fifty leprosy patients lived here in indescribable filth. Unimaginable, yet real, even by Karachi standards at the time. A colony in the middle of the city, in a kind of hollow, which during the rainy season became actually knee-deep in filthy drainage water, a stinking lake of horror and misery. And yet drinking water had to be brought and carried into the huts.

Today it all sounds like some cheap, sensational story in the popular press. But in those days it was the truth — the touchable, smellable, feelable, and hearable truth.

When One Meets One's Greatest Love

The Marie Adelaide Leprosy Dispensary was initiated here by France de Chevillotte, a French social worker and member of our order. Hence the name, after Marie Adelaide de Cicé, who founded the Society of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in the midst of revolutionary turmoil in Paris in the 1790s.

Leprosy patients from all parts of the city and country came for help and treatment. And this was the dispensary, the outpatient department made of old packing cases, with only two tiny windows and without water or electricity. The room was crammed with patients. Added to this was the unbearable heat inside this box, the evil stench, and the noise. Asia can be such an ear-splitting noisy continent and here was no exception. And the flies ... the flies formed a buzzing pall over everything.

But the thing that shocked me most was a patient, about my age, nearly thirty, a certain Muhammad Rashid. He came from the mountains in the north of the country, and he crawled on his hands and feet like a dog, on all fours. His fellow patients walked calmly around him, unperturbed, as if it was all very normal that a human being had to crawl in such a manner in the dirt and slime. It would not perhaps have been quite so shocking if Muhammad Rashid had not taken it so calmly. There was just dull resignation in his eyes, as if things could not have been otherwise. And he, too, had only one life to live, one single life, a life just like mine!

This consent to degradation stunned me. That these people took their condition to be normal, that they had become resigned to such frightfulness, was for me the limit in human degradation. If they could have shown that they were suffering I would have been able to communicate with them somehow. In the postwar years in Germany we used to say: "It can't go on like this anymore. We must — we must — work for change." Here, nobody thought of saying anything like that. I very rarely have attacks of sudden rage, moments in which I am no longer in control of myself, yet suddenly I knew something had to happen here. But how? Something had to be done on the spot. "Berenice," I said with suppressed emotion, "Berenice, it can't go on like this anymore. We'll do something. Here and now, we do something, positively, anything, but we won't watch any longer!" My heart was pounding. It was like meeting one's great love. This was now decided, and this was forever. Everything else was only the outcome of that moment in the beggar colony on McLeod Road.

Berenice sighed a sigh of relief: "I expected it," she said, "the way you have been described to me when they announced you."

Two people's destiny had met.

Operation in the Mortuary

There must have been no second place in Pakistan where misery was so accentuated as in this leper colony. I believe that anyone who has a medical degree like me would have acted in the same way. One just cannot stand by when people like us, who have the same right to dignity and happiness, are allowed to rot in filth and disease, worse than dogs in the street. I was not left with any other choice. Perhaps it was my experience with the Jews during Germany's Third Reich that aroused in me this passionate longing for justice. Nothing could have prevented me from helping them, not even the mistrust of the patients themselves or scorn of my colleagues in the medical world. I would not have cared if my motives were called into question, if I were accused of merely wanting to convert the patients to Christianity. I found myself in the midst of suffering fellow humans who needed help. There was simply no other alternative but to go ahead.

I still remember vividly the death of one of my first patients, due to a kidney complication caused by untreated leprosy. We did not live in the colony but we came every day. I was concerned about the reaction of the other patients, how they would cope with his death. With our meager resources I did not hold out much hope. The laboratory tests that were available showed a similar hopelessness. When my patient finally died I was in tears. But his fellow patients said, "Nobody ever before had died as beautifully as Salman." It deeply consoled me that it was seen as a service when somebody could die with dignity. I was determined that we would continue.

At that time operations were carried out in the huts themselves, kneeling on the dirt floors. A patient would sit by my side, keeping the flies at bay with a bamboo fan. Here I was, a graduate from one of the newly built, modern hospitals of West Germany. I could never have believed that the same service performed in a sterile polyclinic, helping people in need, could be carried out on almost every street corner of this teeming two-million-person city, too.

Soon after we had to operate on an emergency case among our patients in the mortuary of a government hospital. It was a question of life and death; we could not delay any longer. We were not able to even get a garage in the city where we could bring our leprosy patients. "I'd just love to help you, but you must realize that I couldn't put my reputation at stake by letting in leprosy patients." This was the excuse so often presented to me. We were able to get into the mortuary because, by this time, I had gotten to know someone involved in the hospital management.

Through the years I have learned that one can wrangle something out even of the most impossible situations, but only if one is stubborn and not put off by setbacks. Although our little dispensary was only made of packing cases and had no electricity or running water, we were able to carry on professionally sound rather than dabbling in quackery or lowering standards. Laboratory examinations and x-rays were available and I was in touch with specialist clinics. Bandages were made from clean bedsheets and neatly rolled, and soon medical supplies were donated from countries abroad — anti-leprosy drugs, antibiotics, cortisone, vitamin tablets and drips for the howling, skinny babies.

With the aid of bamboo sticks and old sacks sewn together, we erected a sun shelter in front of the dispensary. By 1962 there were over nine hundred patients but the dispensary was still the same eight-by-eight meters. In one corner, medicines were handed out, and in another corner Abdul Rehman had set up his laboratory. Another corner served as a physiotherapy department, complete with wax bath and massage facilities. The remaining space was taken by the dressing department.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Last Word Is Love by Ruth Pfau. Copyright © 2017 Ruth Pfau. Excerpted by permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Crossroad Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0824523695
• ISBN 13: 9780824523695
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208