LORNA’S TEARS
HOW THE LEPROSY MISSION GIFTED THE MUM A REALITY CHECK
Radio star’s heartbreak in Nepal
Broadcaster Lorna Subritzky looked on in dismay as a young man was officially diagnosed with leprosy in front of her at a Kathmandu clinic run by The Leprosy Mission.
“I thought he would be devastated,” the radio host says. “But he was excited because he had known for four years that he had leprosy, but you cannot get treatment until it shows up in your blood. So for him it was, ‘This is great. I can go and get treated and
I can get back to work.’”
Leprosy can be effectively treated with antibiotics if picked up in time.
“The crazy thing is that leprosy shouldn’t still exist,” says Lorna, who was invited to Nepal by the Leprosy Mission so she could see the reality of their work. She admits that she found the prospect daunting but, with turning 50 this year, thought, “You know what? What a bucket-list thing that is and what an amazing opportunity.
“They were right in sending me because Coast FM has done annual appeals for the last four years and I’ve given it my all.
But there is nothing like seeing what they do and realising that the money we give is actually genuinely changing somebody’s life,” she says.
Lorna wasn’t concerned about contracting the disease herself and tells, “It really only strikes those whose immune systems are terribly low and people who are highly malnourished. And in a very poor country like Nepal, it’s the poorest people who are affected.”
As well as going to the clinic, the mum-of-three was taken to a leprosy colony and admits it was difficult to see children afflicted by the illness.
“It was very emotional. My little one is only nine and I met a lot of girls around her age. They really broke my heart. There was a little girl called Sarah – she had the biggest personality of any child I think I’ve ever met. She wasn’t a leprosy sufferer but this girl has no future, not a future as we would see it. That big personality is only going to take her so far. Because of the stigma around leprosy, she’ll be very lucky to work, she won’t get married and she won’t have children of her own.”
However, what struck Lorna was how positive everyone she encountered was.
“We cry about our first-world problems, like our internet’s down, and here were people who had limbs missing, terrible afflictions and whose families had disowned them. I thought, ‘They’re not going to want us here looking at them, taking photos.’ But they loved it because they had visitors. People don’t go and visit them.” Lorna says her daughter Zoe (9) coped well with her being in Nepal – she was looked after by her dad, Lorna’s husband Steve (45) and her two older children Max (20) and Lucy (18) − and that she has been intrigued by the girl’s stories since her mum returned.
“We talked a lot about the differences between her life and theirs. The other day, she was complaining because one of her friends has a cell phone and she was saying she needs a cell phone too. She got’s an iPad, albeit a hand-me-down one, and she’s got an iPod.
She’s got all this technology and is complaining that she didn’t have this extra bit of technology. I just reminded her about Sarah and the little girls I met.”
Lorna is grateful that we have a safety net here in New Zealand and the opportunity to help. “I met a lady who was in her fifties, she looked a lot older. But she told me a story that when she was 13, she was already married, and her husband died from leprosy and she had nothing. She had no family, no income, there’s no social welfare or anything like that. She was basically destitute at 13. Luckily, she was taken in by the Leprosy Mission and now she advocates for them.”
Coast FM is again raising money for the Leprosy Mission. “We don’t ask people to give money,” says Lorna. “We ask them to buy a gift. So it might be $10 for a pair of sandals, it might be $250 for a sewing machine. It might be $83 to buy a girl an education. You can actually buy something tangible. I saw the difference it makes.”