Tributes to doctor who became the ‘Mother Teresa’ of Pakistan
Hundreds of Pakistani mourners attended the state funeral for a German-born nun and physician yesterday.
Ruth Pfau earned international acclaim as “Pakistan’s Mother Teresa” by devoting her life to the eradication of leprosy.
Pfau died in Karachi on August 10 at the age of 87. Television coverage showed her coffin being carried by a military guard into the city’s St Patrick’s Cathedral.
Among those at the funeral were president Mamnoon Hussain, army chief Gen Qamar Javed, senior government officials, imams and diplomats. She was buried in a nearby cemetery.
Martha Fernando, who worked with Pfau at her Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre, said the physician’s death was a great loss to humanity.
“There is no one like her and there won’t be any replacement for her,” Ms Fernando said. “We pray to God to send people like her again to this world so that they could continue serving people.”
Pakistan suffered high rates of leprosy up until the mid1990s. Pfau played a key role in bringing the disease under control.
She was born in Leipzig, eastern Germany, into a Protestant family of six children.
When that region of Germany fell under Soviet occupation after the Second World War, her family escaped to West Germany, where she studied medicine at the University of Mainz.
There, she met a Dutch woman who had survived a Nazi concentration camp and had dedicated her life to “preaching love and forgiveness”.
Pfau converted to Catholicism and, in 1957, joined the Daughters of the Heart of Mary religious order, which sent her to southern India. But because of visa problems she was stuck in Karachi in 1960. She never left.
She started treating leprosy sufferers in a hut in a city slum, which eventually became the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre, and also founded a social work organisation for patients and their family members, later branching out into tuberculosis treatment and blindness prevention.
She travelled all over Pakistan and Afghanistan, treating patients in remote areas with no medical centres and rescuing leprosy sufferers who had been abandoned by their families or locked in small rooms.
Pfau raised funds in Pakistan and Germany.
In 1979, the Pakistan government made her an adviser to the ministry of health. In 1988, it made her a Pakistani citizen.
In 1996, the World Health organisation declared Pakistan to be one of the first countries in Asia to bring the disease under control. Cases dropped from more than 19,000 in the early 1980s to 531 last year.
“The Pakistani nation salutes Dr Pfau and her great tradition to serve humanity will be continued,” Mr Hussein said in his tribute.
In his speech, prime minister Shahid Khaqan said: “Dr Ruth Pfau may have been born in Germany but her heart was always in Pakistan.
“She came here at the dawn of a young nation looking to make lives better for those afflicted by disease and in doing so, found herself a home. We will remember her for her courage, her loyalty, her service to the eradication of leprosy and most of all for her patriotism.”