WHILE GUANGDONG PROVINCE has traditionally had the highest rate of leprosy cases on the mainland, victims of the disease can be found all across southern China, and as far north as Shandong. Hot spots include the south-western provinces of Yunnan, Guangxi and parts of Sichuan, where the warm, wet climate provides ideal conditions for the leprosy bacterium.
Luis Ruiz, a Jesuit priest and director of Casa Ricci Social Services in Macau, works in some of the mainland's most remote leper villages. As in the villages in Guangdong, the residents of southwest China's isolated hamlets have been cured of the disease. But they are ostracised by society because of the disfigurements they have suffered.
'We work with the poor,' Father Ruiz says, 'and the lepers are the poorest of the poor.' Casa Ricci has helped about 70 leper villages, which are home to some 6,000 patients. Eighteen are situated in remote areas of Guangdong.
One of them is on Da Jin, a lonely island off the coast. Some of the patients there have been confined to the island since 1959. Father Ruiz first visited Da Jin in 1986. 'They just threw [the leprosy victims] on the island,' he says. 'They were abandoned and hungry and dirty.' Casa Ricci has invested a lot of money in improving conditions at the village on Da Jin. 'This was the worst [leper village in Guangdong],' says Father Ruiz. 'Today it is the best.' Another 26 of the villages are in even more isolated areas of Yunnan and Sichuan. 'Compared with the leper villages in these provinces, the ones in Guangdong are rich,' he says. 'Many have no roads, no water, no electricity, no clothing and no food.' Some of the villages Casa Ricci has aided are hours from the nearest road. Father Ruiz and his team go wherever they are asked. 'If you don't go you don't understand,' he says.
Casa Ricci has a collection of photographs showing the terrain that has to be crossed to reach some villages. Many of the residents who have to negotiate this journey are amputees. Photos include shots of 87-year-old Father Ruiz, his team and their local guides traversing make-shift bridges erected over raging rivers, walking along narrow paths at the edge of sharp drop-offs, and being pulled along muddy paths in ox-drawn carts.
Father Daniel Cerezo Ruiz - vice-director of the Catholic Social Services Centre in Macau and no relation to Father Luis Ruiz - recalls a recent visit to a leper village in Sichuan. There was no path and the guide would not stop beating the grass. When asked what he was doing, the guide's reply was: 'Scaring away the snakes.' Casa Ricci has also located and helped villages in Yunnan, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, Jiangsu and Shandong - although in some cases it would be more accurate to say that the villages found Casa Ricci.