c. 1999 Religion News Service

TICHILESTI, Romania _ When he worships in the Orthodox chapel here in his small, isolated village in eastern Romania, Cristache Tatulea finds special significance in certain Scriptures.”I can’t read the Bible because I don’t see well,”said Tatulea, 67.”But I heard in church about how Jesus Christ helped the lepers, and this gives me hope that God will spiritually help us.” Tatulea and about 30 people live in a relic of history _ one of Europe’s few remaining leper colonies. The inhabitants no longer have the leprosy bacteria that ravages the skin and the nervous system, said Barbu Iganatescu, the colony’s resident doctor. But most are missing legs, fingers or eyes because their deadened nerves failed to sense injuries until it was too late to treat them.

Iganatescu and a small nursing staff care for the patients daily, both for their lingering deformities and for the typical ailments of old age, such as phlebitis and enlarged prostates. Residents are supported by modest state subsidies as well as gifts from churches and other charities. They live in small homes, many heated by wood stoves and lacking running water, on the hillsides surrounding a central cluster of medical buildings.

The elderly residents have spent much of their adult lives here as farmers in poor but stable conditions, often marrying each other, raising children and indulging in the typical gossip and petty quarrels of neighbors living in close quarters.”I can’t say I like living here,”said Tichilesti’s raspy-voiced mayor, 68-year-old Vasile Tarata.”I’d rather be healthy, but because I’ve lost part of my body, what can I do?” Tarata, who is missing a leg and whose truncated fingers are blackened from the unfelt burns of cigarettes, notes that residents'”standard of living is very good compared with our physical problems. I could be a retired pensioner in Bucharest, always afraid that I won’t have enough money to buy food.” Leprosy, a declining but still potent menace in South Asia, Africa and Latin America, has been virtually eradicated in Europe. But progress came too late for these last survivors of Tichilesti. The colony, which numbered 200 at its height, was founded in the 1930s under a policy of strictly quarantining lepers, a tradition since biblical times that has made”leper”a byword for outcast. Doctors now say fears of contagion were highly exaggerated.

Cristache Tatulea’s ordeal began when he was a schoolboy. His teacher expelled him from class, horrified that his skin lesions might infect others. He spent several years as a shepherd boy before a doctor diagnosed his leprosy and sent him here in 1949.

In Tichilesti, Tatulea met his wife, and they raised two sons in the small,four-room home he built himself.”I tried to make a normal life for my family,”Tatulea said in a tour of his home, now decorated with religious icons and tapestries. With his fading eyesight, he is unable to see the black-and-white family snapshots on his walls, depicting new grandchildren as well as lost loved ones, including an adult son who drowned last year within a few days of the death of Tatulea’s wife.

Despite his eye troubles, Tatulea deftly negotiated the sloping, muddy terrain behind his house on a recently chilly, rainy day as he made his way to his animal shed to look in on his animals _ a small flock of softly cooing chickens and a single pig that gave a plaintive squeal upon his entrance.

Tatulea also keeps busy growing vegetables, and he serves as caretaker for the community’s small Orthodox chapel, heated by a wood stove whose massive bulk contrasts with the delicate icons on the walls and ceiling. Five or six worshippers attend services regularly, presided over by an itinerant priest, while on major religious holidays,”almost all the people who can walk come,”Tatulea said.

A small Baptist congregation also meets regularly, a curiosity in this overwhelmingly Orthodox nation. The church was founded by a missionary decades ago.”We are not beggars. We are helped by God to live here,”said one Baptist, 70-year-old Cripacovai Ilarion.

Despite their poverty, Tichilesti’s residents fondly remember the past, when they befriended neighboring villagers, worked on their farms and danced at their weddings.”They started to eat and drink with us because they observed that nothing could happen (to make them sick),”said Tarata.”When I was younger, I had sexual contacts with the women from the neighborhood, and nothing happened.” Nowadays, residents spend their days working, chatting or watching Mexican soap operas in the sparse community center, where a few old, cushioned chairs are arranged around a TV and a table with a chess board.

Tarata has long kept busy raising chickens and pigs, making wine and brandy, and devouring the prodigious novels of Nicolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev and Victor Hugo.”I didn’t want to let my brain become lazy,”Tarata said.

Lazar Kiselef, 75, despite having lost a leg and several fingers, works daily on his 3.5-acre farm, raising cabbages, lettuce and tomatoes.”I’m not in perfect physical condition, but I have an inner strength,”Kiselef said with an unassuming smile displaying a brace of dental crowns.

In addition to their own meager earnings and state subsidies, the residents receive charitable donations of medicine, food and clothing.”We receive a lot of help, clothes from Germany, from the USA,”said Vera Climov, 65, pointing out jars of sugar beets next to her wood stove, donated by a Dutch group.

A Baptist group from the United States brings medical aid every year, and the visitors are unfazed by the residents’ deformities, Climov said:”They kiss us and say, `It’s no problem. God loves us all.'” Climov has boarded in a spare room in Tatulea’s house since his wife died last year.”We look after each other. He can’t see so well and I can’t walk,”said Climov, sitting up in bed, wearing a faded floral nightgown and coarse stockings over her stunted feet.

Climov is the only current resident who was born in Tichilesti. Like other children of lepers, she grew up healthy and moved away, but as an adult she contracted leprosy and returned here, where she married and had two children.

Barring an unlikely resurgence of leprosy, attrition will eventually close down Tichilesti, Iganatescu said. Five to six residents are dying per year. Though it’s safe to live elsewhere, residents have made Tichilesti their home for decades, and often their families have forgotten them. Said Iganatescu:”They have no place to go now.”DEA END SMITH