It’s better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness” sometimes finds fleshy fruition in great people who dare dispel darkness and defy death. Doctor Ruth Pfau — an 87-year-old German-Pakistani Catholic nun, who died in Karachi and was buried on August 19 — is one such luminary. Mayor Wasim Akhtar described her as: “a shining star who will ever remain in our hearts and whose selfless, unmatched service will always be remembered.”
Born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1929, Ruth’s house was destroyed by bombing in World War II. The Pfau family moved to West Germany to begin life anew. Ruth wrote: “Not all of us can prevent a war; but most of us can help ease sufferings — of body and soul.” Deeply affected by the darkness engulfing her, she first became a doctor and then a nun in 1957.
Originally commissioned to serve in India in 1960, the young doctor-nun, Ruth had visa trouble and got stranded in Karachi. Visa restrictions are for those cramped by spatial confines. Love requires no visas, but a vision. Seeing hundreds of ostracised lepers and those dying of tuberculosis, she began to tend to them in Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan.
On one of her visits to the leper colony near Karachi railway station, Ruth realised that her heart was drawn towards the lepers — loved by few and rejected by many. Beginning with the treatment of lepers from a little hut near the colony, she tirelessly expanded her medical services to embrace TB patients too.
“Being an onlooker is difficult” is the title of a chapter in Ruth Pfau’s book of reminiscences and reflections entitled To Light a Candle. Ruth’s lighting of a candle amidst lepers kindled the lamps of others, too. Under her leadership as the Federal Adviser on Leprosy to the Government, the WHO declared Pakistan as one of the first Asian countries to have controlled leprosy: the number of leprosy cases dropped sharply from 19,398 in the early 1980s to 531 in 2016.
Appreciating her stellar service to the cause of eradicating leprosy, Sister Pfau was awarded Pakistani citizenship in 1988. She has been flooded with many international awards and titles, one of which is “Pakistan’s Mother Teresa”. The Civil Hospital, Karachi, is now renamed Dr Ruth Pfau Hospital.
Announcing a state funeral for her, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan said, “We will remember her for her courage, her loyalty and her service to the eradication of leprosy.” That frail, old German nun’s body, draped in the Pakistani flag, reminds us that love breaks all barriers of country, creed, class, caste and culture.
Rather than being an onlooker cursing God for darkness and disease, why not light a little lamp?
