The Quarantine Next Door
Sickness-related isolation used to involve banishing patients to islands; now the ill are kept separate in our midst.
On a flat green peninsula beneath a towering range of sea cliffs in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there is a hidden community of people who are isolated many times over.
The first layer of their separation is the geographic divide of living on an archipelago with more than 2,000 miles of salt water extending in all directions. Then there is the fact of living on Molokai, a sleepy island of red clay and black lava rock and tart flowers, where there are no traffic lights and there is no movie theater. And then, zooming in once more, there is the isolation of Kalaupapa, a peninsula on the north shore of the island, thousands of feet below the rest
