Off The Beaten Path

I seem to have had a major technological mishap whereas my pictures for the next couple of stops seem to have mysteriously disappeared. Also disappearing were a lot of photos that I took of Andri's last days. I'm a little heartbroke about that, but maybe Google will be able to tell me where oh where they have gone. Not all my pictures disappeared, just a chunk of them. What this means is that y'all (see, I've gone southern) will just have to depend on my dulcet tones and your imagination. Count this as an educational post.

We traveled to a expo center just south of Baton Rouge for a night. This was another scenic view overlooking the livestock pens. It was only for one night, so no big deal. We were here to go to the National Hansen's Disease Museum in Carville to explore the world of Leprosy. Ewww, gross you say. No – it was interesting. The only thing I knew about leprosy was from watching the movie 'Ben Hur' as a child where leprosy sufferers were highly infectious and their fingers and toes would fall off. I guess you could call me well-informed?

The museum is located inside a military base (National Guard) so, after being corrected by the guard on duty as to the correct entrance lane I needed to use (note: it is right in front of the big ENTRANCE sign) and showing my ID, we were allowed to come on base. This museum is dedicated to leprosy patients, once quarantined on site, and the medical staff who attended to them and made medical history.

Falsehood #1

Back in the day, until very recently, leprosy was considered very contagious and there were laws that quarantined the afflicted. It was basically a life sentence for these people. In fact, only 5% of the entire population (all races are afflicted, except for Native Americans) are able to contract the disease. It is caused by a bacteria and is not communicable.

Falsehood #2

Your toes and fingers don't fall off. Leprosy causes nerve damage and you don't feel anything in your extremities. According to the museum, after many times of injuring yourself by banging/burning/etc yourself, the bones in your extremities get reabsorbed by the body. Weird science.

The museum focused on life in the institution and also on the research that was done. A Dr. Hansen found a cure for leprosy that actually reversed many of the outward effects of the disease (although toes and fingers did not grow back) and the name has been changed to Hansen's disease. There is a crusade to ban the word leprosy because of the awful connotations that it has had in the past. Nowadays, people are not quarantined, they are treated and live full lives. This was an interesting place to spend an afternoon.

We moved on to Angola Louisiana, home of the infamous Angola prison. Angola is the second largest prison (in area) in the world. It is a maximum security prison and is the only prison that has a prison museum on it's grounds. There are 5,000 prisoners here of which 71% are serving a life sentence and there are 80 prisoners on death row. Big numbers.

There were the usual? exhibits where you could walk into a typical cell or you could see all the handmade weapons that were confiscated from the prisoners. There was a short movie about how Angola grows all the vegetables that the prison needs. There was a Correctional Officer Hall of Fame room and also an exhibit about Correctional Officers who had given their life at the prison.

We were then walked past double rows of some form of slasher barbed wire into the old death row building. Louisiana now uses fatal injection but they are having trouble getting the chemical so there have been no executions. We saw an electric chair. We then went into the cell block where they kept the death row prisoners and heard about how they spent the remainder of their lives. I felt great sorrow here – it was truly sad.

There have been several movies filmed in this section of the prison – a George Clooney movie, 'JFK' starring Kevin Costner and the horrific movie with Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon called 'Dead Man Walking' which was based on a composite of three actual prisoners. I don't remember much in life, but I vividly remember this last movie and how utterly devastating it was. I'm glad I went to the Angola museum, but it was one of the harder places I've been.

I was going to call this post 'Leprosy and Death Row' but thought that would be a bit much.