Gwinnett woman reaches out to lepers

She leaves good life behind to do good works among poorest and most wretched in India

Published on: 07/03/04
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Here comes the suburban supermom, rolling into a leper colony with a smuggled wheelchair. She dances with the afflicted, scrapes their sores with a pocketknife and — hardest of all — convinces them that their lives are worth something.

The smuggler, whom they call "the little white woman," also happens to be a concert violinist who has raised nine children.

What's wrong with this picture? Absolutely nothing, says Becky Douglas of Norcross. To her, it makes all the sense in the world that she frequently forsakes a life blessed with abundance to go halfway around the globe to places that define misery, to touch the lives of people even India's "untouchables" won't touch.

Her associates call her a Mother Teresa figure, pointing to her efforts to raise more than $250,000 in less than four years for poverty relief in India and to her plans to create a home and school for more than 300 children of lepers. At first, though, the quality of her mercy was somewhat strained.

"It was scary," Douglas, 52, says of her early encounters with the lepers. She says she was worried that she might contract the disease herself. "I've got nine children to raise," she recalls thinking. Later she learned that, although leprosy can be contracted via airborne bacteria, it is easily treatable in its early stages.

"The hardest thing was to make myself look at" the lepers, she says. But once she did, she saw what was truly ugly: the fact that these human beings had been discarded. "I told myself, 'You can't let this suffering go on if there's anything you can do about it.' "

She did what she could, and that has turned out to be more than she ever imagined herself capable of doing, Douglas says. "If I've learned one thing, it's that one person can make a difference," she says. "If every person in America lifted just one other person up, what a different world it would be."

Before this, her life was full and comfortable. Her husband, John, is an attorney specializing in international finance. She typically performed a dozen or so violin recitals a year. Their home is in a subdivision of miniestates in Peachtree Corners. They first expanded their family horizons in 1996, when a friend called and asked Douglas if she would
take in two Lithuanian orphans. The children were a brother and sister; the girl had a life-threatening medical condition.

Douglas agreed on the spot. When her husband got home, she told him, "John, you're not going to believe what I did today." The Douglases adopted the two, adding them to their seven biological children.

Legacy of a tragedy

It took a family tragedy, however, to launch Douglas' mission to India.
In April 2000, the Douglases' daughter Amber, in her early 20s, took her own life. She had long battled bipolar disorder. In going through her daughter's things, Douglas learned that Amber had been making regular donations to an orphanage in India. As a tribute to Amber's memory, she decided to learn more about the orphanage, and in 2001 she went to India to see it for herself.

She learned that Amber's orphanage was doing relatively well financially, but she was stunned by the overall dimensions of the poverty she saw. "So many people needed help," she says. She learned that there is a whole subclass of outcast children: the sons and daughters of lepers. Though they may not have the disease, they
suffer the same social stigma as those who do, she explains, so they frequently have no one to care for them.

Douglas was introduced to a man who took in children from the streets. "He had these 25 beautiful little untouchable children. I asked him, 'How do you feed them?' " The man answered, "We eat every other day." It was through this good Samaritan that Douglas first experienced the plight of the lepers. Estimates of the number of people in India who have the disease vary widely; some government agencies place it in the tens of thousands, while some private relief agencies place it in the millions. Douglas brought her cause home to Peachtree Corners.

In 2002, she sponsored an orphaned Indian girl, Esther Muthuswamy, to come to Norcross on a student visa to receive the education she had never gotten in India. Now, Esther plans to return to India as a teacher.

"We teach the girls in India that they can be anything they want to be," Douglas says. In 2003, Douglas and four friends formed Rising Star Outreach, a nonprofit company devoted to raising money for Indian orphans, children with disabilities and children of lepers. It's a strictly volunteer organization.

"We're the world's cheapest people," she says. "We don't get paid, and we don't pay anybody for anything." When Douglas travels to make presentations to church or community groups or to groups in private homes, she pays her costs, just as she and others in Rising Star do when they travel to India.

Fruitful serendipity

Her efforts have gained the attention of important people in India.
About three months ago, she received a phone call from a woman she did not know. The woman, Padma Venkataraman, is the daughter of a
former president of India and a well-known activist against poverty and for women's rights. The two women have formed a partnership,
plugging Douglas' fund-raising skills into Venkataraman's network of Indian social service programs.

"Becky has a lot of compassion, and she's really committed to the cause," Venkataraman said from India in a recent telephone interview. Also, they share a common philosophy about the best way to assist the lepers. "Many people work with the leprosy people, but often they just want to feed them, give them trinkets," Venkataraman said. In her programs, self-sufficiency is the goal; small loans are made to enable people in the leper colonies to do things such as buy an iron or raise livestock, she said.

"What is most rewarding is when these people prove to themselves and prove to the world that they can be productive," Venkataraman said. Serendipitous things like her linking with Venkataraman have happened regularly since she started Rising Star, Douglas says. "We're all convinced that God is opening doors." The people who have joined her crusade believe that Douglas is a marvelous instrument of a godly enterprise.

"The people in the villages love her," says Tom McKinney, an Atlanta financial consultant and a board member of Rising Star. "When she
comes to their town, it's as if a queen has arrived. But she is able to do what she does in such a humble way. "The only one I can compare her to is Mother Teresa," McKinney says, adding that Douglas has modeled some of her poverty-relief efforts after those of the revered Roman Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Adrienne Cohen, another Rising Star board member, calls Douglas "the most remarkable woman I've ever met." Cohen says Douglas'
obvious sincerity touches the audiences at her fund-raising presentations, just as it does the people in the leper colonies. And she's having a greater impact than even she realizes, Cohen says.
"Even if she saved just a few children, that would be incredible. But she's done so much more than that. She's given herself completely to her cause."

Family rewards

Working with the poorest and most wretched of the poor has yielded great rewards for Douglas and her family. She recalls the time she enlisted her daughter Dianna in a wheelchair-smuggling conspiracy. Dianna, then 24, was accompanying her on a trip to India. Douglas wanted to take two wheelchairs to a leper colony. Airline officials wanted to charge a tariff that amounted to more than the wheelchairs were worth.

Douglas came up with an idea. All the way to India, she pretended to be disabled, and her daughter used one of the wheelchairs to push her around the airports. (As far as is known, the other wheelchair is still in the custody of the airline.) She even limped to the airplane restroom so her "disability" would seem more real.

Dianna was embarrassed by the charade, and she complained to her mother for most of the journey. But when they arrived at the leper colony, the daughter understood why her mother had broken the rules. The leader of the colony, a man whose leprosy had left him with stubs for limbs, came crawling to Douglas to express his joy that she had brought a wheelchair. Having a wheelchair meant that the lepers no longer would have to perform amputations of diseased limbs on one another. With the wheelchair, they could push an afflicted person the 18 miles to the nearest village, where the amputation could be
performed at a clinic.

The reluctant Dianna soon became a favorite of the villagers, and they inquire about her every time Douglas returns. There have been similar benefits for the rest of the family, Douglas says."My children have never known want, or known anyone in want," she says. Now, five of them have done service as Rising Star volunteers. One son asked that the money for his Christmas gift be given instead to Rising Star.
"This experience has brought out a tenderness we didn't know existed in them," Douglas says of her children. "It's helped make my kids into
real people." As for herself, she says she is aware of what she has given up for Rising Star. There's less time for her family, and she has scaled back her recitals to three or four a year. She misses her music, especially the feeling of having a concert hall full of people applauding. But what she receives from the poor has more than made up for the loss, she says.

"It's much more meaningful to hug a leper child."