Kalaupapa, Hawaii

The peace of morning comes to the small village of famous isolation called Kalaupapa. Breezes rustle the berry bushes. Myna birds call from treetops to wild pigs below. Life stirs on this spit of land between the soaring Molokai cliffs and the stretching Pacific abyss.

The residents who call themselves patients move about in the hours before the day’s few tourists arrive. Here is Danny, who first came here in 1942, lingering a moment in the peekaboo sun; Ivy, who arrived in 1956, standing outside the gas station she runs; Boogie, here since 1959, driving a clattering old van.

Boogie, whose given name is Clarence Kahilihiwa, gently explains why he considers himself a patient, not a resident. Some people, the state health employees and National Park Service workers, live here as part of their jobs. Others live here because this is where they were sent, against their will, long ago.

You see, he says, “We are — and you are not.”

Those who are have Hansen’s disease, also known as leprosy. Those who are represent the last few of some 8,000 people who, over a century’s span, were banished to Kalaupapa because of an illness once called the “separating sickness.” Many never again felt the embrace of loved ones living somewhere beyond the volcanic formations that rise like stone sentries just offshore.