‘I was alone and miserable when I went to hospital’

Francis Amakoye, a Senior Occupational therapist and Seferio Juma, a leprosy victim at Alupe centre in Busia County. [Joe Ombuor, Standard]

More than 1,000 primary school pupils in Busia County learn and play on a disused graveyard. New constructions at Alupe Primary School feature gory scenes of exhumed skeletal bones. Pupils have to be kept away from such scenes to save them from trauma.

Less than a kilometre away from the bustle of the school is what has remained of Alupe, the one time East and Central Africa’s only leprosy and skin disease research centre or leprosarium now converted into a sub district hospital.