Culion Island in Palawan near Dicabaito Channel | Photo by Tuderna via Wikimedia Commons
Part XXV of “Cancer/Medical Moonshot” Series
Last Monday morning, this columnist felt sleepy. Ergo, he felt the need for a “Spanish siesta.” To him, it is the greatest and most beneficial legacy, health-wise, left by Iberian colonizers for “Filipino Indios”. After about two hours of sleep, his favorite second-degree cousin, now deceased, appeared in a dream. That woke him up.
That cousin was Antonio F. Dioneda, M.D., who, as a young physician, decided not to emigrate to the United States to pursue postgraduate studies. He could have practiced medicine after passing the Board exam, become a rich permanent resident, and then qualified for U.S. citizenship. What he did was stunning. He accepted a Philippine government offer to become one of the few physicians willing to work at the leper colony on Culion Island in the island province of Palawan. Being an elder cousin by about a decade, this Sorsoganon addressed him as “Manoy Tony.”
Manoy is a regional moniker of respect for a person older than oneself. For older females, the term is “manay ” in the Bicol Region language. After his contract with the modest hospital on Culion Island, which he had extended several times, ended, he decided to return to his home province of Sorsogon, where he operated a clinic. As a public service, Dr. Dioneda conducted free medical check-ups in some barrios that were only accessible by banca. He did not die as a rich doctor but as a happy, humanitarian kindred soul.
In 1906, the U.S. colonial government established the Culion Leper Colony in Palawan. It became the world’s largest, most organized leprosarium by the 1930s, isolating thousands of patients to combat leprosy. It operated as a self-contained town with its own currency until cures were developed, and it was declared leprosy-free by the World Health Organization in 2006.
A leper colony (or Hansen’s disease colony) is an isolated community historically established to quarantine, segregate, and house people with leprosy. The idea of a colony arose primarily from fear of contagion. The last functioning leper colony in the U.S. was Kalaupapa on Molokai, Hawaii (established 1866), with another notable site at Carville, Louisiana. While most are now museums or abandoned, some active, supportive communities still exist worldwide, particularly in India.
“Residents of the “Cancer Castles” can bring in their immediate kin, especially military veterans with PTSD, to find affordable housing. They can be accommodated, and thereby the proposed project can help provide livelihoods and other socioeconomic opportunities in a co-op style.”
Manoy Tony just smiled at me in my dream. He did not need to say anything, for this columnist knew — in his subconscious mind — that Heaven sent him to deliver an idea. Yes, to copy the example of the Culion (Palawan) medical facility for cancer victims, especially survivors. But with lots of modern amenities and medical facilities.
Immediately, the thought came that it should not be called a “colony”. The colony connotes quarantine, segregation, and fear of contagion. Aha, this writer’s vivid imagination turned to phrases like “Cancer Castle”. But at least as “Cancer Co-op Community”. It can help in solving one of America’s (and the Third World’s) pestering problems of homelessness and other social cancers. And all, the proposed projects will be carried out according to the tenets of Cooperative Economics, making the nation’s economy of the people, by the people, and for the people. And not for the two-percent filthy-rich barons, their family-owned monopolies, cartels, and political cronies only.
Residents of the “Cancer Castles” can bring in their immediate kin, especially military veterans with PTSD, to find affordable housing. They can be accommodated, and thereby the proposed project can help provide livelihoods and other socioeconomic opportunities in a co-op style.
Parts of the infrastructure should include facilities for mental or physical rehabilitation and periodic tests to make sure cancer cells have not returned to the survivor’s body. It should also include medical clinics for continued chemotherapy, radiation, etc., ad infinitum. New schools for nursing, medicine, alternative medicine, dentistry, nutrition, addiction treatment, and other medical fields can be established near the camps or castles as “Cancer/Medical Moonshot” campuses.
By next Wednesday, additional ideas for the tentatively named “Cancer Castle” (Resort, Retirement and Opportunity Oases, or R202) will be discussed. It would include a marina, a cruise ship port, and other transportation hubs, and, of course, how to fund them. It will include proposals such as bringing in used medium-sized cruise ships from Greece, as suggested by two friends: an Argentine-Italian ceramic industrialist and a Greek-American retired developer.
