Taking Bangladesh to zero-leprosy, one new case at a time

DHAKA: Sandhya Mandal has never felt so vindicated. For the past four years, the 36-year-old community health worker from Meherpur — a rural district bordering India — has been traveling 50 kilometers every day along dusty roads on an old motorbike, searching for leprosy patients who needed urgent treatment. But in her community, instead of compliments, neighbors and relatives raised questions about her work and her character. “They ask why I come home so late and what is this ‘work’ that I really do. Some even imply that I might be doing something like prostitution,” Mandal tells Inter Press Service (IPS).

But Mandal, project manager at a nongovernment organization called Shalom, which works with the government to end leprosy, sat in an audience of diplomats, ministers and health experts from all over the country, listening to Sheikh Hasina — the prime minister of Bangladesh — at a national conference on leprosy. “Nobody can doubt me or my work now,” she says, proudly clutching the yellow invitation card she received from the organizers of the conference — her first to a national-level event.