In Budhanilkantha there is a house for children suffering from malnutrition. In a teaching kitchen, the mothers learn how they can feed their children with healthy food with little effort and expense. They cook with solar energy here (friends have donated four large solar cookers) and the water for the showers for the physically challenged is heated up using solar panels.

Another speciality: in an area of around 500 m², medicinal and spicy herbs are growing and rosemary, mint and marigolds are growing on precipices and in the corners. These are used to make massage oils for the children and patients and the Europeans who dare to remain in Nepal are especially pleased about the basil pesto.
MG will continue to develop the production in this direction: value-increasing processing, e.g. of the tomatoes (purée, ketchup, etc.) and other suitable vegetables; jams, teas, marinaded dried vegetables, etc. With the latter, MG reverts to ancient Nepalese traditions – almost forgotten and held in very low esteem, but extremely valuable for a nourishment-physiological point of view, compare this with our sauerkraut.

MG will continue to develop this ecological oasis, especially as an increasing number of people are starving in this country even though it should be able to produce enough food when one considers its external situations. She rents waste land wherever she can.

The members of our Nepalese management team have already "infected their families" so that numerous plots of wasteland in Kathmandu have already been transformed into rich growth in a similar way.

MG has now ordered 300 bio compost bins. They are to be issued to the families of those suffering from leprosy. They will be provided with thorough training on how to use the bins and Shanti buys the compost off them, this therefore also being a financial incentive for using the bin carefully.

A water treatment plant will be realised shortly. it will suffice to supply the complete station and an additional 1000 people living in the neighbouring slums.

MG is also dreaming of a bio-bakery for bread and cake, in addition to the manufacturing of gen-free Soya milk for the children. Additional dreams and especially the active implementation of such dreams repeatedly result from the precise challenges of everyday life which are continually good for new surprises, thereby always making it necessary to find new solutions to problems.

The project was therefore not planned as an "ecological project" right from the start, but has resulted from the ever increasing destitution and it proved itself to make increasing sense, i.e. "more necessary" – not only for the station but for the complete Kathmandu Valley with its population which is increasingly starving.
She is hoping to achieve a snowball effect in order to reactivate the good (!) old farming tradition of Nepal. In her mind's eye, she often sees large areas of the Kathmandu Valley as once more being a rich, fertile area as was the case 30 years ago.
In the interest of the suffering population, we can only hope that this vision will at least be partially realised.

Dortmund, March 2005