10th anniversary, July 2002

Foreword
Christa Schaaf

Retrospect

Commemorative volume for the 10th anniversary of Shanti – that’s how long our leprosy facility has existed!?
I can still remember us, about 35 people, sitting on the carpet in Marianne and Herbert Grosspietsch’s living room as we were too many. We looked back on many weeks of hardship. The juridical act of the foundation of our association had been implemented. Reflective things, things worth thinking of were said, a psalm had been read and we ate and laughed together in the big garden. In former times, 15 July 1992, at the foundation of Shanti.
I’m browsing through our Shanti letters of the past years. They contain so many individual destinies which are presented in such a detailed way! Especially the increasing size of the facility is impressive – after three years we had about 100 patients, 2 years later there were nearly 214. Today: almost 800 people live with us or live on us (the staff) respectively.
First the ambulance and the clinic; Buddhanilkantha and the tree project; more and more workshops; home-made brickearth cottages; the kindergarten and then the school in 1998; the hospice department and the house for severely disabled kids; the exhibition room, the shop, the coffee shop … and since 1996 the coloured paintings which make our facility so distinctive and happy.
Marianne Grosspietsch, the founder of the soul of the ensemble, never had a fixed plan: I definitely want to do or arrange this and that; it’s supposed to look like this or that.

Emergencies or other concrete situations always necessitated concrete actions which required swift reactions.
The fact that our facility can’t be integrated into other aid organizations (we tried it quite often), which makes it so distinctive, accrued from these circumstances.
Many of the past years were hard. Years in which jealousy and malice did their best to wear out Marianne and to destroy what she had built up.
Years in which Marianne only had two possibilities: to courageously give everything up or to learn how to trust.
She learned how to trust. More intensively and more childlike (like Jesus had envisioned it).
That’s what gave her strength. The strength which enabled her to master her every day challenges, which have always accompanied her since she considered fighting for justice and humanity her duty.
By the way her achievements experienced its first public recognition, in fact in Nepal: she was rewarded with the "social award", an award for special social actions. A Nepalese magazine brought this price into being together with Nepalese dignitaries.

Concerning this booklet

From now on Marianne will describe the present circumstances of our facility.
In addition to that she’ll describe the short articles of the facility itself as well as some statistics of our facility.
Maybe you’ll ask yourself what will happen to the facility when Marianne is incapable of running it any more? With this kept at the back of your mind you’ll be really thankful for the things her daughter, Dori Grosspietsch-Rindle, wrote.