Your Excellency President of the Philippines, Members of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, trustees, fellow awardees, ladies and gentlemen:
Dear Friends, thank you all for having taken the time out to join us here today. To begin, let me briefly introduce myself: I am a medical doctor, a German, a convert and a nun, by now 72; I have survived Nazi time, World War II, and so far, all the upheavals, riots, terrorist attacks in my adopted. I have slipped into a task which I never planned. I have been very happy in my life and I am still happy, and would do the same if I was to be asked to make my life's decision once more.
I have an entire collection of signatures -- many many signatures, and thumb impressions on sheets of paper and cards, of people who congratulated me to the award -- patients, workers, friends from all over Pakistan, and beyond. The workers state proudly that it is "their" award I am receiving in their name. They are all very excited about it, so I was curious, what was special about it? Perhaps: that Asia asserts itself. Asserts itself constructively, proactively. The Asian Nobel Prize. I am happy to be able to assist Pakistan in this small way, to build the road to participate in the finding of our own identity.
What has actually made you think of us, the Leprosy Team? Looking back the past 40 years, there seems to have been a special grace with the programme. We did embark to do the impossible -- to do the possible, we said in the beginning, what would this be for a challenge? The possible everybody could do. The hut made from wooden crates, in a slum in Karachi where leprosy work started, grew into a National Leprosy Programme, and achieved its goal, leprosy control, after 35 years of hard work across the country.
What makes me genuinely happy and grateful to God, is that this "leprosy control" does not only mean that we gained the victory over a bacillus -- this is fairly easily done. Leprosy control meant for us, from the beginning, to be instrumental to change the lives of our patients ? to help them to gain back their dignity, taken from them simply because they fell prey to an ordinary bacterial disease.
And while battling for their physical cure and their human dignity, this battle has changed us, too, has shaped our values, our "c.i.", our corporate identity: the human person is in the centre of our concern. Our priority commitment is for tasks nobody is willing to tackle, and for disadvantaged groups who have no voice.
When we talk today about empowerment, it means to see the beauty and the value of the other. It is an act of love, love which is able to say, "You are precious, precious in God's eyes and precious to me." Able to say this in a world where we witness so much strife and hatred and rivalry and denial of the right of people to be different.
You had the courage to recognize with your prestigious award our fairly unknown group. A group upholding that we controlled leprosy. Thanks to modern multi-drug therapy and strategic planning but even more so thanks to loving concern for the patient.
For this I do thank you in the name of all our co-workers. The team is looking towards Manila to find their way of life recognized. Thank you for helping Asia to discover, rediscover, find, cling to, confess its values -- values of the intellect and heart. Thanks for strengthening us on our way. Thank you.
