The Prince of Asturias Foundation
Nicolás Castellanos
Nicolas Castellanos was born in 1935 in the agricultural and cattle-farming village of Mansilla del Páramo (León). He took holy orders in Palencia in 1953 and completed his ecclesiastical studies at La Vid Monastery (Burgos). In 1992, he resigned as Bishop of Palencia in order to devote himself to missionary work and, since then, Monsignor Castellanos has resided in Santa Cruz (Bolivia) with a group of priests, clergy and laypersons, where he works within the framework of “Plan 3000”, aimed at improving living conditions and health in this urban district. He founded the “Hombres Nuevos” parish, on which five soup kitchens –attended by more than 800 children and mothers– depend. Each year, some 200 malnourished children receive attention at the “Palencia” Children’s Centre, which also provides training to their mothers. He has also built fourteen schools –attended by over 14,000 students– within the framework of the “No child without a school in Santa Cruz or Bolivia” movement. In 2004, a hospital was built in this locality under Plan 3000 and construction began of social housing for immigrant families to Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
In 1998, he was awarded the Municipal Medal of Merit by the Honourable Municipal Council of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia) and in 1999 was named “Personality of the Year from León”. He has also received the Spanish Association of Toy Manufacturers Award for humanitarian work on behalf of poor children (2001), the Human Values Award from the Community of Castile and León (2002) and Spain's Gold Medal for Work (2006). In 2007, he published the book “Memoria, profecía y liberación hacía el reino” [Memory, Prophecy and Deliverance to the Kingdom].
Vicente Ferrer
Vincent Ferrer was born in Barcelona in 1920. After being called up during the Civil War by the Government of the Republic and passing through a concentration camp in France at the end the conflict, he returned to Spain and completed three years of a Law degree. In 1944, he decided to join the Society of Jesus, where he began his training for the priesthood. He was first sent as a missionary to India in 1952, being ordained a priest in 1956. From then until his death in June 2009, Vicente Ferrer carried out a vast amount of exemplary humanitarian work among the poor and needy in India.
Between 1952 and 1969, he lived in the region of Manmad (Bombay), where he was known as the “missionary of the wells” for the support he gave the peasants in the construction of water wells, creating a Rural Development Association, one of the first organisations dedicated to the development of rural areas in India. He also worked in the construction of community services, such as a hospital, schools and residential homes. The sympathy that this work gradually awoke among the peasants of the area and visibility of such work led the ruling classes to see him as a threat and to take action against him. This resulted in a deportation order for Ferrer and the subsequent peasant mobilisation against this order, which intellectuals and politicians also eventually joined. A march of more than 30,000 people even travelled on foot the 150 miles between Manmad and Mumbai to protest against this measure.
Back in Spain, Ferrer founded Acción Fraterna en el Mundo [Fraternal Action in the World], whose goal was the fight against hunger, as well as collaborating with other causes. He returned to India with a new visa in 1969, settling in Anantapur in the State of Andhra Pradesh, the country’s poorest region, ravaged by desertification and where health and education services were non-existent. There he began to implement irrigation systems and a cooperative working method he called “linked brotherhood”: help is given to each peasant in digging his own well, with material and foodstuffs for the length of the work; when this is finished, the peasant –who can now consider himself to be virtually rich– helps others just as he was helped. In the face of the rigid Hindu caste system, Ferrer brought the untouchables together in democratically run communities, which received criticism from several sectors of society.
He left the Society of Jesus in 1970, married the British journalist Anne Perry and they together laid the foundations of the Vicente Ferrer Foundation in India. Through this institution, which was established in Spain in 1996 to ensure the economic sustainability of its projects, he launched a child sponsorship scheme. Today, after expanding its scope of action to other areas of Andhra Pradesh, more than 1,800 people –mostly local people from Anantapur– work on implementing the different development programmes that the Foundation carries out in 2,313 villages, benefiting more than 2½ million people. All this is achieved thanks to the financial assistance of the Foundation’s more than 130,000 sponsors.
Since the Foundation was established in Anantapur, the results of its work speak for themselves: 27,793 houses have been built and another 1,700 have been adapted for people with disabilities; three hospitals; a family planning centre; a care and attention centre for patients with HIV/AIDS; 14 rural clinics; 1,506 schools and educational centres; a thousand women’s associations; and so on. In addition, 74,421 primary school pupils have passed through its schools (38,063 boys and 36,358 girls) and 68,141 secondary school students (35,514 boys and 32,627 girls). The Foundation has also awarded scholarships to almost a thousand high school graduates and college students.
After more than half a century devoted to the poorest of the poor, Vicente Ferrer died in 2009. He received the unanimous recognition of the Indian and Spanish authorities, as well as that of humanitarian organisations from all spheres, in addition to that of those who helped throughout his career, the outcasts. Half a million people paid their last respects at his funeral chapel before he was buried following a state funeral.
Despite his demise, the work of Vicente Ferrer has been assured through the Foundation and the commitment of his wife and children to this institution.
Throughout his life’s work, Ferrer received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Creu de Sant Jordi of the Regional Government of Catalonia (2000), the Gold Medal of the City of Barcelona (2000), the Human Rights Award of the General Council of Spanish Bar Associations (2000), his naming as a Leading Figure in the history of the 20th century by UNESCO (2001), the Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Solidarity from the Spanish Ministry of Work and Social Affairs (2002), the Olympic Spirit Award of the Spanish Olympic Committee (2002), the Quijote Universal Award (2007) and the Grand Cross of Civil Merit from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2009). He was posthumously awarded the High Distinction of the Regional Government of Valencia and the Gold Medal of the Spanish Senate.
Joaquín Sanz Gadea
Joaquín Sanz Gadea was born in Teruel on 30th June, 1930. After graduating from the University of Salamanca with a degree in Medicine and Surgery, he went on to study Tropical Medicine at the Sorbonne and Gynaecology, Obstetrics and Surgery at the Complutense University of Madrid.
He has been medical director of Buta Hospital in the Eastern Province of the former Belgian Congo, where he began working in 1961 after being selected by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the so-called “Operation Congo” campaign under the auspices of the United Nations. In 1962, he was transferred to the capital of the Eastern Province, Stanleyville, nowadays called Kisangani, to take up the post of surgeon at the General Hospital. He was also to take charge, as director, of the leper colony of Malek, and as a physician, of the Osio, Konga-Konga and Central prisons. In 1964, he founded the Kisangani orphanage, which provides a home to a hundred and forty children, who learn Spanish among other subjects. He rescinded his contract with the WHO and founded the Sainte Thérèse Surgical Clinic in Kisangani in 1970, nowadays directed under the same name by Congolese doctors, and continues to run the orphanage. In 1974, he was appointed Surgeon General by Spain’s Directorate General of Health in the Western Sahara, a Spanish province, a post he continued to occupy until the province was handed over to the Moroccan authorities. He then returned to Madrid, where he obtained a position as a National Health Service gynaecologist.
After practicing his profession for some time, he requested voluntary leave and went back to the Congo, then Zaire, as Head of Surgical and Gynaecology Services at the Onatra Hospital in Matadi.
He collaborated in the construction of the Midema Medical Centre Hospital, where he was director until retiring in 1999, the year he returned to Spain.
He has been a member of the Spanish Medical-Surgical Academy since 1978 and is an Honorary Member of the Board of Zaragoza’s Instituto Fernando el Católico. He holds the Grand Cross of Charity (1965), the Civil Grand Cross of Health (1970) and the Grand Cross of Civil Merit (1992) and is Commander of Number of the Order of Isabella the Catholic (1968) and the Order of Africa (1976). He is also a Knight of the National Order of the Leopard (1970), Officer of the National Order of Zaire (1985) and Commander of the National Order of Zaire (1994). In 1998, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the city of Teruel. The General Assembly of the General Council of Official Colleges of Physicians of Spain decided unanimously in 1999 to grant him the status of National Member of Honour of the College, along with its gold insignia.
Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus was born in Bangladesh in 1940. He graduated in Economic Science from New Delhi and then went on to further his education in the USA as a Fulbright and Eisenhower Fellow, obtaining his PhD from Vanderbilt University. Professor of Economics at Chittagong College, in 1976 he founded the Bank of the Poor (the Grameen Bank), a non-profit institution that has rescued hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens from misery. He is considered to be the architect of the microcredit revolution. His bank will only grant loans to the very poor, who then become shareholders of the entity; the number of whom now exceed 2.5 million people, of which 94 percent are women. At the time of receiving the 1998 Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, the bank had over 22,000 employees working in nearly 38,000 of the country’s 68,000 hamlets and villages and over a thousand branches. The average loan is 75 dollars and the maximum, 300 dollars, with a 98% repayment rate. The bank goes out to look for clients and encourages self-employment; it uses a system that is now functioning in more than 50 countries, organising clients into small groups. In the words of Yunus, the system attempts “to do away with financial apartheid. We believe that a loan is more than a business proposition and that it, like sustenance, is a right of man”. “Poverty has a place in museums, but not in a civilized human society”. Yunus has been awarded honorary doctorates by more than twenty-one universities around the world and has received a score of awards, including the Ramon Masagay Award (Philippines), the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (Switzerland), the Pfeffer Peace Prize, the World Food Prize and the Gleitsman Foundation Award (all three in the USA), the Simon Bolivar Prize (UNESCO), the Man of Peace Award (Italy), and so on. In the past 20 years, the Grameen Bank is estimated to have lent more than two thousand million euros to three and a half million poor people.
In 2005, the Foundation for Justice awarded him the 5th Award of the same name, taking into account the contribution of his work as a teacher in the field of eradicating poverty. On 13th October, 2006, Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank were awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for their struggle for economic justice for the poor. Yunus donated the cash prize corresponding to the award to charity.
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