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2009 Opus Prize Recipient

Association Solidarité Femininé - Aicha Ech Channa
Asociación Hogares Luz y Vida - Sister Valeriana García-Martín
Fazenda da Esperança - Father Hans Stapel

2009 Opus Prize Finalist
Father Hans Stapel
Fazenda da Esperança

Father Hans Stapel is co-founder and president of Fazenda da Esperança – Farms of Hope. He has established more than 60 therapeutic communities in 10 countries to help people with drug and alcohol addictions rebuild their lives.

Stapel, a native of Germany, is a Franciscan priest and in 1979 became pastor of Our Lady of the Glory Church in Guaratinguetá, northeast of Sao Paulo. He started a program to construct houses for poor families and expanded activities to include other social services.

He established Fazenda da Esperança in 1983 to help drug addicts in Guaratinguetá, and the enterprise has grown to include operations in Argentina, Guatemala, Germany, Mexico, Mozambique, Paraguay, the Philippines, Russia and Uruguay. A farm soon will open in Portugal.

Addicts live in houses of 14 persons for a year, supporting each other and guided by two recovering addicts. More than 10,000 people have participated in the program, and 80 percent have abstained from further drug use.

“Taking drugs away is very quick, but we want them to be new people, with a new lifestyle,” Stapel says. “A year is necessary. In the first period, we carry them. Then they are able to walk on their own. Then they begin to carry others.”

Each day, residents choose Gospel phrases on which to model their behaviors. “This is a very accurate way of putting the words of God into practice,” he says. “God is saying, ‘Everything you do for others, you do for me.’ I believe in every creature is the presence of God.”

Love is both the ultimate foundation and solution, Stapel says, and as recuperating addicts find ways to love, “That’s the way to wake up God in them.”

Pope Benedict XVI visited Fazenda da Esperança in May 2007 and gave his blessing to 2,000 current and former Fazenda residents who came from around the world to see him.