it growing, my heart leaps a little.”
Harry Giesbrecht will
turn 80 this fall. He says the university project will be his last. “After this job I’ll be out,” he declares. But he doesn’t sound convincing. If another Harry Giesbrecht says the Russian-American Christian University campus in Moscow, set to worthy project appears, it’s open in June, will be his last project. hard to imagine him saying His eyes mist when describing a kindergarten and no. And whether it’s a commercial or charitable venture summer camps with nice beds and clean sheets. may not make a difference. “Your heart smiles when you see that,” he says. For Harry Giesbrecht, business and mission are mixed together. Giesbrecht’s work is seen locally as a witness of “It’s all in one,” he says with a grin. forgiveness and reconciliation. At one public meeting the “Like borscht.” ◆ mayor of Zaporozhye, a city of a million people, declared publicly, “You Mennonites have been persecuted. You’ve been sent to jail. You’ve been sent to Siberia. And now you come back and are helping us, in spite of being wronged.” At the opening of the Mennonite Centre a Russian Orthodox priest formally apologized for what had been done to Mennonites in earlier generations. “I told him he arry Giesbrecht remembers a banquet in the had nothing to apologize for,” says Giesbrecht, “because opulent “gold room” of the Kremlin, presided what had been done to our people had been done to his over by then-president Mikhail Gorbachev and people, too.” foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze.
“We wouldn’t find the enemy”
H
Beside him sat the chief of staff of the Russian armed forces and the conversation turned to the arms race and the fear of Soviet military technology. “Let me make a confession,” the man said to Giesbrecht. “If war broke out tomorrow and the sun didn’t shine, we wouldn’t find the enemy.” It was a startling revelation, says Giesbrecht. “We were always under the impression that when it came to technology they had everything the West had. They didn’t, and still don’t. Anything you touch in the former Soviet Union, whether it be in Ukraine, Kazakhstan or wherever, is Western made and imported. They don’t manufacture anything.” ◆
Giesbrecht’s current project is building the
campus of the Russian-American Christian University in Moscow. The first of its kind to receive state approval and full accreditation by the ministry of education, it seeks to equip young Russians for leadership in business, church and civil society. It has 450 students and 25 faculty. “It’s an excellent university,” says Giesbrecht. “Students are snapped up even before they graduate.” Up to now it has rented space in the former Patrice Lumumba University but work began three years ago on its own campus. The main building, an $18 million project, is set to be finished in June. “It’s beautiful,” he says. “Every time I come, and see The Marketplace March April 2008
10
