Director of the Maitri Charitable Trust Adriana Ferranti receiving blessings and appreciation for her work from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, January 2023.

Maitri Charitable Trust has been serving, since 1989, some of India’s poorest people and continues to be guided by its founder and longtime director, Adriana Ferranti. Adriana has spent decades at the helm of Maitri. Now 81, she carries on with unwavering commitment. She has spoken with Donna Lynn Brown many times in recent years, including in February 2026. 

By Donna Lynn Brown

What is Maitri Charitable Trust? And what led Adriana Ferranti to establish it? Maitri is an FPMT charitable project located in India, managed by Adriana and overseen by an Indian board of trustees. It has a main site about five kilometers from Bodhgaya and provides services throughout the surrounding Gaya District in several areas, mainly basic health care, leprosy, tuberculosis, mother / child / young women care, education, and animal care.

At its main site, Maitri treats leprosy and tuberculosis, which persist in that part of India, by operating a free hospital and clinic. Leprosy in the area is often under-diagnosed and under-treated by the government, giving Maitri an important role. Homeless patients also sometimes live there. At both its main site and through mobile clinics, Maitri distributes free leprosy and TB relief medications and materials to people living in their homes, and provides vaccines, such as for tetanus and rabies. It also offers other basic medical care along with supplemental nourishment—vitamins, milk, staple foods, formula—for expectant mothers, newborns, and young children, provides information on HIV and other issues, educates girls about their bodies and supplies menstrual products, and provides supports for some kinds of disabilities. Examples include eyewear and special footwear for people with deformities from leprosy. Its mobile clinics reach poor areas lacking primary health cents; they sometimes offer ambulance services as well as direct care. Maitri also helps poverty-stricken families survive Bodhgaya’s cold winters, distributing food, supplements, and blankets to hundreds of people every year, and giving warm clothes and blankets to students at its school. It is also well-known in the area for taking in stray, abandoned, and injured animals, some of whom are dropped off anonymously while others are rescued when staff are informed an animal is in need. Maitri sterilizes animals, gives them veterinary care, and cares for them at its site. Dozens live there at any given time, mainly dogs but also other animals like goats.

Director Adriana Ferranti with women receiving support from MAITRI.

Maitri operates a school is in the village of Fulchatar, about 15 kilometers from Bodhgaya. It is a collaboration with villagers; they built and maintain the building, and Maitri provides teachers, books, and supplies. The school has about 125 students in grades one through four, most from so-called “untouchable” castes. Other schools are too far for these young children to walk to; after grade four, they are able to attend government schools. Maitri’s school teaches the government curriculum as well as moral values. The teachers report that when students later attend other schools, they are ahead of their peers, and young adults who have attended the school as children have found good jobs, such as in the police. Villagers support the school because of its success.

Adriana oversees all this from the porch of her aging mud-brick home at Maitri’s site. Armed with two phones and backed by Kanchan, her trusted second in command, she takes care of the hospital and clinics, 24 staff (many of whom travel around villages providing health care), 70 or 80 mostly disabled dogs, and various other animals. She also raises funds to pay Maitri’s expenses and battles India’s complex bureaucracy. The work never stops—but it seems to keep her healthy. Her reward is seeing young children receiving an education who otherwise would not, sick and disabled people benefiting from treatments and supports that governments do not provide, undernourished mothers and babies getting supplements and care, girls receiving hygiene information and supplies, remote villages getting basic and emergency medical care, poor families being helped with food and blankets, information being disseminated on HIV, TB, leprosy, women’s health, and immunization, and injured and abandoned animals getting food, veterinary care, blessings, and a home.

Blanket distribution at MAITRI Charitable Trust, Bihar, India, January 2018. Photo by Phil Hunt.

What brought Adriana to this life? She grew up amid the scarcities of post-war Italy, shaped by her family’s values of duty and hard work. By the 1960s and 1970s, though, Italy’s new-found wealth offered abundant consumption and enjoyments. She indulged, but soon realized that these pleasures gave little true happiness. She became, from age 30, a seeker. Mystical experiences followed, but these did not answer her questions, particularly a crucial one: why things happen. One day, she came across a booklet called “Reincarnation and Karma” by Yogananda. “Finding out about karma was an incredible liberation,” Adriana says. “Karma explains why. And makes clear that it all depends on me. My difficulties are caused by my own actions. To get out, I had to act.” Yet when she visited Italy’s emerging Hindu centers, none called out to her—and then she encountered Tibetan Buddhism. In 1979, she went to Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa (ILTK) in Pomaia where she met Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. She knew she was home. “Rinpoche revealed himself to me—it was incredible,” she smiles. But she still hadn’t found a role in life that expressed who she felt she was.

Lama Zopa with Adriana Ferranti and MAITRI staff, Bodhgaya, Gaya District, Bihar, India, February 2019. Photo by Ven. Roger Kunsang.

In 1980, she happened to see a documentary on Africa that showed a priest dressing the sores of a leprosy patient. “I knew,” she reports. “I knew instantly, like a lightning bolt. A revelation. This was my role, my path, who I was.” She took a course in leprosy management, but to serve leprosy patients in any area of India, she needed a visa and government authorization. Rinpoche suggested working in the Gaya/ Bodh Gaya region. In 1989, newly equipped with authorization, she began offering leprosy services from Kathmandu while waiting for an Indian visa; she set up in Gaya in 1990 once her visa came through. By 1998, she had procured her current site. Land and buildings were soon blessed by Rinpoche, and a forest planted to improve the environment. “The work came naturally to me,” she recounts, “so I was happy, but it was incredibly difficult…I was on my own, doing everything, even driving the jeep for mobile clinics. It was a hard life, but I had a sense of purpose.” 

Since then, Adriana has overseen Maitri’s health and education programs and services while caring for dozens of abandoned and injured animals, and, at Rinpoche’s request, putting in place nine stupas along with other elements that provide blessings and imprints to patients, staff, animals, and the surrounding area. Money has come from various sources, including, at times, Rinpoche, although fundraising has always been challenging. She reports. “Just by sheer faith is how I carried on. There was never any security. But I thought that as long as I was doing what I had to do, the funds would be provided. That’s what seems to have happened, since I am still here!” 

Adriana is one of a handful of people in FPMT who devote their lives to social engagement. She has been working in this difficult part of India for almost four decades. It is her Dharma practice—often a practice of patience in the face of problems: legal issues concerning Maitri’s land; troubles with officials, permits, and visas; money shortages; challenges training and retaining staff; the headache of service provision during the pandemic; theft and corruption; and hazards specific to being a woman running an NGO in India. And each death of a rescued animal breaks her heart. Now, her priority is to ensure that Maitri is in good shape for the present and future. As well as overseeing its services and expanding them where feasible, she is renovating and upgrading some existing buildings (including a multi-faith temple) and constructing a new house to replace the one that is crumbling. As Bodhgaya’s urban expansion begins to surround Maitri’s oasis of shade and greenery, she is determined to keep it a refuge for humans and animals.

Adriana Ferranti, MAITRI Charitable Trust Director, 2026. Photo Credit Donna Brown

And she is committed. Like a mother with a child, she reports, “walking away is not an option.” She doesn’t feel her age, and with a visa good until 2030, she has no plans to retire. As for later, she says firmly, “If Maitri is meant to continue, someone will come.” Asked who might suit the role, she responds, “They should be able to live in India without visa problems. One of the biggest problems is visas. So an Indian citizen or OCI (Overseas citizen of India) would be ideal. But the main thing is that they can’t see it as just a job where you go home at five o’clock. It’s a vocation. Living on the site, overseeing everything, being patient with difficulties, showing love and concern for the staff, the patients, the animals… Maitri is a service to all beings, so the bodhisattva aspiration is at its heart.”

Written by Donna Lynn Brown. Donna is a former Associate Editor of Mandala magazine. She first encountered Lama Zopa Rinpoche and FPMT at a November course at Kopan Monastery in 1996. Donna completed a Ph.D in which she researched and wrote about FPMT’s social engagement and its intersection with traditional Buddhist teachings.

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For more information about Maitri Charitable Trust and to donate directly to their work, please visit their website.

Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), is a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation and community service.