Report from Saint Lazarus: Christoph Breuninger

See photographs in the next article!

Dear friends,

After spending my first couple days in Nairobi sleeping a lot and curing
a mild traveller's cold I had brought from India, I had the pleasure of
an extensive visit and conversation with Vitalis in St. Lazarus. 

I am very impressed with the work at St. Lazarus and with Vitalis as a
committed and inventive organizer of the project.  And I see (and you
will also by the pictures) that there is a great need for expanding the
location and amending the materials to cater to almost 300 students. I
can hardly imagine how they fit into the classrooms (and couldn't
actually see many of them due to the school break right now).
I definitely support the idea of helping to acquire the money to realize
the project in its (large) original proposal. I also see that
the seed funding proposal for teachers' salaries could take a lot of
pressure off the current situation with delays payment.
My concern with the seed funding is that  I can't help feeling it would be
a drop on a hot stone in a way, and reach sustainability only with
the bigger project's completion. Then again, projects in Africa almost
always are drops on a hot stone, I suppose.

I'll send you a more complete report once I get to organize and type my
notes. As I said, my bottom line will be that I like the project very
much and hope that we can find a way to realize the full vision with
outside money and in the meantime move forward a step with small
funding.

In the German article you can see my pictures of the project and surroundings
 - they should be fairly self-explanatory. All the doors to the left in the
fourth picture lead to classrooms, there are more around a corner to the left,
and the second picture gives a good impression of their minimal size,
originally built as (something like) apartments. The third picture is the
teachers who were there, and the one on the left is Vitalis of course.
The seventh picture is the outside of the school.
 
Christoph Breuninger is a psychologist with emphasis on clinical and family psychology.
He is spending 2011 as a volunteer in different projects (a kindergarden in India, 
an elementary school in Tansania, an aids project in Kenia, etc.)