Monday, March 31, 2008

More Visits

So sometimes when you have meetings at projects that work with kids you get the opportunity to really see what life is like from the kids’ perspective. The picture below is me in my really small chair waiting for our meeting to start. Seriously, I sat in this chair during the entire meeting...about two hours...I love how my New Balance shoes just seem to glow…



Our visits to projects continued last week on Thursday and we visited two more projects that are part of the Soforthilfe foundation. Soforthilfe is German for “Immediate Help” and the foundation has five different projects. I wrote about my experience visiting their street ministry in a previous post.

Last Thursday we visited two more of their projects. One project is called CATI where they offer a safe and secure environment for kids to come to. They help the kids with their school work, they feed them and they strive to help meet the needs of the kids...needs across the board…from washing the kids to help keep them clean to spiritual growth exercises. CATI is for kids ages 6 + and all of these kids are at-risk and most live on the streets.

The other project that we visited was called MI CASITA and it is a similar program to what they do at CATI but this home is for kids less than six years old. There are about 40 kids involved in the project right now. The kids were so little and cute. They were eating lunch when we arrived then of course came nap time. I snapped a few photos of the kids sleeping. In one of the rooms there were twelve kids sleeping all together in a row. They had some cushions underneath them but I really wish that I had some of those blue mats we use in the states to give to them.

It was another successful day visiting projects. We have visited eight different projects so far and I think we have about three or four more to go. We are currently developing a website for our program that helps all of these projects and over the next two to three weeks I will be gathering all of the info that we need for the site so that I can get it to our designer. Getting all of the info together for this site is my main focus these next few weeks. Once we get this website launched I hope to work with some of these projects more directly to help them accomplish some of their marketing and communication goals.

This German foundation Soforthilfe is really doing some great work and I am excited to help them. They currently receive all of their funding from Germany and a few other countries but they have no support in the US. I hope to help them break into the US market.

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