Resigning from a job can be tricky. But when it involves children who trust and depend on you, it is no longer just an issue of work.
This is why the “mothers” hired by SOS Children’s Villages are sent home after their six months’ training, to give them time to decide if they really want the job caring for orphaned children, said Shubha Murthi, finance director for the SOS Asia office.
Taking over a household of 10 to 12 orphans, maybe for years to come, is no small responsibility. “In Asia, we have been lucky,” said Murthi. “In some countries, mothers have raised two generations of children.”
SOS was created in 1949 by Hermann Gmeiner to care for war orphans in Austria.
From the start, he decided to have women, rather than couples, run the village homes. Before launching SOS, Gmeiner had studied an organization that put couples in charge of houses, said SOS President Helmut Kutin, who lived in an SOS village as a child and returned later to join the NGO’s staff.
Gmeiner had concluded that the relationship between husband and wife could interfere with the care of the children.
Last year, Cambodia became the 131st country to host SOS-Kinderdorf International programs through financial support from private donors worldwide.
Last January, the NGO opened a village—a collection of no more than 14 SOS homes—in Phnom Penh with funds supplied by its German association of donors.
This week, Prime Minister Hun Sen inaugurated an SOS village in Siem Reap. Construction costs, estimated at $1.2 million, were funded by the Swedish SOS association, and the Cambodian government provided 3.5 hectares of land for the project.
At the inauguration on Sunday, Hun Sen said that these children who had lost their parents should not be forced to lose even more through human trafficking. He also commended SOS for building the houses in Khmer style of architecture.
SOS takes charge of orphans who no one else is able or willing to care for, Murthi said. A child moves into a home with other children where he or she will grow up, possibly raised by the same foster mother until the child is of age, usually in the early teens. “We use the expression ‘bringing home a child,’” Murthi said.
The number of children in a home varies from 10 to 12 so that brothers and sisters can stay together, Murthi said. “We never separate siblings, and we never change a child’s religion.”
Currently, 12 households are filled in the Phnom Penh village and eight are full in Siem Reap, Murthi said, adding that all the homes are Buddhist.
Villages are built within communities so that children can attend neighborhood schools—like any other children, Murthi said. SOS operates 423 villages worldwide.
When they reach 14 years old, boys move into a youth house managed by a man who works at the village. The transition is done progressively and is meant to help teenagers become self-reliant.
In Asia, girls usually stay at home until they have to go away to study or marry, Murthi said. In any case, a village always remains in touch with its former children who come to visit after they have left—again, like a family, she said.
Villages are managed by a male director who lives in them with his family, and the staff includes men, while “mothers” are single, divorced or widowed women with enough education to help children with their homework, said Soeung Vutha, a former military doctor who now directs the Phnom Penh village.
Above all, the village staff care deeply for their children, he said. “These are my daughters,” mother Lina proudly said as she introduced children from her house.
SOS now is considering building a third village in Cambodia, in Battambang, said Kutin.
