1960's South America

1960's- To South America

 
Social workers and church groups helping the poor first brought Gmeiner’s philosophy on caring for children to Latin America. Gerhard Engel, founded South America’s first SOS Children’s Village in Ecuador’s capital, Quito, in 1964.

Eventually, four more Ecuadorian Villages followed, including one in Esmeraldas, founded by an Italian priest in cooperation with the local curacy. A Village in Uruguay opened the same year, then came Villages in Chile, Bolivia, and Brazil. At 12,000 feet above sea level, Bolivia’s SOS Children’s Village in El Alto is the highest SOS Village in the world. Brazil has the greatest number of SOS facilities, 58 in all. Today, SOS has a presence in all but four Latin American countries.

Single mothers are one of Latin America’s most troubled groups because of girls' obstacles to education. In the 1990s, SOS Ecuador built day care centers for the children of single mothers and working parents. These services enable local mothers to work, thereby helping to prevent family break-ups due to poverty.

The centers also provide preventive health care to children. In early 2000, SOS Children’s Villages began family strengthening programs in Ecuador and elsewhere in Latin America. SOS works directly with families, communities, and local authorities to empower parents to effectively protect and care for their children through microloans, domestic violence prevention, and job training.

Quito’s Children’s Village lies thirty minutes outside of the city. It has twelve family houses, a clinic, and a residence for SOS “aunties”—SOS mothers in training. The Village provides a home for children like Marcelino, who some thirty years ago arrived there as a curious, restless child.

Marcelino wanted to be “a man in a suit and tie carrying a briefcase” when he grew up. Today he works for a multinational corporation. The warmth of a home and the invaluable love of a mother, the games, the sports, the learning, will always remain in my memory and my heart,” he says about his SOS childhood.