1960's Asia

1963- Expansion into Asia

Gmeiner was in Korea responding to a plea from Maria Heissenberger, a Catholic Women’s Movement aid worker stationed in that country to care for orphaned and abandoned children. On home leave in Austria in 1961, she convinced Gmeiner that he should go and witness firsthand the bleak situation for Korea’s children. A decade after the end of the Korean War, Korea had still not managed to rebuild, let alone provide for its homeless children.

“He ran along beside us,” recalled one witness, referring to the boy who unknowingly brought SOS to South Korea. “Before long, he caught our attention. We spoke in hand signals to each other. We laughed, we gave him something to eat. In the evening, he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a grain of rice and laid it in Gmeiner’s hand. Then he disappeared.”

Gmeiner and his young friend had met in Daegu, South Korea’s third largest city. Like most of South Korea in 1963, Daegu occupied a grim landscape of starvation, cold, and poverty. But the grain of rice Kim handed Gmeiner was a message of hope: rice symbolizes health and good fortune. The night of that encounter, the idea for the “grain of rice scheme” was born. Gmeiner launched the Grain of Rice for Korea campaign. Millions of single grains of rice carrying the message “a grain of rice for a dollar” were sent to households in Europe and the United States. Construction of the SOS Children’s Village in Daegu began that same year.

Spreading Elsewhere in Asia

After opening Villages in South Korea and the Philippines, SOS moved into India. The SOS Children’s Village in Greenfields, near Delhi, came into being in 1968 after Hermann Gmeiner had met then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was impressed with the SOS concept. India’s SOS association was founded under the auspices of Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi. With thirty-nine Villages, India hosts the most SOS Children’s Villages in the world. Of India’s SOS Villages, eight serve Tibetan children whose families fled Tibet over the years. China has nine SOS Villages, including one in Lhasa.

The move into Central Asia began in 1996, when abandoned children found homes in SOS’s first Village in Georgia. The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union had given a social and economic jolt to its former states. Alcoholism and poverty became rampant, resulting in children with inadequate care and many with no place to live. From 1997 to 2000, Villages opened for children in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan.

Natural disasters in Asia have spurred SOS Children’s Villages to go beyond its original mandate by providing emergency relief. This aid often resulted in building permanent Children’s Villages. For instance, after Pakistan’s devastating 2005 earthquake SOS Pakistan delivered food, set up a pediatric hospital, provided shelter and care for vulnerable children and women, and created a family reunion program.

SOS became the only organization authorized by the Pakistan government to provide long-time care for Kashmiri orphans. SOS’s largest relief effort to date supplied help to survivors of Asia’s 2004 tsunami; SOS built more than 2,200 family houses together with community and counseling centers, and provided 340 fishing boats. SOS now has a presence in twenty-two Asian countries.

SOS China opened its national office in Beijing in 1987. Since then, SOS China has grown to 10 Children’s Villages. The largest SOS Hermann Gmeiner School in the world is in SOS Yantai with 3,000 students.