In SOS Children's Village, a charity
specializing in foster care, the "mother" plays a crucial role.
Every village is composed of many families, with seven or eight
children to a home. Hermann Gmeiner, an Austrian philanthropist,
founded the organization in 1949 to give children a chance to be
raised in families, so that the orphans could enjoy a mother's love
and family warmth and thus grow up healthily and happily.
Gmeiner made a list of requirements for each
prospective mother: they must be unmarried, divorced, or widows.
They can have no children of their own, and divorced women cannot
have custody of their kids. To be an SOS mother is to make a
commitment to being single or having no child, and agree to remain
in the state for life.
After the People's Republic of China was
founded in 1949, the Chinese Government decided that the state
should play a major role in taking care of the country's orphans. A
lot of babies were abandoned at that time and state-owned welfare
houses across the country were responsible for raising
children.
In the past decade, however, the concept of
foster care has spread and become more popular in China. The first
SOS Children's Village in the country was set up in 1984, and since
then the number of such villages has increased.
Each SOS Children's Village in China is
composed of 12 to 18 families, with a mother taking care of the
children as they grow to become siblings. Each village has a head
(male), who plays the role of father. Every village has
kindergartens, youth's flats and flats for retired mothers.
According to statistics released by the China
Association for SOS Children's Village at the end of 2011, China
villages had fostered about 2,300 orphans. Half of them have
already left the village to enter society; more than 300 children
are college graduates; and one third of them had graduated from
technical schools. They have gone on to be civil servants,
businessmen and servicemen, proving to make a positive contribution
to society in different ways.
However, running an adoption community is not
always a smooth operation. Children's employment and housing proves
to be a bottleneck for the village. Recently, some villages have
offered many job openings for adoptive mothers, but few applied.
SOS villages are in desperate need of mothers, or some children
might again face the heartbreak of losing a mother's love. Many
potential applicants are deterred by the strict relationship
standards, low pay and a difficult life after retiring.
The SOS children's villages in China are in
need of not only huge donations from the whole society, but also
the arrival of a large number of devoted, caring, selfless people,
who may sustain this wonderful cause forever.
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