Lady of the house Poornima Sutradhar greets the visitor with a smile. The place is home to eleven children and Poornima is their mother. Curiously, she hasn't given birth to even one of them. Poornima is just one of several 'mothers' who work for SOS Children's Villages of India.
The welfare organisation, which offers orphaned and destitute children a permanent home and was nominated for the Nobel Prize last year, has 385 'villages' spread over 131 countries. The villages have SOS families comprising a mother and 89 children.
The one here, on the outskirts of National capital has 20 houses and 192 children. ''I think it's a wonderful idea. The children are totally dependent on her (the mother),'' says Ms Tsering D. Kartsang, who was herself brought into this village in 1969. She grew up there and now works in the Fund Raising and Public Relations department of SOS Children's Villages.
She is all smiles when she recalls her childhood in the village. ''All nine children of my home came in on a single day. I admire the guts of our mother who, among other chores, would wash three buckets of clothes every morning. We used to help her a little bit.
The youngest child would be aided by an older one. It wasn't possible for our mother to do everything for everyone all the time.'' Strangely, there is religious demarcation. ''A Hindu child would be housed with a Hindu mother.'' Ms Tsering, being a Buddhist, received a cottage where that religion was practiced.
Princess Salimah Aga Khan, who began working with SOS Children's Villages when she took part in the inauguration of the first such village in French Polynesia, visited this village Thursday.
The Princess, who is to be appointed Ambassador to the SOS villages, will also visit the villages in Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh and Gopalpur in Orissa. ''Six years ago, I went to the very first village. A year later, I went again and was delighted to realise that after 12 months there the children had changed (forgotten their bitter past).
They were also attending school. That's when I fell in love with SOS,'' the Princess said. Pradeep Singh, who is India director of SOS Children's Villages, speaks of how even governments have come forward to support the cause. ''Seventy acres have been provided to us in Bhopal solely for constructing a facility to take care of developmentally-challenged children.
The Madhya Pradesh government wanted us to have a village in every range. Comparing the countries we operate in, the largest number of villages, the largest number of children under our care and the largest number of projects are here in India.''
After the children attain the age of 14, ''we start preparing them for life outside. ''After the Orissa supercyclone, in a single day we had 700 orphaned children on our hands. Two hundred of them are being taken care of by us. In Hyderabad, state government authorities once saved 200 babies from being sold, and handed them over to our care.''
There is a Retired Mother's Home in the complex which is residence to seven old women. ''They have devoted the best part of their lives to children. We cannot abandon them. They stay together, have a kitchen of their own,'' says Tsering.
She recalls her schooldays, ''Outside we faced problems. We are somewhat different. Other kids asked us, 'Oh, so you are from the village? You must be having dormitories? And bells for lunch and bedtime?' That's when we realised that our homes are actually much better than that.''
The SOS movement was the brainchild of Austrian physician Hermann Gmeiner who was moved by the plight of children in a war-ravaged world. With 600 shillings, he founded the first children's village in Imst, Tyrol. The year was 1949. India got its first SOS village - the one here - in 1964 and now has 32 such units including the ones at Vishakhapatnam for cyclone-affected children and at Jammu for victims of terrorism in Kashmir.
The total number of kids being looked after stands at 10,000. Every cottage has three rooms for the children, one for the mother, a living room, a kitchen and a garden. Each village is under a director who has a team of co-workers. The mothers receive training at a special school here.
Poornima Sutradhar has been here for a decade now. She belongs to Bhadrak district of Orissa and saw the advertisement in an edition of Employment News. The unmarried lady, who is paid Rs 4,000 as monthly salary, rises at five every morning, prepares food and gets her children ready for school.
When do they watch TV? ''After eight-thirty in the evening. The TV is not switched on before that,'' Poornima says strictly. But given the smiles on the faces of her tiny tots as they hug the visitors, it appears they love the lady they call 'Ma'.
- Source UNI