Souls of Success

It is a place where the child proposes and providence doesn’t dispose where the homeless discover a home where the abandoned find themselves wanted in a family bubbling with love and affection, it is a world where souls are saved, where hearts are taught to learn how to beat, where motherliness is a concept, where dreams are realized. The SOS Children’s Village there are 30 of them all over the country shapes the lives of orphans, fashions their careers and makes success stories out of them.
Take the case of Anjali Sharma. The 23 year-old girl from SOS children’s Village in Faridabad bad’s Green fields area, a tourism graduate from Delhi University is charting our a career in dramatics. She has worked with the National School of Drama, Indian firm and Theatre Academy, theatre Action Group, Television institute of India in Pune and has interacted with theatre celebrities like Barr John Roshan Seth, Joy Michael, Avijit Dutt and Alexander Heddinger. “We staged a play called Bhagwan ki Adalat at Chandigarh, Mussoorie, Pune and Calcutta which was received very well and go a lot of publicity reveals Anjali.
Moreover, she has spent three fruitful months in a festival of technical theatre in the United States. She has even secured an admission at the Emerson College in Boston for a course in mass communication; at Louisiana State University to Dabble in theatre arts; and in the university of Wales, UK, for an MA fin journalism however, she is still struggling for a scholarship. But, no mater: SOS makes al the difference.
“The kind of opportunities which  I got here is SOS, I am sure is something very rarely a person in a middle-class family gets,” feels Anjali, according to her mother, Tarawati, “She has come to the village when she was only a six months old from Shishu Bhawan, Patna.”
Anjali recalls, “My friends and classmates during my earlier students days used to treat me like an institutional orphan, but after visiting my SOS home they were quite surprised to find it akin to their own homes”.
Asha Kaul, who has done her Bachelor of fine arts form Jamia Millia Islamia and master of fine arts from Delhi University, is another remarkable product of SOS Children’s Village, Asha has come to Greenfield’s in 1970, when she was barely six years old. Since her mother had expired, father put all his Children, including her two sisters and a brother, in SOS.
She adds, “I never wanted to be lost in crowd, and I found ‘art’ to stand out.” Asha’s style is semi-realistic and her subject is nature. Using the medium of oil on canvas, she recently held an exhibition of her paintings on the sea the Shridharini Art Gallery. Comments Suneet Chopra, an art critic, “Asha reflects how naturally and easily our young artists explore he universal language of modern art without losing their roots in our soil.” As early as 1983, she was selected in an international competition for an exhibition in Norway.  Today, her works are found in collection is Norway, Australia, Japan and Germany, not forgetting Indian. With the help of her sponsors, aunt Flise Hass and Georgia Haas in Germany, Asha held an exhibition of her paintings early this year at Rathausglerie in Landshut, Asha is now married to Prakash Patil, who teachers fine arts at the Hermann Gmeiner School Faridabad.
Other bright stars include kala Sexana, who is working with TIC after doing a post graduation in social work from the Tata institute of Social Sciences (TISS), and Yogesh Kaul, a part time model and executive with a hotel in Delhi.
Puneeta’s is another success story who was brought to the SOS village as a abandoned three year old. After 23 years, she is a confident post graduate in social work from TISS. Besides her academic achievements, she has worked as a coordinator of the SOS Mother Training Centre, and has also toured abroad, including Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Germany for on the job training.
Moreover, from the only SOS Children’s Village in Delhi, situated at Bawana near Narela, the first generation of children are even in destitution a girl child is discriminated against because of Indian society’s everlasting obsession with sons. “All this has become possible only because we have superseded in providing an alternative responsible parenthood’ to the needy children,” says J N Kaul, president and founder of SOS Children’s village in India.
The SOS children’s village are more than just orphanages or homes for destitute children:
They are a complete village or society where the house mother is not known as of foster parent. The whole concept of family and motherhood is a process of resettling”, through “therapeutic treatment”, the “uprooted” children: the homeless the orphans and the restitutes.
The term “therapeutic treatment” was first could by Australia’s Hermann Gmeiner who started the international chapter of the concept in the late forties, after the Second World War. According to Dr Gmeiner, therapeutic treatment starts with the mother’s love. When she tells a new child that he is here for good, he often does not believe her. At night, he my wake up crying, he may say that he is afraid he will be sent away. In time, though the child begins to believe that this is really his home.
And as ‘Mama’ cooks for him and mends his clothes and helps hi m with his whom work, he begins to fell, for the first time in his life, a sense of security and belonging. The presence of brothers and sister also contribute to the treatment.
The theoretic treatment if  furthered by the common hearts, the common dinner table, and the  common family tasks. The children prepare the table and helps with the dishes: such chore  are good for all the children. “the children are trained to create an essential atmosphere of warmth, so that their marriages do not  in failure says G P Gupta of the SOS Marriage Cell. The Children are also brought up in such a way that when they leave their villages, both boys and girls not only write to each other but come back home for the holidays/
The SOS Children’s Village in the yet-to-come up Greenfield’s colony is not the only one. There are 1,80,000 kids in 122 countries enjoying the ambience of a natural family having people with whom they can share their plain and pathos.
The village at Greenfield’s I 30 years old and that makes it the oldest SOS village in India. It has given a home, food and love to 12,000 needy and destitute kids, thus anchoring their future.
Above the numbers game are emotions, care, love and human integrity, imaging the love of a “mother” who has been raising umpteen  children in the village she lends a sense of belonging to kids and gives the home a perfect family’s outlook.
Chandra Kanta Chibb is the only one among the 20 ‘mothers’ who has spent 20 years in only one house in he village. Haven’t you changed your house? “How can I? She says. “A mother’s home is always her home Alana, Every house in the village has an identity of its own.
Fourteen of Chandra’s children haven already settled, out of which seven girls have got married. Aarti 20, is one of them who comes to see her mother during weekends.
One of Chandra;s children is doing a B Pharma course in Bangalore. Undoubtedly, the whole phenomenon gives the picture of a family setup. Answering to a question whether the SOS village was a successful efforts, Kanta anwers, “It should be understood y the fact that I have stuck to it for more than 25 years”.
No wonder, the efforts is so successful that 13-years old Neelam Bhatia, who lives in house no 8, says, “ I want to become an advocated or a social worker. I like going here and there, meeting villagers and deprived ones, to motivate them for education and to give up evil/bad habits like drinking.” Interrupting, 13- year old Sunita Pandit assets, “ I want to become a doctor.” Says Chandra: “We don’t is out children, “Dr Hermann Gmeiner had said way back in 1978 in Vienna, “To be an SOS mother means to full accept the child as if he were your own flesh and blood.
The child must experience that there is somebody who says yes to him, who puts him to bed, who cares for him, who works for him, who loves  him.” This is absolutely true, for instance with Chandra Kanta and Kamalini of House Number 8, Snehsadan.
What is still appreciable is the fact that the Director of SOS Greenfield’s feels that “it is a 90 percent success. For more qualitative success, we need to be more organized to put more team efforts, I would like to see the children doing still better in academics,” he states.