03/10/09 - Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been spending time in Washington, D.C. On March 5th, Brad Pitt, star of the Oscar-winning The Curious Life of Benjamin Button, met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-South Carolina). They talked about Make It Right, the nonprofit organization that Pitt created in response to Hurricane Katrina. The group builds affordable, environmentally sustainable housing for Lower Ninth Ward residents in New Orleans.

Angelina Jolie has been in the nation's capital to film a spy movie called Salt. In the movie, Jolie plays CIA operative Evelyn A. Salt. She costars with Liev Schreiber.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been generous toward the causes near and dear to their hearts. As a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Goodwill Ambassador, Jolie has visited destitute children around the world. Through the Jolie/Pitt Foundation, she and Brad Pitt have donated $333,000 to SOS Children's Villages for work in Sudan.

SOS Children's Villages in Sudan and Chad

An SOS Mother and children at the SOS Children's Village in Khartoum, Sudan

SOS Children's Villages is the world's largest charity devoted to giving a loving home to orphaned and abandoned children. With two children's villages in Sudan and one in Chad, SOS is at the forefront of providing stable homes to children who have witnessed horrific violence.

Angelina Jolie has visited Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan three times. During her visit to the Oure Cassoni camp — a shelter for Sudanese refugees from Darfur that is just inside Chad's border with Sudan — Jolie met staff working for SOS who were providing psychological assistance to traumatized children.

"The children benefit enormously from the therapy," notes Yolanda van den Broek, project leader of the emergency relief program of SOS Children's Villages-Chad. "Children who at first did not speak, did not eat, and who were isolated in their own worlds, are now playing happily and are able to interact with others."

Children look out the window at an SOS school in Umbada, Sudan

Child care facilities are lacking in Chad. The situation for many children is very dismal. Children up to the age of six are in an especially precarious state, as none of the few facilities in existence can take them in. SOS has operated in Chad since 2005, when after years of negotiation it opened that country's first SOS Children's Village — in the capital of N'Djamena. The village provides loving, stable homes for up to 120 children.

The SOS Children's Village in Chad also has an SOS kindergarten and an SOS school, both of which are open to children from the nearby community. An SOS medical center offers basic medical services for the local population.

Follow the Jolie-Pitt lead by sponsoring a child.