January 9, 2012: Evidence of Haiti’s massive earthquake of January 2010 that killed more than 230,000 people and deeply affected the lives of 3 million others is still pervasive. Despite some progress, 50 percent of the rubble remains uncleared. More than half a million residents still live in temporary camps, poverty and unemployment are widespread, and families require support to be able to care for their children.
  
These conditions have increased the number of abandoned children, many of whose lives have become extremely dire. Life for boys and girls in orphanages is catastrophic.

With an active presence in Haiti since 1978, after the quake SOS Children's Villages leaped into action by opening its arms to hundreds more children in its Port-au-Prince-based SOS Children’s Village at Santo. In the year following the disaster, SOS also provided food to tens of thousands of children every day, gave medical care where needed, set up new social programs for families, and began constructing new schools. These efforts are ongoing.
 

Children’s Needs Remain Overwhelming

SOS constantly receives requests to admit more children, but its two SOS Children’s Villages in Haiti -- SOS-Santo, near the capital of Port-au-Prince, and SOS-Cap Haïtien in the north -- have only limited capacity to offer quality family-based care.

Today about 130 additional children are still living at SOS-Santo. To provide long-term care, a second SOS Children's Village will be needed in Port-au-Prince. In 2012 SOS will open a new program for children without parental care in Les Cayes, in southern Haiti.

The social, food, and financial support SOS continues to provide to families and children in Port-au-Prince and Cap Haïtien is designed to strengthen community resources and enable families, particularly women, eventually to support themselves.

Most of the children growing up in Les Cayes don't get a chance to go to school.

Building Education

According to Max Lamesch, who manages institutional donor services in SOS Haiti, the country’s educational system is “essentially dysfunctional,” and half a million Haitian children do not attend school. “Even worse, a high percentage of children finishing school remain basically illiterate.”

SOS is addressing Haiti’s poor quality of education by enhancing both “bricks and brains,” says Lamesch. SOS is financing the building of a community school and four public schools in Santo and the Les Cayes area. Together the new facilities will hold 1,000 students. In cooperation with Quisqueya University in Port-au-Prince, SOS is working to improve quality by offering teacher training in child-centered education.

Because more than half of Haitians are under age 18, Haiti’s crisis is very much a children’s crisis. The nation’s reconstruction is a complex undertaking. SOS has been in Haiti for 34 years, and is there for the long haul.

Learn more about SOS Children's Villages in Haiti at www.sos-usa.org/haiti.