SOS Tsunami Village opens in Thailand

SOS Children's Village Phuket was officially opened on 24 January. It is one of the six that were built in the region after the Boxing Day Tsunami. Phuket is often remembered as the place where many tourists were killed - yet many inhabitants of the coastal region were also seriously affected by the disaster.

The SOS Children's Village in Phuket bears witness to the great international solidarity that was shown towards tsunami victims from both Thailand and abroad, who died there on 26 December 2004. With the help of donations from Germany, Sweden, Luxemburg, Switzerland and Austria children have been given another chance to have a family for life.

So far, 47 children have come to live in the SOS Children's Village Phuket, which will be fully occupied at the end of the year, with 120 children. The SOS Nusery is currently attended by 50 children, some of whom come from the neighbourhood. Guy, the youngest child in the SOS Children's Village, is just two weeks old.

In addition to Thailand, new SOS Children's Villages were built in India (Nagapattinam, Puducherry) and in Indonesia (Meulaboh, Banda Aceh, Medan), as were a number of other social programmes that were designed to help families in need. In parallel, around 23,000 people received direct support in the form of emergency relief, and over 2,200 houses, multi-purpose centres and two schools have been built. Twenty-one national SOS Children's Village associations received a total of 54.2 million US dollars for emergency relief and reconstruction efforts in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand following the tsunami.