SOS Children in the Americas

SOS Children's activities were started in the 1960s. The SOS Villages were a completely new concept in Latin America.

Ecuador in Uruguay was the first place in Latin America where an SOS Villages was built. Another village was built in Ecuador and thenChile was the third country that SOS began projects in the early 1960s. It now has a 13 SOS Children's Villages which are located across the country, from Arica in the far north, Antofagasta in the Chilean desert, to Chiloé Island. The Bolivian SOS Children's Village in El Alto is the SOS Children's Village that is located at the highest altitude in the world, at more than 4,000 metres above sea level. Brazil has the greatest number of SOS facilities in the continent - it has 58 in total.

Apart from French Guiana, Guyana, Belize, Suriname and some Caribbean islands, SOS Children works in all the countries of South, Middle and Central America; SOS Children's Villages also exist in the USA and Canada, and fundraising work is carried out to help more orphaned and abandoned children.

In Latin America in recent years an emphasis has been placed on family support; on building up different social facilities and community-based programmes for disadvantaged families and street children. Single mothers form one of the most troubled groups in society, partly because they have a education opportunities. SOS Children's Villages provides support in many locations: it holds courses, supports networks of families who help each other; it offers education opportunities, an employment service and loans, and it has nurseries and advice centres, which all improve the prospects for families and their children in the long term.

Natural disasters, emergencies and violent conflicts have in recent decades repeatedly required humanitarian intervention; permanent facilities have often resulted from theses emergency relief measures. To mention just a few: aid after the serious earthquake in and around Mexico City in 1985; helping refugees in the Mexican State of Chiapas; a children's village was built for orphans following the serious earthquake in Guatemala in 1976; emergency relief and construction of facilities in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua following Hurricane Mitch in 1998; and support following the floods and landslides in Haiti in 2004.