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Photo: Sandeep Saxena

The driving force Helmut Kutin at the SOS Children’s Village, Faridabad

“I am extremely lucky,” says the 67-year-old Italy-born gentleman. “We used to go to the shops to buy bread and other daily necessities when the first SOS Village was shaping up, but things have changed for better now,” he says. Reeling back in time, Kutin talks of finding social acceptance as a boy without a biological family. “It was just after the Second World War and there was general compassion in people. But there used to be some, which included a few teachers in my school, who thought anything wrong must have been done by the SOS children. But we showed them that we were not what they thought,” he says. And today, he proudly states, “I am an honorary citizen of Imst.”

Though Kutin started his career in tourism and then as a tutor, he returned to SOS at the call of Gmeiner, to go to war-torn Vietnam, in 1967. To build the first village there.

Sitting in the manicured lawns of SOS Village at Faridabad, over a cup of lemon tea, Kutin’s favourite, he says with a laugh, “We were told after the end of the war in 1976 to leave Vietnam, as everything was alright though I felt nothing was alright.” Eleven years later, in 1987, under his leadership, the SOS Village at Vietnam resumed its work. “Also, we opened two villages in China the same year,” he adds. Not just that, as many as 150 villages have been built around the world after Kutin took over the President’s chair.

In New Delhi as part of a visit to the SOS Villages across many countries, including those in Palestine and Kosovo, Kutin talks of giving a spin to an initiative in India to make the institution financially self-sufficient. “For too long, other countries have been sustaining our work in India. Many people in this country are earning well now. They should do some charity for their own people,” he says, giving the instance of Austria, a country of 7.5 million people that contributes eight hundred thousand dollars to SOS Villages every year. “If a mere one million people do charity in this country of many millions, it is enough,” he says. To rope in corporate contributors, the organisation has recently appointed S. Sandliya, Chairman of the Eicher Group, as its India head.

Since not all children needing care and education can be brought to an SOS Village, the outreach programme is being given a thrust. Through it, needy families are given support to become self-sufficient by imparting life skills to them.

With 31 villages across India, Kutin talks about six more in the coming years. “Out of which, two at Nagapattinam are being built for the tsunami hit children,” offer S. Sandliya. The rest are in Srinagar, Raipur, Begusarai and Puducherry.

Even as the office-bearers at the Faridabad centre quote target figures to be achieved by 2016, Kutin, like a wise head of a family, intervenes, “Don’t be glued to statistics. Don’t forget that children are not mere numbers. Each child is important to us.”

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