Haiti orphan appeal: Angelina Jolie visits SOS Children's Village

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The SOS Children's Village in Port-au-Prince was honoured today to receive the visit of the NGO's most loyal supporters: Angelina Jolie was eager to see for herself the progress being made by the SOS emergency relief programme for the children of a country that will have to be rebuilt from scratch.

Angelina Jolie visited the SOS Children's Village in Port-au-Prince today to express her support for the organisation and its work in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti. Ms. Jolie was visiting the country, one of the poorest in the world, just four weeks after the disaster in an effort to draw attention to the plight of the children in Haiti.

During her stay, she took the time to visit two SOS families who have each taken in four children, all brothers and sisters in both cases. The children were amongst those 33 children about to be illegally removed from the country when the authorities intervened. Providing temporary care for unaccompanied children whilst families are traced is SOS Children main focus in Haiti. In those cases where it has been firmly established that there are no remaining family members capable of providing adequate care for such lone children, long-term care within an SOS family is a viable option.

Ms. Jolie also showed great interest in learning about another aspect of SOS Children emergency relief programme in Haiti: to provide some 30,000 children with food, medical supplies and treatment as well as trauma therapy through the community centres it runs in the surrounding communities. Some 5,000 children are already benefiting from these efforts, which are being strongly supported by the staff and equipment provided by the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. SOS Children's Villages plans a large-scale reconstruction programme over the next 10 years.

Angelina Jolie has been an outspoken and loyal supporter of SOS Children's Villages for years and has visited both the trauma therapy centre run by SOS Children within one of the refugee camps in Chad for people fleeing Darfur and an SOS Children's Village in Amman, Jordan. The Jolie/Pitt Foundation she created together with her partner Brad Pitt supports the organisation financially.