While most people on a business trip to India might use free time to hunt for souvenirs, Nigel Mortimer of XL Capital Ltd. decided to do something more worthwhile.

Mr. Mortimer, XL VP underwriting manager in excess casualty, recently spent a business trip weekend volunteering with orphaned children at the SOS Children’s Village in Bawana, India.

The SOS Children’s Village programme was first founded by Austrian Hermann Gmeiner after the Second World War at Imst in Tyrol.

Today, there are SOS villages all over the world. The villages are unique in that they do not adopt out orphaned children. Instead they take in orphaned children and create a family and community around the child, extensively training women to be mothers, and placing several mothers together in a special village.

“In most of my career I have only had opportunities to go on business to places like Detroit or Cleveland,” he said. “At the end of last year, I had an opportunity to go to Delhi, India to train some people we are hiring to work in our London, Dublin and Bermuda offices. I was there for about 12 days and I had a weekend free. I was interested in finding an opportunity or a charity that I could do some work for.”

Mr. Mortimer decided he wanted to do volunteer work in India, because of statistics he came across about the country’s crushing poverty. Forty-seven percent of Indian children under the age of five are either malnourished or stunted. India ranks between Rwanda and Sudan in terms of adult literacy, and only ten percent of the entire workforce works in the formal economy.

“Being an orphan in any country is a bad enough fate in itself, but in a country that has a large amount of poverty, orphans are exposed dramatically to exploitation, sex trade, warfare, drugs or slavery,” Mr. Mortimer said. “That’s why I decided I wanted to volunteer in an orphanage.”

Through the XL human resource department in India, he was directed to the SOS Children’s Village in Bawana.

“Our XL office in India worked with this charity last year,” she said. “They visited the Bawana village and raised money to help educate some of the children there. It seemed like the exact thing that I am looking for.”

He was particularly attracted by the charity’s mission statement ‘in adult life we reveal how we fared in our childhood’.

“At the SOS Bawana village one mother takes care of nine or ten children,” he said. “The project is set up so the child can identify with one person as their mother or caregiver, and create a relationship with brothers and sisters and share with their experiences as a family.

“They are also protected by the umbrella of village around them. There was an infrastructure in place to make sure they had adequate money for food and clothing, but also an infrastructure to make sure the mothers were the right people to do that job.”

Mr. Mortimer said he was impressed by the training the mothers undergo before becoming village parents. They spent between three to five years in training and then go through a selection process. The children form lasting relationships with their SOS mothers and siblings.

“There was one nice story of a guy who was from Bawana,” said Mr. Mortimer. “He grew up, but when he was about 21, his biological mother came and found him. She had since married a wealthy Canadian who died and left her this string of businesses in Canada. She came looking for her son to come back to Canada and run this business.

“Meanwhile, his SOS mother was critically ill. He rejected the opportunity to work with his biological mother, and stayed with his SOS mother and his other brothers and sisters. Once you are taken on board, it is not an orphanage in the normal sense that someone comes along and adopt you from it. You are building a new family.”

SOS Bawana children often return to their SOS village to get married once they grow up. Because arranged marriages are common in India, there is also a marriage office at the village which helps the orphans to find mates. Mr. Mortimer said the town of Bawana is quite impoverished, but inside the SOS Village, the atmosphere is very happy. “When I went there, I was greeted by two of the mothers and the director, Dr. Singh,” he said. “I was taken into the houses. The mothers are from all over India so you get the benefit of having all those different cultures. It was a national holiday in the state where one of the mothers had come from so she was cooking up this national dish. it was very nice, but incredibly sweet.”

While there, Mr. Mortimer witnessed the introduction of several new children to the SOS village.

“There were some tiny kids who had just arrived,” said Mr. Mortimer. “You could see the pleasure on the brothers and sisters’ faces. It wasn’t anything like I expected an Indian orphanage to be.”

He expected to be asked to dig a well or do some other form of physical labour, but was instead asked to teach.

“In India, manpower is very abundant and you can hire anyone for a dollar a day,” he said. “They wanted me to teach the kids about the western world and about the workplace. They wanted me to answer questions like ‘What kinds of skills would you look for as an employer?’ They wanted me to talk about choosing a career, and preparing for job interviews.”

Mr. Mortimer said that XL already had a relationship with the SOS Bawana village and hoped to maybe employee some of the children when they grew up. Before going to India, Mr. Mortimer, XL Bermuda employees and some of his friends helped to raise $8,500 for the SOS Bawana village.

“The money was for hot water geysers to put into the village,” Mr. Mortimer said. “Delhi is a northern city and it is quite cold in winter. They needed the water for hygiene. A lot of the houses didn’t have any hot running water so the mothers were going to a central place to collect water.

“From what we raised, they had money left over so they are going to use that to buy furniture for the kindergarten.”

He was struck by the kindness and caring of the Indian people, particularly those who worked in the SOS village.

“The people who run this organisation get paid very little,” he said. “It is a very emotional and challenging job, yet they all seemed to be exceptionally calm and appreciative that they worked in an organisation like SOS. Increasingly, the responsibilities fall onto the non-governmental organisations to manage the poverty in India.”

For more information about the SOS children’s villages go to http://www.sos-childrensvillages.org/.