OSSO opens a new orphanage in Cuenca!
OSSO, with the help of Morrell Family Charities and Todos Los Niños Foundation, has opened a brand new orphanage for up to 48 infants and severely handicapped children. The orphanage is located just outside of Cuenca and is called Los Pequeñitos de OSSO (OSSO’s Little Ones).
 
There has long been a need in Cuenca for an orphanage designed to care for abandoned children with severe handicaps. There has also been a need for another place to care for abandoned healthy infants. With the strong encouragement of the local government OSSO decided in August 2005 to move forward and build such a home.

(L to R: Amber Steckley - Managing Director, Angela Head - Rex's daughter, Rex Head - Founder and Executive Director)

Instead of being like a traditional orphanage, Los Pequeñitos de OSSO is built with six family-style homes designed to have six to eight children in each one. This allows us to more closely mimic the kind of love, care and relationships found in a real family.
 
Each home is wheelchair-accessible and has four bedrooms and a kitchen, bathroom and living room, just like a regular home. The websites of Morrell Family Charities and Todos Los Niños Foundation have some great pictures of the construction process, including some pictures/video of the Los Pequeñitos de OSSO children.

This was a huge project for OSSO and by far the biggest project we have undertaken, but we did not do it alone. Within days of deciding to build the orphanage, the Julie and Mike Rhodes family called OSSO and said they wanted to help us build an orphanage in Cuenca. (They did this independently. We had not told them that just a few days earlier we had decided to take on this project.) The Rhodes family later created their own nonprofit organization called Todos Los Niños Foundation. Within a month, Morrell Family Charities contacted the Rhodes Family and said they wanted to help. We have also had a lot of help from Kent Craven, an architect in Logan, Utah, who designed the building for free, and from Jay Bollwinkel, from The Grassli Group, who provided the landscape design for free. To monitor the conditions of the children and assure the safety of the children, employees and volunteers, we’ve installed a video surveillance system in every room. This system was donated by Luxon Video.

The Morrell family took on the huge task of paying for the land and construction of the new orphanage while the Rhodes family, with the help of Cindy Geilmann, paid for the furnishings and organized the donation of clothes, bedding, etc. (see more pictures)
 
“The Rhodes and Morrell families have really been great to work with” said OSSO’s Managing Director, Amber Steckley. “On paper we may be three separate organizations but in reality everyone worked as a team on this project. It’s been a huge undertaking.”

We have already moved our 11 children in, including five of the severely handicapped children that used to live in the baby orphanage in Cuenca. We hope to move the nine handicapped children from the Special Kids orphanage as well, as soon as we get the legal paperwork done which we just started last week. We have a donor who has provided the initial few months’ cost to be able to move them over as soon as we’re able to, but we need more sponsors to be able to pay for the ongoing costs of caring for these children.
 
By moving these severely handicapped children from these orphanages we allow them to care for more children without handicaps.
 
“To better serve the handicapped children, we’ve put together a first-rate professional team” said Rex Head, OSSO’s Executive Director. “We have physical and speech therapists, an early stimulation therapist, a social worker and an educational psychologist. We also have a pediatrician that visits every two weeks and a pediatric neurologist that sees the kids regularly.”
 
We also have childcare workers we call tías, or aunts, that work in each home. They work in shifts, but we have the same workers always working in the same houses so the children can bond with them like they would with parents.

Overall we feel we are taking very good care of these children, but it is expensive. We are looking for sponsors who would be willing to sponsor individual children for $30/month or more and sponsors to sponsor individual orphanages (family groups of children) for $1,000/year or more (click here). See our article in this newsletter on OSSO’s Sponsorship Program.