FRANCAISSOS Enfants sans frontières - History
1974-1979
-November 1974, France: SOS-ESF is launched by Jacqueline Bonheur after Edmond Kaiser’s experience with Terre des Hommes. Jacqueline Bonheur suffered from a lonely girlhood and wanted to help deprived children. She joined the Swiss NGO Terre des Hommes in 1972 to organize the sponsorship of Haitian children whose parents had tuberculosis. As she wanted to inform against the malfunctions of the orphanage Simone Duvalier in Port-au-Prince, she got poisoned and almost died in 1973. The next year, Jacqueline Bonheur, moved by the misery of Haiti peasants, decided to adopt three orphans, the eldest aged eleven. She had to leave Terre des Hommes, which forbade adopting children of more than eight, and she finally decided to create her own association to take care of Haitian orphans. In France, SOS-ESF will gain the status of an adoption institution in 1981, then of a charity in 1987.
-From 1975, Haiti: SOS-ESF opens a nutritional centre at Gros Morne, in the north of the country. Haiti will remain one of the main operations of the organisation, four fifths of its programmes being dedicated to it in the 1990s.
-1979-1984, Thailand: with the Vietnamese invasion, the end of Pol Pot’s regime shows the extent of the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge and prompts SOS-ESF to come and help the Cambodian refugees on the Thai border. After asking the ICRC and UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Fund) about the local needs, Jacqueline Bonheur successfully appeals to people’s generosity, thanks to the radio channels Europe 1 and RTL (Radio Television Luxembourg); massive donations are collected, including from the Elf Foundation. On the 27th of December 1979 and 6th of January 1980, SOS-ESF, which has chartered two Air France cargo airplanes, can send two hundred tons of equipment, whose reception in Bangkok is filmed by the movie director Claude Lelouch in his movie Les uns et les autres. However, donations in kind do not always suit local realities. William Shawcross, a journalist, notes that the foam mattresses provided by SOS-ESF quickly turn into sponges during the rainy season in Cambodian refugee camps. SOS-ESF, which has recruited and trained the creators-to-be of Handicap International, finally withdraws in 1984.
