Village Answers SOS to Give Kids a Fresh Start.

(From The Moscow Times)

TOMILINO, Moscow Region -- Eleven-year-old Kristina has been playing violin for three years. Her eyes follow the notes on the score as she performs the Hunter's Chorus from Weber's opera "Der Freischutz." But her bowing hand is scarred with burns.

"That's from her previous life," said Yelena Dolgopolskaya, the woman whom Kristina calls mother. Kristina, who now has a new mom and six brothers and sisters, lives in Tomilino, an SOS Children's Village 10 kilometers northeast of Moscow.

The village is a small settlement of 14 carmine-colored cottages, flanked by birch and pine trees, and stands next to an almost-completed luxury housing development. The village was a pilot project in Russia for SOS-Kinderdorf International, an Austrian-based nonprofit organization that has been building homes for mistreated kids worldwide since 1949.

The organization started talking to Soviet officials about bringing the charity to Russia in 1988. In 1994, Russia's SOS Children's Villages Committee was formed and the first families moved in Tomilino in May 1996.

Dolgopolskaya, now in her 50s, has been with Tomilino from the very beginning. Fifteen years ago she, then a geologist, read a magazine article about the Austrian villages and tracked down its author, Yelena Bruskova, the founder of the villages in Russia.

She liked the idea so much that she started working as a volunteer, and later "persuaded Yelena Sergeyevna [Bruskova] to let me become a mom," she said.