“When the girl came to us, her face was like stone,” Annie says. “For two years I played with her, trying all kinds of funny things to bring her out of that frozen stupor, but she never smiled once.
“I wasn’t getting anywhere,” she continues. “Then I tried something different. On July 6, 1955, I put her in a sampan with eleven other kids, and took them all to see the wonderful new building we’d just finished. You know, the first time she got a look at it she broke into a big smile! It was the first time she looked happy. Now she’s fourteen, and her greatest ambition is to be a nurse.”
A magnificent chapel, built exactly where Annie had visualized it, was completed in time for Christmas services in 1961. A group of Norwegian seamen donated an illuminated cross to surmount its roof. At night, when their ships sail out from Hong Kong, they can see it glowing above a line of hills that cut back from the sea like the fiords of Norway.
To Annie, the chapel embodies the same spirit she expressed in naming the eleven wards at Haven of Hope Sanatorium: Love, Peace, Joy, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Neatness, Temperance, Hope and Courage.
For qualities like these, exemplified in her work at Rennie’s Mill Camp and the sanatorium, Sister Annie Margareth Skau was given the Florence Nightingale Award of the International Red Cross on May 18, 1961. Annie regarded the award not as a personal tribute, but as an honor earned and shared by everyone who worked or contributed to make the Haven of Hope a reality.
“There is so much that needs to be done for these poor, homeless people,” she says. “Why, we’ve hardly begun the job.”
In 1951, the same year that Annie Skau was exiled from Red China, the Communists drove out a remarkable European-Chinese couple who had been helping moneyless families to support themselves by setting up home industries. Their house, with all their savings invested in it, was seized by the state and they reached Hong Kong with a total capital of thirty-four cents.
The husband, Gus Borgeest, had been a production expediter in a Shanghai textile mill for twenty years. His background was almost as international as the U.N.; a British subject, he was born in Shanghai of mixed British, Danish, Portuguese, Italian and German ancestry. Mona, his Christian-Chinese wife, was born of Cantonese parents in the Hong Kong fishing town of Aberdeen.
During the Japanese invasion, Gus was interned for two years. He spent his time in prison reading about the Quakers and became converted to their ideal of helping others. When the war ended, he returned to his Shanghai job until Mona contracted tuberculosis. To aid her recovery, the couple moved to the more favorable climate of Hangchow. It was only a stopover, for the political climate that developed after the Reds took control made the survival of Christian welfare workers an impossibility.
Arriving in Hong Kong, Gus found a job in the Fish and Vegetable Marketing Organization of the colony government. Mona had regained her health, and the two of them spent their spare hours doing refugee welfare work in the squatter settlements. It was thoroughly discouraging; living conditions were deplorable and the refugees, subsisting on handouts, were losing their pride and initiative.