“I think that Mona and I have reached our first major objective,” he said, early in 1962. “That is to show refugee families a better way of living than handouts and squatter settlements, and to help strengthen the over-strained economy of Hong Kong.”
Several other organizations have adopted the self-help system pioneered by the Borgeests, and Gus is ready to move on to fresh challenges once the Sunshine Island settlement becomes self-supporting. He believes this can be done within three years; from there on, he would like to turn Sunshine over to an administrative committee capable of running it without him.
The island has become a bustling work center. A one-handed stonemason who has built hundreds of feet of stone-and-cement walls for pig pastures is erecting the walls of another piggery. Dozens of Hakka women in their black-fringed straw hats are transporting dirt in straw baskets to clear the site of a new road. One man tirelessly splits boulders with a heavy hammer and a chisel; while he works, he listens to Cantonese music issuing from his transistor radio, perched on an adjoining rock. A sampan taxi, operating between Sunshine and the nearby island of Peng Chau, supports a family with several children and a seaworthy chow dog.
Gus is absorbed in new plans to help others. Two years ago he undertook a complete survey of the island of Shek Kwu Chau, two miles west of Sunshine, to determine whether it could be made into a rehabilitation center for some of Hong Kong’s 250,000 narcotics addicts. With only slight modifications, the survey has become the blueprint for the center, opening in 1962 under the administration of the Society for the Aid and Rehabilitation of Drug Addicts. He was one of the early developers of Hei Ling Chau, the island leprosarium run by the Mission to Lepers, and remains a member of its administrative council.
On the last day of August, 1961, Gus and Mona became winners of a Ramon Magsaysay Award, the “Nobel Prize of the East,” for their Sunshine Island accomplishments. The award also carried a $10,000 prize, and the Borgeests decided to save it for the education of their three daughters.
“We have no other funds,” Gus explained. “But a lot of people who heard about the prize must have decided that old Gus is on easy street. Our contributions fell off, and our debts started shooting up again.”
At fifty-two, Gus is a ruggedly built man whose face and bald head have been burned dark brown by the sun. His one gospel is the doctrine of helping others to help themselves.
“The Chinese people don’t want to live on anybody’s charity,” Gus said. “And that’s doubly true of the refugees; they wouldn’t have come here, most of them, if they’d been willing to become stooges for a government that did all the thinking for them.”
Gus has a well-defined conception of the way he prefers to spend his own future:
“I’d like to devote the rest of my life to work among the lepers and drug addicts. We couldn’t do much for the addicts on Sunshine; we’d get them accustomed to living without drugs, but they’d slip back into addiction when they met their old companions back in the city.