There is a second line of defense, the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs Association, which embraces 13,000 of the poorest youngsters in its recreational and leadership programs. Father Howatson is the prime mover in the Association, doing some of its finest work among rooftop squatters in Wanchai, a waterfront jungle of bars and cabarets where shiploads of pent-up sailors are regularly turned loose.
Because of the magnitude of Hong Kong’s welfare needs and the bewildering assortment of private organizations attempting to deal with them, there is an absolute necessity for a central clearinghouse to eliminate overlapping in some areas and neglect in others. This is the function of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, a coordinating agency of ninety welfare organizations which regularly checks the balance sheets of its affiliates. If they pass muster, the colony government grants them substantial aid to supplement their own resources.
The Council, under its executive secretary Madge Newcombe, is also charged with discovering where and what the needs of poor people are, and then of assigning the religious or welfare societies best equipped to satisfy them. There is no shortage of needs; the Council’s concern is to avoid imbalance and wasted effort in meeting them.
Five years ago the Council created the Central Relief Records Office. With its file of approximately 200,000 cards, listing the name of every relief client and the aid he is receiving from each agency, the office has drastically reduced the duplication of welfare-agency work and chiseling by potential recipients. There is no need for begging; relief is so well organized that any hungry person can get a meal at a welfare agency.
Apart from feeding and housing the colony’s displaced persons, there is a human problem of especial poignance. A resettlement estate, at its outset, is an assembly of strangers from all over China, some from big cities, some from back-country hamlets, tossed together like beans in a bowl.
At Wong Tai Sin, one of the largest resettlement estates, 60,000 people are packed into long rows of multi-story concrete blocks. Physically, they are far better off than they were in the shacktowns they came from, but when they first moved in they were strangers lost in a crowd, rootless and with no sense of community interests.
During World Refugee Year (1959-60), the United States government met the problem of building community consciousness at Wong Tai Sin with one of its most effective gifts—$210,000 to build a community center there. Now completed and in full operation, it is a large, modern, five-story building teeming with community enterprises.
The variety of its activities is bewildering: classes for the deaf, courses in Diesel mechanics and refrigeration engineering, Chinese opera, day nurseries, social events, libraries, movies and a hundred other interests—all of them designed to form a congenial community out of thousands of isolated families.
The idea worked so well that the United Kingdom put up an equal amount of money to build a second center in the new-born industrial city of Tsuen Wan. The Toronto and Canadian World Refugee Year committees donated $75,000 for a third community center at Chai Wan, on Hong Kong Island. Others are planned, and the public response to the centers has been so enthusiastic that the colony hopes to establish one in every resettlement estate.
The Hong Kong branch of Church World Service, a department of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in America, picked up fresh vigor a few years ago. Dr. Elbert E. Gates, Jr., pastor of the First Baptist Church of Westfield, N.J., made an incidental stop at Hong Kong during a trip to Australia. He and his wife, June, had a close-up look at the colony’s refugees, and what they saw made an unforgettable impression on them. In 1959, he gave up his pastorate and took a one-third cut in salary to become director of the Church World Service branch in Hong Kong.