Working together, the couple have become leaders in colony refugee activities. The statistical side alone is enormous—distributing 53,000 quarts of powdered milk a day and 2,500,000 balanced-ration biscuits a month, and operating a noodle factory and a central kitchen with a daily capacity of 40,000 meals. There are scholarships for young people, dental clinics, foundling homes, homes for orphaned girls and a dozen other undertakings.
Dr. Gates, a cheerful, tireless advocate of the colony’s poor people, interrupts his work many times to show overseas visitors what is being done, and still needs to be done, to help the refugees. He takes most pleasure, perhaps, in displaying the “self-help” projects of Church World Service.
At one school in the hills of Kowloon, he directs a home where girls are taught to make dresses, sweaters and ties for the American market. All were formerly homeless, most are under twenty years old, some are blind, others have only one hand or one arm. They have all learned to knit, including the girl with one arm, and are earning their living by making high-quality products for sale in the best stores.
“We don’t want to produce curios, or something that tries to play on people’s sympathy by calling itself a refugee product,” Dr. Gates says. “These girls have proved they can turn out goods that will hold their own in a competitive market.”
It is obvious that Doctor and Mrs. Gates are enjoying themselves as much as those they help when they drop into the Faith Hope Nursery, a joint enterprise of Church World Service and the YWCA. The nursery children, two to five years old, are shack-dwellers whose mothers work during the day. At the nursery, the kids receive daytime care, meals, clothes and a daily bath, with plenty of time left over for group singing and dancing. When the pastor and his wife appear, moppet grins spread the width of the classroom and there is a spirited exchange of Cantonese greetings.
Church World Service, together with CARE, Catholic Relief Services and the Lutheran World Service, form the recognized “big four” of Hong Kong’s private welfare organizations. Each one does its own work and cooperates willingly with the other three, as well as scores of other Catholic, Protestant and non-denominational groups. One hears a certain amount of subdued muttering about this or that religious group pushing hard for new members, but there is no sign that it has seriously impaired their aim, which is to help all poor people without regard to finicky distinctions of race or religion.
CARE, the non-denominational American member of the big four, made a brilliant and original addition to its long-established welfare program in 1961. This was the Ap Chau Island settlement, built for the families of fishermen.
The people who fish the waters around Ap Chau, a three-acre island in the northeastern corner of the New Territories, had for generations spent their entire lives on fishing junks, never establishing homes on shore or attending schools. But the technical demands of the modern fishing industry put them at a competitive disadvantage, and they petitioned the colony government for permission to build homes on Ap Chau and send their children to school.
Graham French, a Philadelphia philanthropist who was in Hong Kong to observe CARE operations, heard about the petition and became curious enough to investigate it thoroughly. He discovered that the petitioners were so deeply indebted to loan-sharks that they had no real chance to finance housing ashore unless they got outside funds. He offered to give $17,500 to get the settlement started, CARE added another $20,000 and the colony government spent $14,000 to clear a site for the houses.
With these combined funds, a settlement consisting of houses for forty-eight families, or 360 people, was completed in December, 1961. The Royal Engineers laid an undersea 1,000-yard pipeline from a mainland reservoir to supply the island with fresh water. The fishing families, for their part, formed a community cooperative to administer the scheme. Rents go into a revolving fund, and members of the co-op can borrow from it at one percent interest to repair and mechanize their boats.