visited the United States in 1954, telling children in Wisconsin schools
about their work. The response was electrifying. One small boy stood up
beside his desk to announce with utter seriousness, “I want to give my
heart to Jesus.” The appeal spread like a prairie fire; by February,
1955, Wisconsin school children had sent more than $2,500 for the new
rest home, which was called Haven of Hope Sanatorium. An anonymous
contributor donated another $5,000 through the Church World Service, Hong
Kong welfare agency of the National Council of Churches of Christ in
America.
“Now our sanatorium had walls and a roof,” Annie says. “So we prayed for
furniture and food for our patients—and for bedpans, too.
“It was a hand-to-mouth existence,” she remembers without a trace of
self-pity. “Our staff had no resources—we were so short of staff that
some of us worked for two years without a day off. We didn’t mind it at
all; we worked with one mind and one spirit, as if that sanatorium and
what it stood for was our one reason for living.”
In its early stages, the sanatorium was nothing more than a rest home.
One day, almost as an afterthought on a busy round of duties, Annie asked
a few of her patients to help her with some routine tasks. They pitched
in at once and returned the following day to volunteer for more duties.
They kept at the work for several days, then called on Annie in a kind
of delegation.
“Give us instructions, show us what to do,” they respectfully demanded.
“We want to learn how to be real nurses.”
Annie agreed, taking care to see that none of the volunteers exerted
themselves beyond the limits of their precarious health. After three
months, they insisted on examinations to show what they had learned.
From modest and tentative beginnings, the courses multiplied and expanded
into a full-scale nursing school, offering a two-and-a-half-year
progression of classes in eleven different subjects, with stiff exams.
Most of the pupils are girls between eighteen and twenty who specialize
in TB nursing. The eleventh class was graduated in February, 1962, and
the demand for new enrollments was so brisk that Annie, as Director of
Nursing Services, could accept only five out of sixty eager applicants.
The sanatorium grew into a 206-bed institution of modern and spotless
appearance, and a 40-bed rehabilitation center for chronic and infectious
TB patients has been built nearby. Church World Service cut a road
through to the isolated site and it was later paved by the colony
government. Tuberculosis has been brought under control at Rennie’s Mill
Camp, and the Haven of Hope is drawing many of its patients from outside.
There is no danger of a shortage; TB strikes everywhere among Hong Kong’s
poor.
Haven of Hope is administered by the Junk Bay Medical Council, which also
operates a clinic at Rennie’s Mill. Four doctors comprise the sanatorium
staff. Except for Annie and Miss Martha Boss, the assistant matron,
from Cleveland, Ohio, all the nurses are Chinese. Miss Boss, trained in
the same diligent tradition as Annie, spends three days a week at the
sanatorium, three days on church work and school duties in Rennie’s Mill,
and the seventh day on an industrial medical project.
Rennie’s Mill Camp no longer looks like a shacktown. Catholic and
Protestant mission schools have been established, and many residents are
employed in handicraft shops. A new police post has been erected beside
the camp, and a bus line carries camp residents to the business and
shopping districts of Kowloon. Soon a reservoir is to be constructed with
government aid on a hill above the camp, and a modern housing development
will replace inadequate dwellings.
Taiwanese flags still fly in the breeze at many places in the camp, and
Nationalist Chinese contribute to its support. But its main lease on life
comes from the churches and the colony of Hong Kong.
Although the scope of Annie’s activities has become much wider, she
has lost none of her personal and religious attitude. When she walks
through the wards she is followed by the smiles of hundreds of children.
At any moment, she will stop to lead a grinning group of little girls,
perched on their beds like sparrows, in a song. With Annie joining in the
gestures, the kids sing out in Cantonese “Jesus loves little children ...
like me ... (pointing to themselves) ... like you ... (pointing at Annie
or the girl in the nearest bed) ... like all the others” (with a big,
wide-open sweep of the arms).
Annie hugs a lively, black-haired youngster and says quietly, “Her
mother was seven months pregnant when she swam from China to Macao with
this little one on her back. The girl’s been here two years, and she’s
gradually getting better. Her mother went back to China, and has probably
been liquidated by the Communists.”
Another girl reacts to Annie’s pat on the head with the wiggly cordiality
of a puppy.
“This little one was scared to death of ‘imperialists’ when she came
here,” Annie explains. “It took us a long time to persuade her that the
Red propaganda wasn’t true.”
Her first two patients at Haven of Hope, a brother and sister, have now
completely recovered. Both had seen their parents tortured and killed by
the Reds.
“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.
“We aren’t accomplishing anything,” Gus told Mona. “It’s a waste of
time—unless we can do something, find some way to help people earn their
way out of these miserable firetraps.”
After a long series of discussions in which they considered and discarded
a variety of self-help schemes, Gus and Mona agreed to stake all their
resources on one hopeful but wholly untried plan. They put aside every
spare penny until they had saved $700. Now Gus was ready to present their
plan to the appropriate officials of the colony government.
He went to K. M. A. Barnett, District Commissioner and the colony’s top
authority on the Chinese people and their customs. Mr. Barnett listened
in some wonderment while Gus outlined a proposal to build a refugee
rehabilitation center on a desolate island seven miles west of Hong Kong
Island. He would teach people how to make a living by farming marginal
land—and there was plenty of such land lying idle in the colony.
The Commissioner was friendly, but he needed the answers to certain
questions. What was Gus’s farming experience? Twenty years in a textile
plant. Why did Gus think he could grow anything on that island? Hadn’t
the Chinese farmers abandoned it?—and they could grow almost anything,
anywhere! Gus was positive he could make it go. Did he have any money?
Gus mentioned the $700 and said he was sure it would be enough for
a starter. On the face of it, the plan looked highly unfeasible to
Mr. Barnett, but he sensed something out of the ordinary in Gus’s
determination. Besides, the Commissioner reflected, his office was never
crowded with people who intended to do something simply for the benefit
of their fellow men.
Having weighed the matter thoroughly, District Commissioner Barnett
recommended that the strange couple from Shanghai be given a chance.
The colony government leased the barren, 200-acre island to Gus for
thirty-four dollars a year, and he and Mona spent most of their savings
to buy two tents, bedding, a sack of rice, cooking utensils and farming
tools.
On June 5, 1953, Gus, Mona, their five-year-old daughter, Naomi, and two
refugee farmers set sail for their new home, which Gus had rechristened
Sunshine Island, in a hired junk. On their first night ashore it rained
four inches in two hours, but they stuck it out with Mona doing the
cooking and Naomi scampering around for field grass to ignite the fire.
Twelve days after they landed, a refugee fisherman, his wife and daughter
nosed their leaky boat against a sandy beach and became the next settlers.
Within a month, Gus and his helpers had tilled a small patch of land and
were raising some chickens, geese and nanny goats. Three-fourths of his
capital had been consumed by these improvements and the farming books he
pored over every night. An interest-free loan from a Quaker friend kept
the venture afloat, and they sweated through the humid summer building
grass huts, planting crops, and slashing paths through the shoulder-high
sword grass.
Any heavenly blessings they received did not cover weather conditions,
for Typhoon Tess flattened their huts and tore up their garden. Yet the
improbable colony earned its first income at the end of five months—$2.60
from the sale of rabbits they had raised. Loans and small gifts from
friends overseas furnished additional support. Virtually nothing went
swimmingly; the first few families who joined them on Sunshine couldn’t
stomach the solitary island and had no interest in working to pay their
way.
One of the worst catastrophes in Hong Kong history—the Shek Kip Mei
fire that destroyed the shacks of more than 60,000 squatters—created an
unsought opportunity for Gus. Strapped for cash, he landed a temporary
job helping to relocate the fire victims and sent his earnings back to
Mona, who kept the Sunshine Island project breathing. He returned in
a few months to find the island earning about one-third of what the
Borgeests had spent on it.
Both of them decided on some major changes. He talked to welfare agencies
and secured their help in selecting people who had the desire and the
qualifications to benefit from the scheme; farmers and those who wanted
to learn simple trades, or people like Professor Ting, a former lecturer
at Hangchow Christian College, who was willing to mind the geese while
building up his shattered health. Every worker on the island earned $.35
a day, plus food and lodging for his family; a puny income, even by Hong
Kong standards, but in their view, infinitely preferable to handouts.
Welfare organizations in Hong Kong had been watching the progress of
the fledgling colony and were quick to appreciate its value. The United
Church of Canada donated $960, the Hong Kong Welfare Society put up $30
a month to pay families working on the island, and other agencies joined
in—Church World Service, Catholic Relief Services and the Lutheran World
Federation—sending cash, supplies and carefully chosen settlers.
When the first stone houses on the island were completed in 1955,
Gus struck a note of triumph by giving them the high-sounding name of
Villa Borghese—a salute to his Italian ancestors. Twenty families,
comprising 100 persons, had entered wholeheartedly into the spirit
of the plan, digging terraced gardens from the rocky hillsides and
planting pineapples. Bamboo, banana, and pine trees were set firmly on
the hillsides or in the sheltered hollow between Sunshine’s two highest
hills. Refugee students, earning their tuition from welfare agencies,
excavated a fish-breeding pond.
For the first time Gus was able to pay himself a salary of $36 a month,
but as often as not in succeeding months he turned it right back into
the kitty to balance his accounts. Periodic crises like typhoons, crop
failures, and the death of valuable livestock regularly badgered the
colony, but Gus contrived to ride them out.
In 1957, Gus was laid low by a serious case of tuberculosis. For six
months he reluctantly remained in a chair placed on a sunny terrace in
front of his house. From there he directed Mona in the management of the
colony. Gradually regaining his strength, he recovered fully in two years
and resumed active charge of the enterprise.
Increased aid from the outside enabled Gus to raise every worker’s daily
pay to 70 cents. Sunshine Island lost its bleak look; besides its new
stone buildings, it had over 800 fruit trees and 300 pigs, including 30
breeding sows. Roads had been chopped through its spiny ridges, knitting
the whole project together.
Hong Kong’s government staff, satisfied that Gus was doing something
solidly beneficial for refugees, furnished district officers,
agriculturists, forestry and fisheries experts as consultants on various
Sunshine Island jobs.
But the human dividends of Sunshine Island were far more impressive
than its physical achievements. More than 700 men and women, including a
number of drug addicts, had found new hope on the island. After working
there for six months or a year and creating a small nest-egg from their
savings, they applied their newly acquired skills to start their own
farms on marginal land or get jobs in the city. A large majority of them
are now earning their own living in the British colony.
Gus, having conceived Sunshine Island as a pilot project for farming
marginal land, schooled a group of his “graduates” in a marginal-farm
resettlement at Cheung Sheung, in the New Territories. Each new farmer
received two acres from the Hong Kong government, plus a cow, farm tools
and a small cash allowance. Practically all of them made the grade as
independent farmers.
Activities expanded once more on Sunshine Island when the Hong Kong
Junior Chamber of Commerce donated $2,500 to build a piggery for
30 animals, and 20 more sties were added to it in 1961. Papaya and
pomegranate trees were added to the orchard. The island became a local
attraction for visitors, with Boy Scouts and other youth organizations
camping and swimming at a beach on the side of the island most distant
from the farm area.
With the knowledge he paid a steep price for on Sunshine Island, Gus has
set up marginal-farm projects at three more locations besides Cheung
Sheung.
“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.
“And if there’s time enough, I’d like to go to one of the rural areas in
the Philippines with Mona and set up another place like Sunshine Island.
With what we’ve learned here, I know we could do a lot better.”
The heroic works of the Borgeests and Sister Annie Skau, outstanding
though they are, have directly affected the lives of less than one
percent of Hong Kong’s refugees. But the dimensions of the crisis are
so great that they have engaged the attention of scores of humane and
intelligent people. They have gone far beyond routine assistance to
devise creative and practical solutions to the colony’s refugee problems.
Monsignor John Romaniello, a Maryknoll missionary from New Rochelle,
N.Y., used his noodle to produce millions of meals for hungry refugees.
A roundish man with nothing on his mind but the Lord’s work and noodles,
he revels in his title as “noodle king of Hong Kong.” He sings about
noodles, writes about noodles, puns about noodles and buttonholes every
American tourist he meets for contributions to buy more noodles.
It is showmanship with a purpose. Behind the kidding lies an idea so
obvious that no one ever thought of it until Monsignor Romaniello
came to Hong Kong in 1957 as director of Catholic Relief Services. He
noticed that millions of dollars’ worth of American surplus foods like
milk powder, corn meal, and wheat flour being sent to the colony to
feed refugees were winding up on the black market. Having lived among
the Chinese for thirty years, he decided to keep a close eye on the
surplus-food traffic.
One day he observed a young girl taking a sack of surplus flour into a
bakery, then paying the baker to convert it into noodles. The simple
incident stayed in his mind, nagging at him. Later, while riding across
the harbor on the Star Ferry, the answer to a gigantic riddle came to him
in one reflective flash; the little girl was paying to have the flour
made into noodles because her mother, like most refugee mothers, had
no way of turning the flour into an edible meal. The same was true of
com meal; there was neither space nor cooking facilities for it in the
average refugee cubicle. In their raw state, the surplus foods were alien
to a Chinese palate.
Why not convert these foods into noodles? No colony baker was equipped
to handle the job on the scale Monsignor Romaniello envisioned. On
any scale, the cost was too high for the refugee feeding program.
Monsignor Romaniello, helped by other Maryknoll fathers, constructed a
noodle-making machine out of scrap parts and an old engine. It looked
like nothing ever designed by engineers, but it rolled out the noodles.
The Maryknoll noodles caught on at once with the Chinese, who found them
easy to prepare and agreeable to eat. With funds provided by Catholic
Relief Services and the Hong Kong Junior Chamber of Commerce, the first
noodle-making contraption was replaced by a production-line model. Within
four years, Hong Kong noodles were pouring out of the machines at the
rate of 5,000,000 pounds a year, and welfare organizations like the
Church World Service had adopted them. Noodle machines were exported to
the Philippines, Macao, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam as the noodle mania
grew.
Another Catholic priest, working in a phase of welfare work wholly unlike
that of the “noodle king,” has achieved a degree of success comparable
to that of Monsignor Romaniello. He is Father P. J. Howatson, an Irish
Jesuit who has become a key figure in the colony’s youth leadership
program.
Welfare workers will tell you, holding their breath as they do so, that
gangs of young hoodlums have not yet infested Hong Kong. Widespread
poverty, overcrowded housing, and a predominantly young population seem
to offer fertile soil for their growth, but welfare people believe
juvenile gangs have not appeared primarily because of the integral unity
of the Chinese family, with its respect for parents and elders.
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.