HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT, 1953
by Government of a plan to set up a camp on Lantao Island to house not only the blind, disabled and their families from Rennie's Mill Camp and North Point Camp, but also persons with these handicaps found destitute in the streets. It is in- tended to provide the inmates of the new Camp with vocational training adapted to their individual disabilities.
Emergency Relief. Apart from the fire on Christmas night, to which reference is made in Chapter 1, a number of lesser squatter fires and two tropical storms took heavy toll of the homes and possessions of many poor families. After the first fire of the year, a large conflagration which swept through Homuntin Valley in January, 1953, a matshed camp was quickly erected to house some 2,000 of the victims. This number rose to nearly 3,000 following a second large fire which broke out in another squatter district a fortnight later. Free feeding of the victims was organized by the Social Welfare Office immediately after each disaster, and was continued until the families were able to fend for themselves. Including meals provided for victims of the Christmas night blaze, the number of free meals distributed during the year amounted to over 4 million. In all these emergencies valuable assistance was given by the voluntary societies in carrying out relief work. Workers from the Hong Kong Branch of the British Red Cross Society and other agencies distributed relief clothing, while the Kaifong Welfare Associations gave other forms of assistance, and or- ganized campaigns for public subscriptions.
Squatter Screening. The interviewing of squatters in con- nexion with resettlement continued during the year, but the main work of the team of interviewers from the Social Welfare Office has been the screening, after squatter fires or tropical storms, of the applicants for emergency relief. Considerable ingenuity has often been needed to weed out the genuine victims from imposters whose only aim was to obtain cheap accommodation for which they were ineligible under the resettlement scheme.
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