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HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
at Kwai Chung which provides accommodation for fifty girls for training in needlework, rattan weaving and housework.
There are three non-Government institutions of particular value to the Probation Section. The first is the Hong Kong Sea School, Stanley, which accommodates 300 boys, all of them either orphans or from poor homes, and trains them for a career at sea. After completing their course of two or three years they are able to find immediate employment with shipping companies. The school began construction of a new wing in 1958, with funds donated by the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Secondly, the Children's Centre, Kowloon, which offers educational and vocational training to over 100 poor children. Lastly, there is the Juvenile Care Centre which was established on the Island with the express aim of preventing juvenile delinquency. This Centre provides primary education and vocational training for over 800 boys and girls who attend the Centre daily, a number of them being accepted upon the recom- mendation of Probation Officers and welfare agencies.
Youth Organizations. The families of many thousands of children in Hong Kong live in slum tenements, often in extremely cramped spaces, or in one room in a Resettlement Estate. In these overcrowded conditions family life becomes a struggle and physical recreation hardly possible, except in the streets, where a game can be played at some risk or a dog-eared and dubious book or magazine borrowed for ten cents from a 'children's library' pedlar who displays his wares at a street corner. Moreover, there are still many children for whom no places can be found in primary schools. For these, children, youth organizations seek to provide recreation, informal education, hand work and group or team competitions, thus giving them a fuller and perhaps more stable background than their homes can provide.
The largest organization in this field is the Boys' and Girls' Clubs Association which was itself running over 100 clubs with a membership of some 3,650 children at the end of the year, while another 75 clubs with nearly 4,500 members were run by affiliated bodies, among them the Youth Welfare Section of the Social Welfare Department (24 clubs with over 800 members). Each club normally functions for half the day and has anything up to 40 members. An important and exacting part of the club leader's job is to get to know each of his members as an individual, to