Relief Services, Church World Service, the Co-operative for American Relief Everywhere, Inc, Lutheran World Service and the Seventh Day Adventist Welfare Service. These five agencies together distributed during the year over twenty-six million pounds of surplus foodstuffs donated by the United States Government under the American Public Law 480 programme. Increasing amounts of these foodstuffs, mainly flour, powdered milk and rice, are being used to provide milk and meals for needy school children. From its Hung Hom Kitchen, Children's Meals Incorporated provides twelve thousand heavily subsidized ten cent lunches a day for poor Kowloon school children and there are plans to increase this to twenty thousand meals a day. Some difficulties in raising funds were due in part to an over-optimistic deduction by a number of oversea contributing agencies from the widely publicized industrial successes of Hong Kong and its attractiveness as a tourist centre. But there is no doubt that some school children are under-nourished, however much the extent may be in scientific dispute because of the lack of specific data. Caritas also operates a school meals programme for about two thousand children in the Aberdeen area, and Lutheran World Service, Church World Service and CARE between them main- tain a total of fourteen milk distribution centres and four mobile canteens. This welcome emphasis on improving the diet of school children should help them to obtain fuller benefit from their education.
79. While the scale of expenditure on food as a first step in public assistance goes on contracting under the tauter administration described above, demands for emergency relief could not of course be controlled or even forecast. Disaster relief was discussed in the opening of this chapter, and this minimizes the temporary despair and wretchedness that nature's cruelty can bring. The Community Relief Trust Fund also continued to assist victims of natural disasters to rebuild their homes and means of livelihood. Cash grants are made, according to a scale approved by the Fund's Committee, to help needy families who have suffered death or injury or lost their huts, boats or agricultural assets. The annual report of the Trustee of this Fund is published separately, but its terms of reference and membership also appear in Appendix 5.
80. The officers of the Relief Section are now long accustomed to turning out at any hour of day or night in answer to an emergency call, and in the typhoon seasons to not seeing their homes for perhaps days on end; all this in addition to the exacting day-to-day work of public assistance. With their colleagues who work for the handicapped, they are used to seeing fellow citizens at the lowest ebb. The community
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