Lutheran World Service and the Seventh Day Adventist Welfare Service. These five agencies distributed almost fifteen million pounds of surplus foodstuffs donated by the United States Government under the American Public Law 480 programme. These foodstuffs, mainly flour and powdered milk, are used to provide milk and meals for needy school children and are supplemented by other gifts of canned food and vitamins. From its kitchen at Hung Hom the Children's Meals Society, incorporating the child feeding schemes of the former Children's Meals Incorporated and the Mennonite Central Committee, provides up to fourteen thousand, five hundred heavily subsidized ten cent lunches a day for poor school children in Kowloon and Tsuen Wan. Caritas also operates a school meals programme which last year issued 457,300 meals to about 2,120 children in the Aberdeen and Shek Kip Mei areas, and Lutheran World Service, Church World Service and Caritas between them maintain a total of seven milk distribution centres and two mobile canteens. This emphasis on improving the diet of school children should help them to obtain fuller benefit from their education.
72. In January, 1967 legislation was introduced enabling people qualifying under merit and means tests to obtain legal aid in civil cases. The department has undertaken on behalf of the Director of Legal Aid to inquire into the means of any applicant and between 12th January, when the scheme came into operation, and 31st March 394 cases had been referred for investigation of which 295 had been completed or were withdrawn.
73. 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 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 owes them a great deal, yet they are the first to acknowledge that in times of crisis social workers in other fields and their colleagues in the voluntary welfare agencies will drop everything in order to back them up.
CHAPTER VIII
WELFARE OF THE DISABLED AND OTHER CATEGORIES
REHABILITATION
74. Four Government departments and many voluntary agencies are actively engaged in working for the rehabilitation of the physically,
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