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The Governor's "Letter to Hong Kong"
Following is the full text of Governor the Rt Hon Christopher Patten's broadcast on RTHK's "Letter to Hong Kong":
The memory of one of my very first visits as Governor is still clearly with me.
It was a blisteringly hot afternoon. We were all boiling damp, as my grandmother would have put it. As part of the trip I went to see a sheltered workshop for youngsters with a mental disability. Waiting patiently outside, grilling in the sunshine, were a group of parents and their disabled children, petitioning for better training and day care facilities for themselves. They had posters and banners and T- shirts and hats and petitions, lots of petitions. They were courteous and kind, and very, very, long-suffering.
A short while later, I went to see one of the parents in her own home. In a small flat, she was bringing up a large family, one of whom was suffered from a severe mental disability. She really did have her work cut out every day looking after this much loved son, preventing him coming to any harm and trying to keep him alert and occupied. She was pretty well on her own, except for the help she got from the rest of the family. No respite. No relief. Day after day of hard work, grinding hard work, day after day of loving care with not many "thank yous" except, I guess, those that families mean but usually forget to say.
Not long after this, I was answering questions at one of my first public meetings. A young man, with a physical disability and wheel-chair bound, asked me a thoughtful question about the government's commitment to providing services for people like him. People who had to cope and make their way in the world against the odds and often against the prejudices of their fellow men and women.
I took a number of lessons from those various encounters. I was impressed by the qualities of the disabled and their families - those with a disability of the mind as well as of body. I was impressed by their dignity, their determination, their commitment, their courage, their intelligent restraint. How many people with a less good cause, with less strong or important arguments, put their point more aggressively, less thoughtfully.
Well, I don't think that noise is the best argument. Hong Kong's citizens with a disability and their families deserve a hearing, and I believe they are starting to get a hearing.