People
3
weekly
September 8, 1975
Vol. 4 No. 10
SPIRIT
A CALIFORNIA COUPLE SAVES | Hong Kong has long been irresistible HONG KONG JUNKIES BY TEACHING
THEM TO SPEAK IN TONGUES
Rick and Jean Willans enjoy a guitar sOT- enade from one of the ex-addicts rescued by their Hong Kong rehabilitation center.
Rick, waist-deep in the South China Sea, baptizes a recent convert to Christianity as Jean (at left) bears witness.
to Christian missionaries bent on con-
verting the heathen. Less fortunately, it has also been a center of drug addic- tion: first opium and now heroin have always been in generous supply.
Until recently, however, the addicts benefited little from the religious zeal that has historically surrounded them. Now two lay Episcopal mission- aries from California, Rich and Jean Willans, have brought modest hope to the army of Crown Colony junkies.
They are a hapless lot. "They come here practically naked," says Jean. "They've usually pawned everything to maintain their habit, and sometimes they don't even have underwear. Their teeth are all ruined, too."
The Willans employ neither Western medicine nor acupuncture to ease Ori- ental addicts through the ordeal of withdrawal and subsequent abstinence from drugs. Their revolutionary "cure": acceptance of Christ formalized in an experience called "Baptism in the Holy Spirit," after which the communicant can "speak in fongues."
Speaking in tongues—the spontane- ous, sometimes convulsive utterance of religious credos in a language un- familiar to the speaker-dates from
the first century and is more common these days to Pentecostal faiths than their high-church brethren. Yet Jean Willans, 50, first learned it from
an Episcopalian minister in her home- town of Van Nuys. Her own speaking, she claims, has been understood
by people who know Spanish and New Testament Greek, neither of which lan- guages she can ordinarily speak.
Equally important to the Willans' suc- cess has been their knack of "praying in" money. "We thought God wanted you to have apartments to stay in,” Jean explains to her junkie flock. “So
we prayed, and then one foreigner here said he felt God wanted him to pay our $300-a-month rent. Once we needed a hundred dollars desperately for food. I told the boys to pray that morn- ing, but didn't mention our shortage. That same evening a man who had nev-
er given anything like that amount before squeezed a hundred-dollar bill into my hand as he entered the apartment."
Such windfalls, plus the bulk of Rick's income as management consultant for
a major Hong Kong company, provide the $3,600 needed each month for five apartments housing 20 former ad- dicts. They range in age from 23 to 58, and most have worked in the Mafia- like "Triad Societies," vicious dope gangs which dominate Hong Kong crime. (Most addicts sniff, not shoot. heroin a practice known locally as "chasing the dragon.")
Surprisingly, the Willans have no in- terest in expanding their work outside the colony. "This is not primarily a drug cure," explains Jean. "We are mainly interested in these people knowing Jesus Christ as a person.' Rick, 32, adds: "We advise them to pray each day in tongues. If they do this they are internally at peace--and it shows. Otherwise these boys are the most dis- turbed people I've ever come across." As she substitutes Christian faith for junkie pipe dreams, Jean recalls a vi- sion of her own. “În 1967 I dreamt that my husband and daughter (who is now living in England] were going to travel to the Orient. So far every- thing has come true." She adds with a quick smile: "But I certainly never dreamt I'd become a housemother to 20 drug addicts." DAVID AIKMAN
Photographs by Hubert Van Es
The Willans assuage the withdrawal
pains of a Chinese junkie with prayer that seems more effective than medi- cal therapy. At right is Jackie Pollinger, an English missionary.
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