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welfare director, one women's section director, and adds two new subcommittees, one sanitation director and one football instructor. The same kinds of subcommittees are found in an additional three committees (those for Blocks #16, #19, and #23) but Block #19 has two additional categories of junior police call (three members) and security (nine members), and Block #16 adds that of hygiene. Block #17's MAC has recently formed subcommittees for recreation, general affairs, women's section, and public relations.
What do these committees do? Are there any differences with the subcommittee descriptions given earlier? Take, for example, the recreation subcommittee. The MACs of Lok Fu Estate may participate in two kinds of recreational activities, those organized through the District Office and planned for the estate as a whole and those organized by the block itself. The latter are much less common, as many committees do not have enough enthusiastic members to do the organizing nor do they have sufficient funds to pay for the expenses. Picnics are popular in the summer and fall, however, and the residents of many blocks are enthusiastic about outings to local temples to eat vegetarian food. One committee provides summer activities for its resident young people (such as camping trips, chess playing sessions, and table tennis) and a few committees have obtained basketballs and footballs for residents to use. The women's section subcommittee of one block's MAC provides a special service by seeing to the needs of old women living in the block. For example, it helps to pay the electricity bills for those in need and gives general assistance to these older women. The functions of the other subcommittees are generally the same as described.
One special subcommittee, that for security, is characteristic only of public housing estate Mutual Aid Committees. There, multiple entrances and exits make security a problem. It is true enough that private housing units also have security problems, often serious ones, but in my experience they rarely have patrol teams, relying instead on gates, an occasional watchman or two, or a company-hired professional security team. In the public housing estates, the security subcommittee is usually the one responsible for the neighbourhood security patrols, the regularly-rotating groups of committee members and residents who patrol
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welfare director, one women's section director, and adds two new subcommittees, one sanitation director and one football instructor. The same kinds of subcommittees are found in an additional three committees (those for Blocks #16, #19, and #23) but Block #19 has two additional categories of junior police call (three members) and security (nine members), and Block #16 adds that of hygiene. Block #17's MAC has recently formed subcommittees for recreation, general affairs, women's section, and public relations.
What do these committees do? Are there any differences with the subcommittee descriptions given earlier? Take, for example, the recreation subcommittee. The MACs of Lok Fu Estate may participate in two kinds of recreational activities, those organized through the District Office and planned for the estate as a whole and those organized by the block itself. The latter are much less common, as many committees do not have enough enthusiastic members to do the organizing nor do they have sufficient funds to pay for the expenses. Picnics are popular in the summer and fall, however, and the residents of many blocks are enthusiastic about outings to local temples to eat vegetarian food. One committee provides summer activities for its resident young people (such as camping trips, chess playing sessions, and table tennis) and a few committees have obtained basketballs and footballs for residents to use.18 The women's section subcommittee of one block's MAC provides a special service by seeing to the needs of old women living in the block. For example, it helps to pay the electricity bills for those in need and gives general assistance to these older women. The functions of the other subcommittees are generally the same as described.
One special subcommittee, that for security, is characteristic only of public housing estate Mutual Aid Committees. There, multiple entrances and exits make security a problem. It is true enough that private housing units also have security problems often serious ones →→ but in my experience they rarely have patrol teams, relying instead on gates, an occasional watchman or two, or a company-hired professional security team. In the public housing estates, the security subcommittee is usually the one responsible for the neighbourhood security patrols, the regularly- rotating groups of committee members and residents who patrol
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