Social_Welfare_Annual_Report_1964-1965 — Page 15

immigrants and their children. Seventy per cent live in severely cramped housing conditions around the fringes of the harbour. Between 1954 and 1964 the Government resettlement programme had rehoused more than seven hundred thousand citizens in densely compressed multi-storey 'new towns', each with a population ranging up to 80,000, and in a few resettlement cottage areas; this figure represents some 20% of the whole population. Many thousands of families have been rehoused in this way but have little feeling of neighbourliness towards those next door and very little leisure in which to develop a sense of community. Such con- ditions present formidable difficulties in any attempt to encourage the new citizens to play a part themselves in the development of a coherent society.

16. However the Youth Welfare Section (a title which is now in- appropriate to much of its main responsibilities) has made a solid begin- ning, through community and social centres set up in resettlement estates and new towns, towards bringing their inhabitants more intimately together; attracting them to the centres, which provide a host of welfare services and group activities, and then stimulating through these centres the development of a community spirit. The first centre at Wong Tai Sin Estate near the Airport is now nearly five years old; the second was completed a year later in the rapidly growing industrial town of Tsuen Wan; the third was opened in February 1964 at Kwun Tong and the fourth is being built at Tai Hang Tung and should be opened at the end of 1965. A review and assessment of their achievements is at present being examined; and on this the policy for future expansion or variation of the programme will be built. At the Wong Tai Sin and Tsuen Wan Centres the Maryknoll Sisters and the Hong Kong Young Women's Christian Association respectively provide a day nursery for two hundred children between the ages of two and six who need care while their parents are at work; the British Commonwealth Save the Children Fund provides a Play Centre for more than six hundred children at Kwun Tong; the Chinese Young Men's Christian Association organizes a variety of group activities for young people in the Wong Tai Sin and Tsuen Wan centres, eighty or more of whom come together every evening for folk dancing or sport or to develop other interests or skills. Practical training classes in air-conditioning repairs are run by the Hong Kong Christian Welfare and Relief Council in the Wong Tai Sin Centre; these courses lead to ready employment, and at any one time three hundred boys aged 15 or over are being trained. At Tsuen Wan, Lutheran World Service provides similar facilities in carpentry and mechanics for two hundred young

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