28. A wide range of activities for older children is provided by a number of other organizations in the Colony, among which are the Chinese Young Men's Christian Association, the Young Women's Christian Association, Caritas, and others.
29. The Boys' and Girls' Clubs Association continued its work of providing recreation, informal education and character-training for several thousands of children between the ages of 8 and 14. At the end of the year the Association had over five thousand four hundred members in a hundred and thirty-two clubs run directly, and there were almost another six thousand seven hundred in sixty-one affiliated clubs.
30. The Lions-YMCA Camp at Junk Bay gave a week-long summer holiday to nearly three thousand children. The Hong Kong Conference of Youth Organizations' Camp at Silver Mine Bay was used by two thousand five hundred. Caritas opened its Youth Welfare Centre on Cheung Chau Island in November.
31. The activity which is probably more popular than any other with Hong Kong children is reading. During the year the two libraries of the Children's Playground Association attracted nearly 225,000 visitors and well over thirty-two thousand books were borrowed. The Boys' and Girls' Clubs Association's twelve children's libraries have a monthly attendance of about a hundred thousand. The six libraries run by the Department itself in its community and social centres attract four thousand readers a day and nearly thirty thousand books are borrowed every month. A new mobile library which is a donation from UNICEF and the Hong Kong Junior Chamber of Commerce has replaced the old library van. It makes an average tour of about thirty-five miles a day, visits twenty-five separate areas every week and reaches out to children from almost sixty schools in the New Territories. Libraries not only provide healthy reading matter in large quantities to offset the dubious wares or downright trash offered by street stalls; they also attract children to join in competitions, picnics and other forms of recreation organized by the agencies which run them.
32. The Hong Kong Sea School trains boys, mainly chosen because of their needy circumstances, for a career at sea. Boys who have finished their training have at present no difficulty in finding employment, as the demand from shipping firms for properly trained young seamen remains high; about eighty former pupils are now serving as ships' second mates and third mates. There were five hundred boys in residence at the school at the end of the year, the maximum capacity being five hundred and fifty.
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