SOCIAL WELFARE
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by the Supreme Court to consent to adoption overseas through the good offices of one or other of these organizations. By the end of the year 229 children had left Hong Kong for legal adoption into a family abroad and 248 children were waiting to leave. The work of these organizations materially assists in making provision for the increasing number of children without a family or a home.
Youth Organizations and Group Work. The families of many thousands of children in Hong Kong live in slum tenements, often in extremely cramped spaces, or in one room in a Resettlement Estate. In these overcrowded conditions family life becomes a struggle and physical recreation hardly possible, except in the streets. Moreover, there are still many children for whom no places can be found in primary schools. For these children, youth organizations seek to provide recreation, informal education, hand work and group or team competitions, thus giving them a fuller and perhaps more stable background than their homes can provide.
The Chinese Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. provide several thou- sand children and young people with clubs and recreational centres where they can follow their bent in vocational training, handicrafts, and hobbies. The Boys' and Girls' Clubs Association was running 115 clubs with a membership of 4,132 children at the end of the year, while another 83 clubs with 4,981 members were run by affiliated bodies, among them the Youth Welfare Section of the Social Welfare Department, which had 23 clubs with over 600 members.
The Boy Scouts and Girl Guides Associations now have over 6,000 and 2,000 members respectively and continue to expand. 62 Scouters and Scouts from Hong Kong participated in the 10th World Jamboree held in Manila in July, and the Association was able to welcome many visitors to Hong Kong after the Jamboree, amongst them the then Chief Scout, Lord Rowallan, and the Inter- national Camp Chief, Mr. John Thurman, as well as a number of foreign contingents. The Girl Guides Association obtained a new camp site at Pok Fu Lam which proved an excellent addition to training facilities. The Association had a very successful year in training new and existing Guide leaders. A highly qualified Girl Guide Trainer from the United Kingdom spent a year in the Colony and left, on her departure, a local Training Team of
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