Journey beyond cancer through the eyes of a child
Exhibition shows their pain and hopes as they fight the disease
They are small, bald, brave and beautiful. And their ability to light up a room with a smile should be a lesson to anyone feeling down on their luck. These children have all battled cancer.
To celebrate their spirit, the Children's Cancer Foundation is staging an exhibition at the Cultural Centre entitled A Story of the Little Bald People. It features 90 works from about 45 children centred on four stages of their treatment.
Not all of the children made it.
Clinical psychologist and programme co-ordinator Ada Yuen Nga-yee said children did not always have enough confidence to express their feelings verbally, so drawing provided a valuable outlet in times of stress or crisis.
Artwork in the first section, for example, deals with the children's emotions just after diagnosis and admission.
'There are no smiling faces here,' Ms Yuen said. 'A lot of the time these children are very young and they think they are sick because they have been naughty.'
As children progress through treatment, Ms Yuen tries to get them to focus on positive things: smiley faces, love hearts, shining suns.
'When you are in pain, all you can see are the difficulties, but drawing helps them focus on the good things to come,' she said.
It works. Yi Cho-wing, nine, was diagnosed with leukaemia when she was six. Some of her drawings made during her eight months of treatment feature in the exhibition.
'It was less boring when I drew,' Cho-wing said. 'I could draw what was inside my heart and it meant I could get my unhappiness out.
'I've always liked drawing, even before I went to hospital. Sometimes the doctors would come with an injection for me and they really hurt ... but now I am back at school I am much happier and it is far less boring.
'It just gets better and better.'
Miami Wu Yi-yuen, who founded the organisation, said much had changed since 1988, when her three-year-old son, Don-don, was diagnosed with leukaemia.
'We have come such a long way,' she said of both the foundation and her son.
'Don-don was only given a 10 per cent chance of survival, but now he is studying sports science at Leeds University and was a member of the under-19 Hong Kong rugby squad that went to France last year.'
The foundations' budget is financed almost entirely by donations. It is now looking to reach out to the mainland and provide training to carers there so they can offer similar services.
At one stage Ms Yuen had asked the children to draw what they thought the cancer cells looked like.
Displaying the spirit that helped him through an 18-month battle with neuroblastoma - a particularly dangerous cancer of the nervous system that afflicts children- five-year-old Tam Ka-ho said: 'I drew them as hamburgers.
'That way I could gobble them all up.'
