IF SOMEONE HAD told Pong Lai-hing 12 years ago she would one day be in the running for a Nobel prize, she would have scoffed at the suggestion. Life was then very much about survival: as a recently laid-off factory worker she was struggling just to bring home bread for her ailing parents.
Having reinvented herself by enrolling in computer courses, she helped found the Women Workers' Co-operative, which bid for typing commissions and looked out for the welfare of jobless peers.
More than a decade later, the co-operative's work has brought Pong and her colleagues into an arena normally reserved for warring presidents-turned-peacemakers or death-defying political activists. In what is perhaps the most co-ordinated feat in Nobel history, 999 individuals and organisations have been nominated as a collective through a project dubbed '1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005'. The aim is to recognise women whose 'strategies for constructive conflict management should provide important impulses for conflict research and peace policies' around the world.
What sets the list apart from 198 other nominees for the peace prize - among them the late Pope John Paul II, former US secretary of state Colin Powell and the International Atomic Energy Agency - is its celebration of the hard graft put in by grassroots social activists worldwide. The 999 names might be well known in their own communities, but few generate much international press.
In a gesture to honour the struggle for recognition of women's contribution to the world, the 1,000th slot has been left unfilled as a tribute to all the activists the organisers failed to contact.
A fine example of commitment to social justice can be found in the Women Workers' Co-operative, now anchored by seven core members. They run two shops in the poor district of Shamshuipo: the Community Recycling Co-op trades in cast-offs ranging from furniture and cooking utensils to clocks and books, while the Union Mart sells food and other daily necessities at basement prices.