Mary arrived from central Africa two months ago with her children. Having suffered both physical and mental trauma, she then had to adapt to a new life in a new city with no security or money.
She can not speak English and her children will not be able to attend school until they have been cleared by the government, a process that takes months. She is desperate that their education should not be interrupted.
Mary is one of 2,000 refugees or asylum seekers helped by Christian Action, a charity set up in the early 1950s as Hong Kong Christian Aid to Refugees and renamed Christian Action in 1994.
For a city founded on the hard work and dynamism of the floods of refugees who came from the mainland in the 1950s, Hong Kong today is not so welcoming to refugees.
Asylum seekers are allowed into the city on tourist visas, then they seek a recognisance paper from the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, before running the gauntlet of seeking help from the Immigration Department, where they might be assisted and given refugee status or held as overstayers for violating their visas. Christian Action helps asylum seekers and ethnic minority residents who find themselves stuck in the poverty gap.
With funding from Operation Santa Claus, the charity wants to bring joy and laughter back into the lives of deprived ethnic minority children and those of asylum seekers by setting up a one-year programme at the Chungking Mansions Service Centre.
