Never mind that his students swelter in 32 degrees Celsius heat with no air conditioner. Or that they have no hot water for showers on even the coldest winter mornings. Or that they perform dismally in school exams. Never mind, either, that Alman Chan Siu-cheuk lacks independent evidence that his ramshackle Christian Zheng Sheng College in a remote corner of Lantau retains 90 per cent of his students until they graduate, and that 90 per cent of these remain drug-free. He trusts his numbers.
As principal of Hong Kong's best known faith-based drug rehabilitation centre - at least since last summer, when the college proposed to take over an abandoned secondary school in Mui Wo - Chan draws from a deep well of testimony and anecdotes of helping dead-end kids turn over a new leaf. And he has faith in the surveys he conducts himself on his former charges.
But still, the former high-school teacher or chemistry and maths knows this is not as convincing as empirical evidence gathered by outsiders would be. The most likely criticism would be the study's lack of objectivity.
'I'd love someone to carry out an independent study, but no one has offered so far,' he said over tea in the IFC (the Sunday Morning Post's original request for an onsite interview had been politely turned down). What's more important, Chan says, is trust.
'Why are our students willing to stay in the school? Are we locking them up? No. They can leave any time. If the courts didn't trust us, if this organisation couldn't produce the results, they wouldn't send kids here for two years. If the kids don't want to stay, the courts won't make them either.
'Do you think that 16-, 17- or 18-year-old kids would be willing to stay in substandard living conditions for three years? We're not a correctional service, we have no right to detain anyone. So I ask them, why are staying so long? Then they tell me: they see the future.'
It's not strictly correct to say that no one has offered to conduct an independent survey on Zheng Sheng College. Before the handover, the colonial government was reluctant to subsidise religious NGO rehab centres, all of them Christian, on the grounds that they were proselytising. After the NGOs argued that they were conducting much of Hong Kong's rehab effort without support, the government commissioned Chinese University to conduct an evaluation study in 1997. That report, a copy of which was obtained by the Sunday Morning Post despite having apparently vanished from university archives, contains the bulk of what the government knows about the operations of these organisations. Non-subvented rehab organisations, including Zheng Sheng College, are loosely monitored by the Social Welfare Department and other authorities. Further, Zheng Sheng College refused to be included in the study, despite being asked repeatedly to do so. When asked why, Chan replied that the study was for subvention purposes only, and that its terms were 'unfair', without elaborating.