If you take everything Andrea Gutwirth says to you at face value - and she says it with absolute sincerity - you will believe that she is shy to the brink of invisibility, knows nobody important in Hong Kong despite having lived here 35 years, has no gift for languages, and runs 'only a small charity'.
However, this 'small' charity is SoulTalk - a support network for emotionally and psychologically distressed women she founded in 1992 - which helps more than 2,000 women in Hong Kong each year. Her efforts have led her to receive the 2010 Women of Influence Award for Entrepreneur of the Year.
SoulTalk runs a 24-hour hotline, offers emergency refuge housing in its own 'Loving Home' in extreme cases, and has a growing network of professionally trained volunteer 'ambassadors' - full- and part-time staff. It is also known and respected by doctors and lawyers in Hong Kong as the best telephone number to give to women they deal with professionally who are in urgent need of the kind of non-medical or non-legal help they cannot provide.
The inspiration for the charity came from her own, traumatic experiences.
It began in 1992 as a baby Phoenix rising from the ashes of her own 10-year marital conflagration, which left her penniless and culminated in her two youngest children being taken away by their father.
'I realised then that if I was going through this, there must be plenty of other women in similar situations,' Gutwirth says.
