Cancer foundation’s new Kowloon centre provides art therapy, helping sick children to put aside illness and pain

For 2½ hours each week, three-year-old Pang Ho-wing puts the pain of illness aside when her mother, Anna Chung Si-si takes her to a centre for young cancer patients.

Run by the Children’s Cancer Foundation, the rehabilitation centre at So Uk Estate in Kowloon has free programmes such as handicrafts, drawing and sports classes for children with cancer.

Chung takes her daughter there for weekly sessions. “She was always excited to go there,” she says.

Chung, 39, and her husband were heartbroken when Ho-wing, the younger of their two daughters, was diagnosed with leukaemia more than a year ago.

“I was so sad,” Chung recalls. “I felt the sky had crumbled. I kept asking, ‘How could such a little girl suffer from this terrible disease?’”