Staff at Hong Kong coronavirus isolation facility on mission to make patients from ethnic minority communities feel at home
- The staff members, recruited from the local Indonesian, Filipino and Pakistani communities, help patients who are not comfortable communicating in English or Cantonese
- ‘Coming into quarantine, they are bound to be nervous and unsure of the procedures. I do my best to chat with them and let them know they are not alone,’ one staff member says
When Fatimah Angelia received a phone call in the middle of the night requesting sanitary towels, it came as something of a shock.
It turned out that the call was coming from an Indonesian domestic helper currently in quarantine at the Hung Shui Kiu Community Isolation Facility, where Angelia works as a staff member dedicated to taking care of members of ethnic minority groups.
“I don’t even know how she got my personal number,” she recalled with a laugh. “But I helped her contact the staff at the facility and they brought her the items within five minutes.”
Since Angelia started working at the facility, she has become a sort of mother figure for Indonesian domestic helpers in isolation. On top of her daily duties manning a hotline and delivering meals, the 60-year-old works to address worries unique to the facility’s Muslim patients, such as concerns over accidentally eating meals containing pork.
Angelia is part of a team of 15 recruited by the Security Bureau to take care of patients who have difficulty communicating in Cantonese and English. The team of Filipino, Indonesian and Pakistani staff members seek to provide a sense of familiarity and bridge cultural gaps for ethnic minority patients in isolation.
Special arrangements at the Hung Shui Kiu facility include a hotline manned by staff fluent in Urdu, Hindi, Bahasa Indonesia and Tagalog, as well as Halal-certified food options.
With the assistance of the Kowloon Mosque and Islamic Centre, the facility has also acquired dozens of prayer mats and copies of the Koran so Muslim patients there can say their daily prayers.