HKU Bulletin November 2006 (Vol. 8 No. 1)

18 19 Project SEE Inspires an Off-shoot New programme motivates students to help the region’s needy. A programme to send our students to developing countries during the summer months has provided the impetus for a new student-led voluntary organisation to help children in Cambodia. Humanity in Focus was formed by five local students who joined Project SEE (Students for Equality and Equity), a programme launched this summer by the General Education Unit to bring together local and international students at the University to work on such issues as gender, AIDS, the environment and children’s rights. The students initiated their Non Government Organisation (NGO) after experiencing the hardships of Cambodian village life where preparing a meal required a two-hour trek to market, the local hospital was less equipped than their first aid kit and children in the nearest town begged for food. “The situation in the village where we stayed motivated us to set up Humanity in Focus,” student Wendy Choi Wae Yee said. “We were eating only eggs and rice and we thought that was simple enough, but the children there ate rice with nothing on top.” Ms Choi and her colleagues, Agatha Wong Chi Lai, Yves Wan Yau Sum, Georgina Lam Kit Gee, Wong Chi Lai and Canadian exchange student Ali Manek organised English and hygiene classes in the village and made connections with local NGOs who were trying to improve life for children there. Ms Wan said many of the local volunteers were Cambodian university students. “They really motivated us because they are students, too, and they’re trying to do something for the children in the village.” Humanity in Focus aims to raise $12,000 to build a simple village school and a water tank and train 25 volunteers to become teachers. So far the students have organised a fund- raising dinner and designed a calendar using photographs they took in Cambodia. In future they hope to involve students from other universities and secondary schools, and send volunteers to Cambodia. If the current projects succeed, they also hope to take on more on-going work involving children, gender and drug addiction prevention. “Project SEE was a good experience because the University gave us a lot of freedom to contact the local NGOs and make our own plans,” Ms Choi said. “Now we are helping to empower our Cambodian partners. We’re committed to making this project work.” Project SEE also sent another 34 local and non-local students to India, Sri Lanka, Thai land, Vietnam and the Philippines during the summer. The Director of General Education, Dr Albert Chau, said the purpose of the programme was to engage students in dealing with social issues of global concern. “We ultimately want them to become active advocates for equality and equity in the world around us,” he said. ARTS STUDENTS Bound Feet and Queues A new book explores the diary of one of the first American woman to live in China. I f 19th century diarist Harriett Low were to visit Macau today she would hardly recognize the place. The sedan chairs and sampans of her day are long gone and the Catholicism that dominated the colony in her time, has been largely overtaken by the new religion of gambling. But in 1829 when Low, a 20-year-old unworldly American, arrived in the former Portuguese enclave, she encountered women with bound feet and men with queues. While travelling with her aunt and uncle, a trader from Salem, Massachusetts, Low spent five years in Macau and kept a detailed diary of a life filled with balls, picnics and operas. At the t ime, Macau was the only permi tted gateway to Mainland China and, as such, formed the centre of life for foreigners trading with the Mainland. The wives of foreign merchants, however, were forced by the Chinese government to remain in the enclave, where they led constricted lives, while their husbands traded tea and opium in Canton. It is this diary that forms the heart of Rosmarie Lamas’s new book, Everything in Style: Harriet Low’s Macau , published by the Hong Kong University Press. Steeped in the exoticism of the Far East, this engaging memoir details the Chinese customs of the period, explores the power of religion, the problems of inter-cultural relationships and the daily life of 19th century women on the south China coast. In so doing it offers a peek into a lost world. Lamas, based in Lisbon, Portugal, is a social anthropologist by training and is a former associate professor at the Institut for Tourism Studies in Macau.