The Riches of Friendship

Ask any Hong Kong resident for his thoughts on the small town of Tin Shui Wai, and the response will probably be "Poverty!" or one of poverty's closely associated labels, which are social problems.

As you know, Jesus had many things to say about those who are poor. All of those things urge Christians to take action, so a few weeks ago Dr. Yue Kwok To (CA Exco Board Member) and I attended the opening ceremony of our action called Pathways to Hope.

Motivated by God’s heart for the poor, my small faithful team and I joined local church pastors and their congregations to develop Pathways to Hope, a programme designed to pave the way out of poverty and isolation.

Mrs. Tsang was one of the first to benefit from our outreach.  She said, "Before I met Christian Action staff and the volunteers, I was terribly lonely. I really felt unwanted, that people were not interested in an old lady living by herself with no family.  But the volunteers from the church have shown me they are different. They visit me regularly and invite me to all the gatherings arranged specially for people like me. The activities around the holidays are especially meaningful as these are the hardest times for me." 

The beauty of this outreach is that the volunteers are members of this community. They are seeing that the government cannot solve all their problems, but they already have the solution; they are the solution. What starts out as a project often grows into a friendship, either between the volunteer and a participant, or when a participant is introduced into the wider social network.

Three hundred families (a thousand individuals) are a part of CA’s Pathways to Hope.  We are praying that one day they will all say, as Mrs. Tsang has said, “I am no longer lonely. The volunteers have become my friends! What’s more, when they see I have needs, they arrange for me to receive donations.”  This old lady, who once said she was “terribly lonely”, now sounds as if she has received the true riches of friendship.