Computer training for refugee kids

Last Christmas, my pastor gave a wonderful sermon on "Home", during which he spoke about Christ's homelessness while He was on earth. From there, he extrapolated to how many people in Hong Kong are homeless -- not in the sense of street sleepers, but rather, they are refugees in Hong Kong, in a state of legal limbo.

Inspired by that sermon, I had then decided to try and see how we could help out. I learned about the name of an NGO here that looks to serve these people, but I was very busy then and didn't follow up. Then, about a month back, I had dinner with a friend of mine who happened to be volunteering for the same NGO. I decided that twice couldn't be a coincidence and jumped onto that, and got my friend to introduce me to the director there. They welcomed our help and we decided to do a short computer training camp for their children, just to see if our students could handle it.

After a flu-scare-induced delay, today saw our first IT camp for these refugee children. They come from a variety of races and backgrounds, and their English speaking ability is also very varied. Some of them are also a bit unruly -- like any other kid, perhaps, they would rather play computer games on the Internet rather than learn how to take pictures! But once you got their attention and their interest, they got excited about the subject matter in a hurry.

I think it was a big challenge for our students, too. Looking at those kids today, it suddenly occurred to me that most of our students had probably never interacted this closely with somebody who's not Chinese before, excepting their professors, and none of their professors come from similar backgrounds as these kids. Hong Kong is truly a little too racially homogeneous, I think. But kids are easy to deal with, and by the end of the morning, I would say that they were quite comfortable with each other.

It was a good feeling to come home at the end of the day today.