SIR,-1 have had a letter from Hong Kong dated December
27, 1955, from the wife of Archdeacon Donnithorne. This lady has been able, through money specially given for the purpose in response to my urgent appeals, to help some of the destitute there. There are about 30,000 refugees compelled to live in the 'streets and on the rooftops. She writes: . . Just before your help arrived we had discovered that there are hundreds of families living . . . in what can be best described as little "rabbit-hutches" [on the rooftops].. . . One day I went to a poot tenement house and climbed up [seventy-eight stone steps] to the roof and there . . . lived about 20 families. Their "houses" were only about, up to my shoulder in height, made of cardboard or sacks or paper for the walls. . . . The furniture? There is none at all; the bed is in most cases a straw mat on the cement floor of the roof- top. . . . One woman and her son had unpicked an old overcoat . . . and use that tattered garment to cover them both. . . . Another little family (father, mother and three tiny children under six years old) had one very thin wadded quilt . . . and that was all their covering . . . the young mother hag TB. There is no water on the roofs and no lavatory facilities.
'One woman living not very far from us works until very late at nights sometimes mak- ing paper bags; we' have passed her pavement "home" many times after 10 p.m. . . . and seen her sitting up beside her sleeping husband and children and pasting the bags and folding them. . . . I took a parcel of clothes suitable for her family and herself. . . . She could hardly believe that it was for her! She held up each garment with such pleasure to admire it and then held it against the child for which it was meant. . .
I earnestly ask you, Sir, to publish this letter, that your readers may know of the appalling need. If they wish to help relieve this tragic suffering, any donations sent to the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, 17 Broad Street, Oxford, will be sent promptly. in full, to Mrs. Donnithorne. — Yours faithfully,
Oxford Committee for Famine Relief
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