Hong Kong’s homeless, disabled and elderly – and the NGOs that help them – hit hard by protest crisis
- Survey released last week found that 80 per cent of the 103 local charities interviewed had recorded a loss since June
- Social workers say protest damage makes life more difficult and dangerous for Hong Kong’s disadvantaged
Every night for some time, 69-year-old Uncle Heng received a boiled egg and a banana for dinner from a local charity before he slept rough on the streets of Mong Kok.
But for the last two weeks in November, his customary meal was not available because of the anti-government protests and traffic disruptions across Hong Kong.
Jeff Rotmeyer, the chief executive of ImpactHK, an NGO that delivers food and necessities to Hong Kong’s homeless people, knows Heng well.
“He’s alone all the time and suffers from depression, but he is actually a really sweet and kind man,” Rotmeyer said.
Rotmeyer and his team of 12 to 20 volunteers usually visit two or three locations across the city every night, giving out 1,500 meals each week.
As the protest crisis intensified, however, the team was forced to cancel 10 per cent of their trips for two weeks as police fought pitched battles with radical protesters at local universities, including Polytechnic and Chinese University.