Dear Chapter Chairman,
I write to invite your Chapter to nominate 5 or more Wahyanites and their family members to serve as voluntary tutors to practice online oral English with under-privileged students in Tin Shui Wai (TSW) in Hong Kong.
According to Wikipedia, TSW “acquired a rather dubious reputation in Hong Kong for being an area where numerous serious family and social issues, including domestic violence, mental illness, and suicide occurs….. …….. TSW is prone to family tragedies because of its remote location, limited employment opportunities, and high density of public housing estates. Some would also argue that the large number of new immigrants from Mainland China in the area, struggling to adjust to the different cultural and social dynamics of Hong Kong, also contributes to the problem.” While the HK Government has committed to improve and provide more services to its residents, there is always a gap between supply and demand.
The Wah Yan One Famliy Foundation (WYOFF) has initiated a project to provide free English tutorial lessons to under-privileged students in Forms 2 to 4 in TSW by mobilizing Wahyanites in Hong Kong to act as voluntary English tutors. Details are in the website below;
https://tswetp.wahyanhk1971.org /
Because of its resounding success, having served 14 schools with over 450 participants during the past 1 1/2 years, it has been proposed to start a new free online oral English program to help Forms 5 to 6 students in TSW to pass their oral public examinations. This new program is different from the existing one and aims to seek and tap the hidden potential of overseas Wahyanites because of their better mastery in oral English.
As WY graduates, we uphold the ‘Men For and With Others’ spirit to serve others and help the needy in society. Given the situation in TSW and the demand from principals there, we consider it worthwhile to introduce this additional service for Forms 5 to 6 students whose parents are receiving public assistance and therefore cannot afford to send their kids to private tutorial classes even if they are promising but are academically behind standard because of lack of proper guidance and support at home. We do not aim to produce outstanding students, but help deserving teenagers in TSW to improve their oral English and pass their public oral examination. Our objectives are to give back to society what we have taken from it and spread the Jesuit spirit and WY education to the lowest self-esteem and most needy group of teenagers in HK.
Given that your members and families are using and speaking English daily, they are therefore more than capable of helping these kids to practice online oral English. As such, we would like to invite you to nominate 5 or more candidates among your working or retired members, their wives, grown-up sons and daughters who are
- fluent in spoken English and have the patience to talk to, identify and correct the grammatical and usage errors ofTSW students, many of whom can only speak broken English; and
- can make available two hours or more a week (not local but Hong Kong time and day of the week outside school hours from 8 am to 4 pm except Sat., Sun. or public holidays as well as bed time) using a free apps to talk to the students online.
Selected candidates will be, if needed, trained to install and use an apps (Google Hangouts, for example) through which they can talk online to 1 to 10 students simultaneously at a time they are convenient on a regular basis. We expect over 100 students will enroll in this program from the start and therefore if each Chapter can fill 5 or more tutors, more attention can then be paid to each student. The tutors can select topics which they have an interest to talk about or if they like, they can entertain special requests from participating students. However, no sensitive subjects like sex, politics, religion, etc, should be touched.
I hope you will agree to recruit voluntary tutors for this meaningful project for us. Pl. pass their names and email addresses to Mr. Tak H. Eng, Deputy Co-ordinator of this program at takhoieng@gmail.com by end of Oct., if not earlier. He will then liaise with them direct on the use of apps as well as details of operation. We hope to try out the program in early Dec. after we have recruited and trained the students on the use of the apps and have it up and running before Christmas this year.
If you have any Q., pl. email me at retireddanielmak@msn.com or Tak H. Eng above. My tel. no. is 1-852-67079653 and Tak, who lives in USA and also a WYHK 1971 graduate, can be reached at 1-203-637-5512, just in case you like to talk. Many thanks for your help.
Cheers,
Daniel Mak
Project Co-ordinator
A WYHK 1971 graduate and a retired CEO of HK Government