Hong Kong Red Cross

Things as ordinary as standing up, sitting down or reading are not at all easy to patients with cerebral palsy (CP) like the 15-year-old Daniel and 8-year-old Kelvin. CP is a group of disorders that affect a person's ability to move and to maintain a balance posture due to damages in brain. But instead of giving up, they study hard at the special schools ran by the Hong Kong Red Cross.

However, their physical disability do ask for additional care and assistance. Devices like height adjustable desk that cost several thousand dollars each or an eye-gaze computer access system that cost more than hundred thousand dollars can greatly help not only their studies but also the control of their bodies. These special equipments provide the necessary assistance to disabled students like Daniel and Kelvin, enabling them to live and learn despite their severe disability.

Please give what you can now to support the needy like Daniel and Kelvin.

Dear Red Cross Supporters,

I am posting this appeal online to seek support for our service. With your support, we could definitely serve the community even better in the coming year.

Your gift could provide essential equipments to our special school students to learn efficiently and happily in a safe environment. We hope to reach the target of HK$2.1 million so that we can maintain all our life-saving and community care services just like to the students with disability that I am going to mention to you here.

Being the unfortunate minority, cerebral palsy patients like Daniel and Kelvin especially need help from the society. Special schools of Hong Kong Red Cross are particularly designed for students with severe physical and multiple disabilities. Our schools provide them a suitable learning environment as well as a place for rehabilitation.

Picking up a book to read might be an easy task for you, it is unfortunately not the case for 15-year-old Daniel for cerebral palsy has impaired his walking ability and cramps in his right hand. He needs to position the book rightly on a desk before he can turn over pages. Inappropriate height of the desk will strain his trunk and back, which will badly affect his sitting posture and tire his waist and back muscles. If situation persists, it will cause scoliosis (backbone bend sideway), affecting the normal functioning of the lungs. We therefore cannot afford to neglect the severity of the problem.

Daniel enjoys reading at a rightly adjusted desk.

Daniel, started boarding at Hong Kong Red Cross John F. Kennedy Centre when he was six. As he cannot coordinate his feet and hands well, extra efforts is needed for his study. A height adjustable desk can aid him to stand up, enabling him to learn in a more comfortable environment.

Height of these specially-designed adjustable desks can be manually altered to fit for wheelchair users and students with multi-disabilities. It helps students to eliminate the undue impact of improper sitting posture.

Daniel enjoys reading at the desk. Irrespective of his limited physical strength and body mobility, Daniel reads almost every day where history books and detective stories are his favorites. Don’t belittle him because of his physical disabilities for what Daniel knows is no lesser than an ordinary person and his attitude is very optimistic too.

Therapist adjusting height of the desk for Daniel to ensure proper and healthy posture.

"Thanks to all donors who support Red Cross!" Daniel expressing his gratitude to people who have helped him. Most of the two hundred students studying at John F. Kennedy Centre are like Daniel need to use adjustable desks. However, we have limited number of these desks and we therefore desperately need your gift such that Daniel and other equally hard-working students can continue their assiduous studies.

Please click to send a donation of $500. You could bring hope to these industrious students. Your donation to HKRC will hasten the installation of special computer and equipment for special needs students with normal intelligence like Kelvin, and more other vulnerable with different needs.

Now a primary 1 student at the Hong Kong Red Cross Princess Alexandra School, Kelvin is another kid with normal intelligence who is equally keen on self-improvement.

"I want to be a policeman for I want to catch villains," this is the wish of Kelvin. Unfortunately, cerebral palsy has damaged the proper functioning of his eyes and the impaired eyesight has seriously affected his learning progress, albeit his normal intelligence.

Eyesight damaged by cerebral palsy, Kelvin can only read with his left eye.

At 8, Kelvin is as energetic as other kids. However, he finds reading tremendously challenging for cerebral palsy has damaged his eyes to the extent that he can only see and read by his left eye. Worse still, he could not read every line faultlessly as he would always miss reading a few words in a sentence, hence creating difficulties to his writing too.

Yet, Kelvin is fond of learning. While there is still no medical breakthrough that can cure his visual problem, an Occupational Therapist at his school found that an eye-gaze computer access system can help Kelvin improve his eyesight. With repeated training, Kelvin can now make big progresses and can write his name with ease. This advancement in assistive and rehabilitation technologies can allow students to use their eyeballs to control the mouse for better eye-tracking ability thus more accurate text reading.

Kelvin's learning is greatly affected by his visual disability.

Nevertheless, since Kelvin uses this computer in his rehabilitation process, not only has his visual and communication ability improved, but also his self-confidence strengthened.

This computer can act as a communication tool for students with cerebral palsy. However, the shortage of equipment in our school has been hindering these special-needs students from learning and development.

Please send what you can now to help students with severe physical disabilities to continue their study like Kelvin and Daniel?

Your donation will also help safeguard our youth service, like the HIV/AIDS Peer Education Programme and Re-construction of Healthy Life Style for the Psychotropic Substance Abusers (RHLSPSA) Programme. HIV/AIDS Peer Education Programme is to disseminate the correct message across and eradicate biases toward AIDS patients through peer group education. The service recipients of RHLSPSA are those young people who have record of psychiatric drugs abuse. Through different kinds of Red Cross activities, it helps young participants to expand their social network. By the guidance of the mentor, encourages the participant to re-establish a healthy life style.

Your gift of $500 could ensure that we could provide health education among youth and purchase new equipment and facilities for the special-needs students as well as in supporting our humanitarian services.

Our voluntary workers and staff have been devoted to serving the public. This is our unswerving commitment. What we need more is the kind donation from people like you to enable us to provide services to meet different needs of the community.

Please send $500 or whatever you can manage now. An exceptional gift of $1,000 would be a wonderful gesture to help us meet the need of disabled children and the other vulnerable in our community.

Please make your donation now online or download the donation form and send it to the address marked on the form. The sooner you get it back to me the sooner we will be able to raise the $2.1 million for all our services to improve lives that are so much reliant on voluntary donations.

I finish by offering my very grateful thanks to you for taking the time to read my appeal .