Celebrating Lunar New Year with kids and goats

The Year of the Sheep is coming. To give Lunar New Year greetings to our fellow citizens, my wife and I have made a video, which naturally has sheep as its theme. Filmmakers always say that animals and children are the most difficult subjects to film. We embraced the challenge this year and found some goats and 10 children to star in our video.

Instead of being professional actors, these 10 children were referred by a non-profit organisation that provides speech therapy for children from grass-roots families. Since its establishment in 2004, the organisation has served more than 2,200 children with speech and communication problems and their families, mainly using funds generated from the Belgian chocolate shops and restaurants operated by a social enterprise. All revenues from these shops and restaurants, after deducting the necessary expenses, are used to support this charitable organisation.

Shooting the video was more than work. It was fun. I specially arranged these children and their parents to visit Government House. The children watered the crops in the farm and pulled Chinese white radishes out of the ground with us, and made "fai chun", or Lunar New Year banners, together. While the children were having fun, the activities were captured on video. They also visited a farm in the New Territories on another day and had close contact with some goats. Although I was not there on that day, I learnt from the crew that the children, many of them seeing goats for the first time, were so excited that they didn't need to act at all.

When meeting the children at Government House, my wife and I did not notice any signs of speech and communication problems. They spoke clearly and said their lines with perfect pronunciation. They are also members of a choir that has performed on different occasions with the support of the Partnership Fund for the Disadvantaged to promote the importance of speech therapy. According to the person in charge of the organisation, the demand for speech therapy in Hong Kong is very high and there are more than 100 children on the organisation's waiting list. My wife and I are deeply impressed by the selfless dedication of the people operating the social enterprise, which has helped these children achieve remarkable progress over a short period of time. We hope that this spirit of tolerance and mutual help will spread far and wide so that the disadvantaged in our community can get assistance and everyone in Hong Kong can have a warm and joyful Lunar New Year.

My wife and I showed the children around Government House before shooting. They were curious about the beetroots grown by me.		We pulled Chinese white radishes out of the ground together. The children were thrilled and one even tried to get a piggyback ride on me. Work had never been so much fun.
The Lunar New Year banners shown in the video were made by the children themselves.		The children were excited at having close contact with goats in a farm.

February 18, 2015