Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
Yang Qi, a 13-year-old boy, lives in a small flat in Hong Kong with his parents. He has spent years playing on a piano that takes up space in front of his kitchen and bathroom doors.
He is one of the students preparing for a charity concert at the Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui. The concert aims to raise money to fight poverty, including by supporting children who don’t have the resources to follow their interests.
Sze Lai-shan, who is the deputy director of the Society for Community Organisation (SoCO), said the concert wanted to give kids from low-income families a chance to show their talents on a real stage.
SoCO is one of the city’s largest concern groups for the underprivileged and the event’s organiser. It said that more than 200,000 children in Hong Kong were potentially living in poverty.
It also estimated that about 50,000 Hongkongers under the age of 18 lived in subdivided flats.
Many of these children lacked the resources to develop their hobbies and potential, and had to cut back on daily food expenses to afford short-term classes or take part in free charity programmes, the concern group said.
