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´Mooncakes´ Feature On Therapeutic Menu For People Recovering From Psychiatric Illness

Updated: September 12, 2007 05:00 PM GMT
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As the Mid-Autumn Festival approaches, a Catholic social-service organization for the second time is offering "mooncakes" made by people recovering from psychiatric illness.

Chinese people celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, or Moon Festival, on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, which falls on Sept. 25 this year. Eating "mooncakes," pastries filled with mashed lotus seeds and salted duck-egg yolks, is a distinctive feature of the full-moon festival.

La Vie (life) Bakery does not engage in heavy promotion, nor does it produce a great variety of mooncakes like commercial bakeries. Instead, its bakers and patient-apprentices hope customers will "taste" the enthusiasm and hard work that go into making the treats.

The Caritas Jockey Club Lai King Rehabilitation Centre, which provides vocational training and counseling service for recovering psychiatric patients and mentally challenged persons, set up the bakery in 2004.

Lo Chi-fai, acting workshop manager at the Caritas rehabilitation center, told UCA News on Sept. 1 that they hope to attract and impress consumers with patient-apprentices´ effort in producing baked goods.

Kwok Fung-ming, one of the two bakers in charge of daily operations at La Vie, said he has divided the mooncake production process into three sections to make it easier for the apprentices. "If someone has difficulty rolling the dough, I will arrange for her or him to carry out other duties such as measuring the stuffing or packaging," he explained.

Kwok worked for a large bakery chain before joining La Vie two years ago. "I used to work 14 hours a day. After my father died, I began to treasure my family, and my mother encouraged me to work here," which provides a shorter regular working hours, he said. The bakery operates year-round.

His initial experience working with recovering psychiatric patients was frustrating. "It was hard to make them understand what I taught," Kwok recalled. But after establishing mutual trust, he now experiences "greater joy from work than before."

The most important thing, he said, is to motivate the workers by "praising them often, giving them advice and appreciating their strength."

They just "lack self-confidence and have a weaker memory," Kwok added. "Their attitude is much better than the other apprentices in the job market, and they are usually not lazy."

Lo said the bakery currently has seven patient-apprentices, men and women, who measure ingredients, make the dough and stuffing, and work on packaging, transportation and other processes.

Not every patient-apprentice is up to the demands of the job, he observed, pointing out that since early this year, more than 20 recovering patients have applied to be apprentices but only a handful have lasted.

One of them is Wong Wing-tong, who lives in a home for recovering patients and commutes to the bakery on weekdays.

Wearing a white kitchen uniform, he told UCA News he likes this job. "I am responsible for making the dough and measuring stuffing," he said. "I don´t think the work is hard. I love learning how to bake mooncakes and bread."

Last year, La Vie sold nearly 800 boxes of mooncakes in one month, grossing almost HK$70,000 (about US$9,000). Lo expects this year´s sales to rise. "We publicized earlier, in July, and have received more than HK$30,000 worth of orders already," he noted, adding that more orders usually come in the last week before the festival. "If we succeed," he said, "we can expand the business next year and hire more workers."

Besides traditional-style mooncakes with lotus seed paste and two egg yolks, and a low-sugar version, La Vie also offers "mini green-tea and lotus-seed paste" mooncakes. Their customers include schools and homes for the disabled and elderly in the vicinity, as well as employees of Caritas-Hong Kong, the Catholic diocese´s social-service organization.

Hong Kong government statistics for 2000 counted about 55,000 citizens with varying degrees of mental illness. The rehabilitation sector, however, estimates as many as 100,000 patients.

END

(Accompanying photos available at here)

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