Who Said That...

At age 22, Jackie Pullinger wanted to become a missionary, but no society would take her on. So she went on her own. It was 1966 and she gathered up all the money she had and bought a one-way ticket.

With a dream and a sense of adventure, she caught a ship from France which stopped at many ports. She prayed and asked God at which port she should get off . She eventually disembarked in Hong Kong.

Jackie concerned about Kowloon’s Walled City - called the City of Darkness. She found work as a primary school teacher in the Kowloon Walled City, which in the 1960s was not policed and consequently had become one of the world's largest opium producing centres ran by Chinese criminal Triad gangs.

Outside her primary school job, where she taught music, Jackie started approaching people in the Walled City to say that Jesus loved them. Most of the people she talked to were either politely condescending or just amused.

Then Jackie set up a small youth club. Many of the boys who came to it were members of the Triad gangs. To begin with, the people of the Walled City were sceptical of her – missionaries came with lots of money and nice clothes and preached and helped for a while before going home to the West. Many people simply couldn’t believe that Jackie had no money and wasn’t going to go away.

Eventually, she gained the trust of the young men, and they began to believe that she was there to stay, and that she meant what she said – that she really did care for them. She began to see the boys becoming Christians one by one. Many of them were addicts. Jackie’s efforts to show and tell the love of Jesus eventually had an amazing degree of success.

Jackie opened a home for those who needed help and was soon inundated with pleas for help and a place to stay. As Jackie’s work grew, she found herself able to open a second house. By the time a third home was needed, Jackie, with the help of a couple of American missionaries, set up the St Stephen’s Society in 1981, which continues its work in Hong Kong and south-east Asia today. It provides rehabilitation homes for recovering drug addicts, prostitutes, and gang members. By December 2007 it had grown and was providing homes for 200 people.

The society has become one of the most successful drug rehabilitation programmes in the world, rescuing hundreds of young people from a life of misery on the streets.