The Hong Kong banker who gave up his career to facilitate release of abductees in Afghanistan and help victims of Syrian civil war
Frontline Red Cross worker Jason Yip has helped victims of Sichuan’s earthquake and the wars in Afghanistan and Syria. He explains why it’s hard to get used to Hong Kong each time he returns from the field
Mission impossible The first time I travelled overseas was for an internship in Kenya, working on a microcredit project in the slums in Nairobi. I was 21. I come from a very ordinary Hong Kong family, my parents didn’t even finish high school. But they’d tried their best to provide everything I needed to enter the University of Hong Kong.
At the youth centre I was working with, the mothers would come with their kids and some of them were infected with HIV or had a sister or brother who had died already. There was one child, about four or five, called Michael. He’d hang out with me almost every day at the slum, holding onto my shirt. When I was leaving Kenya he said, “Jason, one day I will save enough money to come to Hong Kong to visit you.” I knew it was a mission impossible for him. It had me thinking, “How can the world be like this?”
Working in an investment bank can make you blind – you just see your e-mail, your salary, your clients – but I tried my best to stay connected to society
Finding the front line My parents wanted me to follow a typical path. I studied business and started working at an investment bank. Working in an investment bank can make you blind – you just see your e-mail, your salary, your clients – but I tried my best to stay connected to society. I volunteered for the Hong Kong Correctional Services, working mainly in the juvenile prison. A lot of people think prison is prison. But how can we help a juvenile to become a social asset again? We have to offer opportunities for them to rebuild their lives.
Unfortunately, our education system in Hong Kong may have killed all the interests of young people. So, we came up with some classes. A lot of the youths were keen on Japanese animation, so I offered free Japanese lessons in the prison. After half a year I went back and some of the kids sang me a song that I’d taught them, and were looking forward to starting a new chapter in life.
I resigned after working in the bank for four years and went to Japan, in 2008, to study international relations at Waseda University. There I came across the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) for the first time. I thought, “Wow, this organisation is really the one on the front line. This is the sector that not many people would dare to go to. And those victims are exactly the ones in the most extreme situations.”
