Welcome to BOGA website

Message from the President
LAM Lai-yee, Aalim

It’s my pleasure to welcome all of you in tonight’s event – the BOGA 2009 Annual General Meeting and 81st Dinner. Do you still have the 80th Anniversary Brooch with you? We gave out as souvenir to all participants which included members, old girls, friends and current girls in various events or activities in the past one year. 80 years is not an easy way to walk through. Keep the brooch! This showed how you shared the joy of celebrating the anniversary and how you supported BOGA.

We continued to receive many young members last year and to take a closer connection with the alma mater. The 2008 BOGA Mentorship Programme marked another excellent work done. A record breaking of members from all walks of life joined as mentors and so do the majority of S6 students joined as mentees. The feedback from both mentors and mentees were encouraging thus motivated us to keep the Programme most effective in the coming future. I urge you to read through their parts in this booklet to share their valuable awards.

This year marks an important time-line towards 2010 by which BPS will celebrate her 120th Anniversary. We have started working closely with our alma mater and BOG Foundation to prepare all sorts of events/projects to spot that important date on 20 November 2010. In our newsletters, we kept you informed of all news or progress reports just to remind you that significant date. As important also, BOGA will attain her 82 years of history in 2010 which is also worth memorizing. There will be a 120Year Book coming up near to June 2010. In a few pages of words, BOGA will tell everybody how was she on the rise.

Without delay, please inform all your classmates, no matter they are now in Hong Kong or overseas, the Celebrative Dinner on 20 November 2010.

Once again, my heartfelt thanks to you all in supporting BOGA.

Best wishes and good health.

Message from the Principal
Wendy HO

It gives me great pleasure to celebrate with the BOGA yet another year of outstanding achievement.

All along, the BOGA has been the school’s closest partner and friend.  And after collaborating with them in various projects, I could genuinely appreciate their total devotion, team spirit and strong allegiance to their mother school. I am truly thankful that whatever endeavor BPS initiates, the BOGA will always be standing by our side and lending us a hand.

When I count my blessings, I would never forget all the friendly smiles and assuring words from old girls whom I met at the inauguration ceremony of the Mentorship Programme. Not only did they make me feel welcomed and accepted for the first time, but they were also telling me that the school is moving in a direction that they would approve of. When I told them that we would need speakers from various fields for our Careers Expo in January, all of them responded enthusiastically. They didn’t know how grateful I was when they immediately handed me their business cards and told me, “Call me any time you need me.”  Such consoling words would touch our hearts and linger there for a long, long time.

It was only after the Careers Expo that I realized how powerful and precious the old girls could be in helping the school move forward along its course. There were fifteen professions that students had chosen, but given our limited connections, neither myself nor the careers teachers could get the right people to come all on one day. Our biggest headache was speakers from the media – TV anchors, movie directors, actresses, TV drama producers etc. Not knowing any film stars and TV artists, how could I pull the right strings?

Then someone connected me to Canny Leung, who is directly involved with entertainment business. With her social and professional ties, Canny managed to get us top speakers from multifarious professions including media, make-up, interior design etc. The earnestness and sincerity I would feel from her telephone calls, together with the immense support from her assistant, could only convince me that she was an angel from heaven!

But then God did not just send her alone. While I was busy making endless phone calls to friends and acquaintances, I suddenly remembered Silvia Lam, whom I met briefly at a BOGF dinner. I must say that I liked her the moment I saw her. Having worked for Cathay Pacific for years as an air-stewardess and eventually cabin manager, Silvia is the best person to introduce the job. And, guess what? When I rang her up, she responded most enthusiastically. I was all the more touched when she kindly offered to find the other speakers for me, which helped to put the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in place.

I must take this opportunity to thank all the old girls who had helped to make the Careers Expo such a great success. Other than Canny and Silvia, I am most indebted to Venus Choy, Yeung Long-yan, Karen Wong, Phillis Loh and Sincere Chiu, who all excel in their own fields but are kind enough to squeeze time out of their busy schedule simply out of their love for their alma mater.

Actually, I have a lot more to thank Venus Choy for. First, she impressed me as a most loving and dedicated mentor. In the first meeting, she won the trust and admiration of her mentee, who was then caught in the crossroads in choosing the course of study to pursue in University. Venus analyzed the situation with her, laid the options before her and gave her timely advice after a series of casual meetings. She took her out for dinner, got concert tickets for her, invited her to her new house – and even “adopted” her friend whose mentor was not present in the first meeting. Eventually they got on so well that the girls couldn’t help marveling what a “super nice” mentor they were fortunate enough to have. If you asked me to nominate a “model mentor”, I would definitely cast my vote for
Venus.

I must also mention another beautiful thing that Venus brought to BPS girls – the art of ceramics. As an art lover and amateur potter, she was anxious to share the joy of ceramics with our girls. How could you expect the in-house lawyer of the Hospital Authority to conduct ceramics classes at school hours? Yes, you guess it right. She brought along her best friend, Philip Lam, who has a craze for pottery making and is kind enough to offer free ceramics classes for our girls. If you happen to drop by the Art Room on Saturday mornings or during Life-wide Learning lessons, you’ll see a small group of 5-6 girls working with clay, their faces brimming with excitement and anticipation.  They are the lucky few who have signed up for the ceramics classes taught by Mr. Philip Lam, occasionally joined by Venus. Not only that, seeing that the set-up of the Art Room could not sustain the further development of ceramics as an interest club, they generously donated equipment and materials, such as wheels, clay and glaze, and carried them all the way to school. How could we thank them enough for what they did for our girls?

In the coming year, we will be celebrating our 120th School Anniversary. Take a look at the following schedule and mark 20.11.2010 in your diary because it is the date of our Anniversary Dinner and the official launch of the 120 Year Book.

We have recently embarked on a very meaningful and exciting programme sponsored by the Hong Kong Music Exchange Foundation. Through Silvia Lam, we were introduced to Mr. Gordon Siu (蕭烱柱先生), former Secretary for Planning, Environment and Lands, who works for the Foundation on a voluntary basis. Moved by the talent and dedication of our girls, Mr. Siu managed to convince the Foundation to sponsor the exchange tours of our Chinese Orchestra and Symphonic Orchestra to Singapore and Malaysia in December 2009 and January 2010. This is an unusual practice because the Foundation normally only sponsors underprivileged schools of lower banding. Since the Foundation is covering part of the cost, the rest would have to be raised by ourselves. Again, my heartfelt appreciation goes to Silvia Lam and her husband, Mr. Linus Cheung (張永霖先生), who managed to raise a handsome sum for the purpose. Other than that, the school is organizing a concert on 13 July to subsidize needy students as well as to set up a Music Fund to promote music education such as organizing master classes, ensemble groups, conducting classes, music camps, exchange programmes and to replace/purchase musical instruments.

For those of you who grew up with the choir and orchestra, would you please contribute to the Music Fund by making a donation or buying concert tickets?

Yes, I could go on for hours because there are so many wonderful stories of old girls giving the school a hand when we need it most. To some people, what they do may look trivial, like donating precious back issues of National Geographic to the Form Six Library, offering to help at careers talks; giving away bulks of free concert tickets to our girls and so on. But it is exactly such small acts of kindness that could warm our hearts and assure us that we are not alone.

In the past two years, I feel lucky to have made some trusting friends through working with old girls. There is so much to learn from them – their drive, their commitment, their comradeship and their love for BPS. This is something that I would cherish and remember for a long time.