Hong Kong has long been irresistible to Christian missionaries bent on converting the heathen. Less fortunately, it has also been a center of drug addiction: first opium and now heroin have always been in generous supply.

Until recently, however, the addicts benefited little from the religious zeal that has historically surrounded them. Now two lay Episcopal missionaries from California, Rich and Jean Willans, have brought modest hope to the army of Crown Colony junkies.

They are a hapless lot. "They come here practically naked," says Jean. "They've usually pawned everything to maintain their habit, and sometimes they don't even have underwear. Their teeth are all ruined, too."

The Willans employ neither Western medicine nor acupuncture to ease Oriental addicts through the ordeal of withdrawal and subsequent abstinence from drugs. Their revolutionary "cure": acceptance of Christ formalized in an experience called "Baptism in the Holy Spirit," after which the communicant can "speak in tongues."

Speaking in tongues—the spontaneous, sometimes convulsive utterance of religious credos in a language unfamiliar to the speaker—dates from the first century and is more common these days to Pentecostal faiths than their high-church brethren. Yet Jean Willans, 50, first learned it from an Episcopalian minister in her hometown of Van Nuys. Her own speaking, she claims, has been understood by people who know Spanish and New Testament Greek, neither of which languages she can ordinarily speak.

Equally important to the Willans' success has been their knack of "praying in" money. "We thought God wanted you to have apartments to stay in," Jean explains to her junkie flock. "So we prayed, and then one foreigner here said he felt God wanted him to pay our $300-a-month rent. Once we needed a hundred dollars desperately for food. I told the boys to pray that morning, but didn't mention our shortage. That same evening a man who had never given anything like that amount before squeezed a hundred-dollar bill into my hand as he entered the apartment."

Such windfalls, plus the bulk of Rick's income as management consultant for a major Hong Kong company, provide the $3,600 needed each month for five apartments housing 20 former addicts. They range in age from 23 to 58, and most have worked in the Mafia-like "Triad Societies," vicious dope gangs which dominate Hong Kong crime. (Most addicts sniff, not shoot, heroin—a practice known locally as "chasing the dragon.")
 Surprisingly, the Willans have no interest in expanding their work outside the colony. "This is not primarily a drug cure," explains Jean. "We are mainly interested in these people knowing Jesus Christ as a person." Rick, 32, adds: "We advise them to pray each day in tongues. If they do this they are internally at peace—and it shows. Otherwise these boys are the most disturbed people I've ever come across."

As she substitutes Christian faith for junkie pipe dreams, Jean recalls a vision of her own. "In 1967 I dreamt that my husband and daughter [who is now living in England] were going to travel to the Orient. So far everything has come true." She adds with a quick smile: "But I certainly never dreamt I'd become a housemother to 20 drug addicts."