In Nov. 2006, Dr. Michael Woolnough of Richmond Sunset Club visited Angkor Hospital for Children in Siem Reap, Angkor Cambodia. After meeting the hospital CEO, he realized the potential for sending a container of supplies using the RWHN organization.

The succeeding CEO, David Shoemaker (aWinnipegger), then introduced Mrs. Nina Cassils, a tireless fundraiser for community projects in South East Asia. The container initiative then expanded to include a neighbouring (adult) hospital in need, three community centers in Cambodia for street children, and an adult training centre in Phnom Pen for adults disabled by landmines.

Various Vancouver hospitals and school groups were approached and much needed used and new items were rapidly collected. These included: three diagnostic ultrasound machines (delivered from Calgary), various medical and surgical supplies, including three operating tables; and, large donations of hygiene products, carpentry and gardening tools, toys and many computers.

RWHN and Richmond Sunset Club volunteers loaded the goods on 8th December and the container arrived in early January 2008 in Cambodia, where a team was waiting.

Clearance and distribution followed flawlessly, thanks to careful planning and avoiding difficulties with customs. The response from Cambodia has been tremendous.
Everything sent is being well used in the different centres and news came that three life-saving surgeries were performed in the first week, using the donated operating room tables.

Well done, RWHN, Richmond Sunset Club, and special thanks to Mrs. Cassils!

- Dr. Michael Woolnough

www.rotary5040.org D5040 NEWSLETTER – Mar 2008 PAGE 12

Nina and John share their passion for helping to bring aid to S.E. Asia — Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar (Burma). They help by supplying medical, educational and nutritional basic necessities to poor communities as well as connecting people.

John Cassils had just pulled out his video camera in a village in northern Laos in 1999 when he was invited into a hut to see a shaman dancing.

John, his wife Nina and four friends had been enjoying a 10 day trip by riverboat and four wheeled drive in the mountainous area near the Chinese border. They’d asked their driver to drop them off outside the village and walked in separately with no translator, although one friend who was in the Vietnam War spoke Lao.

A couple of heaps under a blanket in the corner of the hut soon drew John’s attention. They were the still figures of two young boys. John, a former family doctor, examined the three and four year old boys and found they were nearly dead from malnutrition. One child had lost 70 per cent of his vision and the other couldn’t stand because he had lost muscle strength.

The group of six friends arranged for the boys to go to the hospital in Laos’ old capital, Luang Prabang, that evening. They paid for a month’s care for the children. “The one fellow got all his vision back and the other child was fine, too,” John says.

The gesture was one of many the Kitsilano couple has made to help children in Southeast Asia since they got involved with an orphanage in Thailand in 1998.

In 2008, Nina filled a 40foot container sponsored by a Richmond Rotary club with three four year old ultrasound machines from a private clinic in Calgary; the latest video
laryngoscope, worth $10,000, donated by a local doctor; tools; bicycles and more for the Angkor Hospital for Children in Siem Reap, Cambodia. They also raised $2.5 million for a nearby satellite hospital and $100,000 for a vocational centre. Now they’re focused on supporting Medical Action Myanmar, which spun off from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).

The Cassils don’t donate to large international organizations with significant overheads. Instead, they help fledgling grassroots organizations develop into strong, sustainable, accountable agencies. They combine philanthropy with pleasure trips and encourage others interested to do the same.

When large international agencies flailed trying to get aid into Myanmar (formerly Burma) immediately after Cyclone Nargis assaulted the country May 2, 2008, the Cassils nimbly got more than 8,000 pounds of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, food bars and vitamins in through their contacts, with no interference from the country’s government.

While many governments give little aid money to Myanmar because they worry it would only benefit the military government, the Cassils say with the right connections it isn’t hard to ensure aid gets to people. Myanmar and other poverty stricken
Southeast Asian countries are ideal places to give, they say, because
Canadian dollars stretch far.

You can only visit so many temples and pagodas in Southeast Asia before you want to do something meaningful, says a warm and open faced Nina, sitting at the long wooden dining room table in the couple’s spacious Point Grey Road duplex that overlooks English Bay.

The Cassils travelled throughout Southeast Asia in the late 1970s and early 1980s when John was building and renovating commercial properties in Hong Kong and Thailand for Strand Development Corp., which he founded. They pitched tents and slept on people’s porches in small villages and fell in love with the countries’ poor but generous citizens.

In 1997, the couple decided to invest in the children of Southeast Asia. A friend who worked for the United Nations connected them with Thailand’s representative to the UN, who put them in touch with a struggling orphanage.

The Cassils visited the orphanage, met the couple that ran it, saw how happy the children were and provided money for food. “It was easy after that,” says John, a slim, balding man with friendly blue eyes.

They’ve continued helping the orphanage and have since taken on projects in Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia and India.

Their goal is to make sure people have access to clean water, and to support healthcare, nutrition and agriculture. Once children are healthier and families are earning a little money, you can think about school, Nina says.

“You have to build it, you have to stock it and then you have to think of hiring the people,” she adds. “In Laos, we’ve seen so many schools and hospitals sitting empty.”

The Cassils find bright locals who are interested in healthcare and education, arrange for their training and return to their villages. They’ve built up a web of contacts with people who do similar work, and they only support non-proselytizing organizations.

From late November to midMarch, the Cassils returned to Southeast Asia. In December, they were invited to attend the Clinton Global Initiative 2008 Asia meeting in Hong Kong along with the president of Mongolia, exprime minister of Maldives and Chinese actor Jet Li. They visited the west and east deltas in Myanmar to see firsthand how their aid had helped, and before they flew home, they travelled to New York where they received the Best of Friends award from the American non-governmental organization Friends Without A Border for their support of Friends’ Angkor Hospital for Children and their role in mobilizing donations for its satellite hospital.

The childless couple of 33 years has always been adventurous. The no nonsense
man who grew up in a middleclass family in Montreal and the younger, animated woman who grew up in a “modest business family” in Victoria hiked Abbot Pass in Yoho and Banff National Park on their honeymoon.

John started out as a family doctor, then launched a medical educational filmmaking company. Business connections led him into real estate. “I took six months off because we got a couple of very good projects,” he says. “I ended up being in that business for 25 years.”

Nina worked as a real estate agent until John asked her if she would take two years off to focus on Southeast Asia. That was 10 years ago. Now 67, John, who’s meant to be retired but visits his office every day he’s in town, is keen to enjoy the good life. During the Courier’s visit to their Kits home, John tried to convince Nina, who looks much younger than her 55 years, they should take a vacation down south. She told him they needed to be in Asia.

But John admires his wife’s dedication.

“She’s involved in selling eye shades that have been made by hill tribe people to people that have expensive private jets, making bags for people to carry groceries [in] for hill tribe people that are trying to develop a little business to make more money. Nina’s involved in so many of these types of projects,” he says. “She literally is on the Internet three hours a day minimum and usually goes to bed between 12 and 2 in the morning.”

Before the Cassils started their work in Southeast Asia, they donated locally and still do, but it’s their overseas philanthropic work that they’re most passionate about.

In 2005, after years of quietly donating money, Sue and Wieland Wettstein, friends in Calgary, convinced them to register the CW Asia Fund (CW is for Cassils and Wettstein) under the umbrella of Tides Canada, so they and Canadian friends and family who contributed could get tax receipts.

Tides Canada deducts an administrative fee of about 9.5 per cent from contributions going abroad, but CW Asia takes no fees and strives to ensure none are charged when they give money to another organization. “It’s not meant to criticize,” Nina says. “The international NGOs are doing very, very good work. But a few of them are very top heavy.”

Nina serves as the full time, unpaid managing director of CW Asia Fund. Wieland and John typically commit matched funds.

To raise $2.5 million for the satellite hospital, John prepared and circulated an information booklet. He and Wieland committed 15 per cent over five years to build, furnish, equip and staff the satellite hospital for five years. An Australian family that had just started a foundation and was looking for a place to contribute received their brochure, visited the Angkor Hospital for Children and contributed $1.85 million or 75 per
cent of the cost.

When friends take trips to Southeast Asia, the Cassils encourage them to pack medical supplies and deliver them to a hospital or orphanage. Wieland committed 15 per cent over five years to build, furnish, equip and staff the satellite hospital for five years. An Australian family that had just started a foundation and was looking for a place to contribute received their brochure, visited the Angkor Hospital for Children and contributed $1.85 million or 75 per cent of the cost.

When friends take trips to Southeast Asia, the Cassils encourage them to pack medical supplies and deliver them to a hospital or orphanage.

It wasn’t until Cyclone Nargis hit that they asked friends to donate money.

They received clearance from the Canadian government to provide assistance in Myanmar and secured $444,000 in CIDA matching funds, raising a total of $1.2 million between Canada, the United States and United Kingdom. That doesn’t include the more than $300,000 they collected in medical aid.

Top people they know at Jamieson Laboratories and Nature’s Path provided them with vitamins, and they made successful cold calls to Rexall Drugs, Air Canada and Cathay Pacific, which air freighted the goods free of charge. “Everything that we sent was exactly what they needed,” Nina says. “A Canadian organization sent hundreds of tents over, [but] they couldn’t even use them because most of the delta was a foot deep in water.”

Dr. Frank Smithuis, a former director for Medecins Sans Frontieres who has served Myanmar’s poor for more than 15 years, helped them get supplies to the people.

Now the Cassils are providing food security to the Myanmarese who had their children, homes and livelihoods swept away by the largest tropical storm to ever strike the country.

Last December, the Cassils started a $5 for 5 campaign for Myanmar on the Give Meaning website$ 5 feeds five families for five days. The $10,500 they raised helped set up community kitchens in four villages. Instead of talking to counsellors, villagers who’ve lost family members cook, eat and clean up together, to foster a sense of community and heal.

They’re starting a new Give Meaning campaign for Myanmar called Give Five to provide boats, fish traps, garden and carpentry tools and eyeglasses. They’re also helping Medical Action Myanmar, which Smithuis and Medecins Sans Frontieres started June 1. The Australian ambassador to Myanmar and another couple recommended Smithuis’ work to the Cassils. His clinics feed malnourished children, treat people with
tuberculosis and HIV and provide women with contraceptives and prenatal care. The Cassils made a video of one of his clinics, which they use to inspire others to support it.

“Donors want to know who they pay and what is done with their money. John and Nina bring the donors and the patients closer together,” the Dutchborn Smithuis said in an email from Yangon (Rangoon). “They see the activities and talk about it with potential donors. That is very powerful.”

He says more support is needed for Myanmar’s people from donors big and small. Myanmar receives less than $3 per person per year in overseas development assistance, less than any of the 50 poorest countries. By comparison, Laos receives $63 per person.

“The low level of aid results in unnecessary suffering and the deaths of tens of thousands of people each year,” Smithuis says. “I have worked for more than 15 years in Myanmar and I can guarantee you that it is very possible to implement aid programs that directly benefit the people of Myanmar and save thousands of innocent lives.”

Nina believes celebrities have focused attention on African countries in need of aid while impoverished countries in Southeast Asia have been overlooked.

Leanne Chan, who helped with CW Asia’s $5 for 5 campaign, doesn’t think that’s necessarily true. Chan, who founded the Lending for Africa Foundation in 1995 and left it when it moved in a different direction, believes it’s difficult to compare countries and continents.

On the phone from Germany, Chan says the government of Myanmar makes it difficult for others to help the Myanmarese because of the way it runs the country. “If you can’t get clear information and stats back, then it’s very hard to do development work, and I found the same thing within Africa,” she says.

Chan calls the Cassils’ work honest and altruistic. “They want to help people, and they can do it on a small level. You give $5 and the $5 goes to the people you see in those pictures,” she says. “But when you get into that larger realm and you’re trying to do social development for an entire country, it gets very blurry.”

Even with George Clooney speaking from internationally displaced peoples’ camps in Sudan, that region doesn’t get adequate attention from western countries, she says.

Chan says John and Nina, who she met socially eight years ago, are unique because of how involved they get in each project and how much they achieve. “If you were to look at all the milestones and successful projects that they’re managing, it’s more than you can see on most large charitable websites,” she says.

You can see for yourself at www.cwasiafund.org. “More people should do what they do,” she adds.

But couldn’t the Cassils sell their well situated home and give the poor even more? They could, John agrees, but he believes how much one gives shouldn’t be the focus.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s not a matter of how much people give of what they’ve got,” he says. “It’s if they give.”

One of my favourite books about Italy is not what you would expect. Far from the glossy coffee table publications that show us the shiny veneer of cobbled streets winding through Medieval towns, towering Renaissance Cathedrals or pink and yellow seaside villages tumbling down a hillside into the Mediterranean, The dark heart of Italy by Tobias Jones digs beneath the surface to reveal a far more disturbing picture of political polarization, endemic corruption and the cosy stranglehold of the Casa Nostra and the Catholic Church. It is a must read for anyone who wants to truly understand what they are seeing when they visit this complex land.

Most people travel with their ‘eyes wide shut’ so I admire people who dig behind the scenes when they travel – the only drawback is that you may not always like what you see. My tale today is about three such pilgrims who not only travel off the beaten path, didn’t like what they saw, but returned to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!  

For Dr. John and Nina Cassils, the journey began over 10 years ago while visiting some of their favorite destinations in Asia, mainly Cambodia, Myanmar and rural Thailand, not as tourists but as explorers and adventurers penetrating so deep into the heartland that they encountered villages that had not seen Westerners since WW11. They fell in love with the land, they fell in love with the people. It began with a random act of kindness.

On one of their travels they came across 2 young children who were sick. Trained as a doctor, John recognized that they were dying. He took them to hospital immediately, paid for their medical treatment for a month and they survived.

From then on they have always travelled with bags of medicine, gifts of books (bi-lingual dictionaries) and donations of vitamins. Their philanthropy expanded in an adhoc way. They saw a need, they filled it.

Occasionally they supported local charities with cash donations designated for specific purposes but generally their contributions were direct and tangible, like building a thatch house for a homeless family, stocking a library with books in local languages, directly paying the annual salaries of teachers, paying to train 20 young women as nurses, providing wells of clean water, painting hospitals and hauling donations like computers in their luggage. Over the years they have purchased everything from mattresses and canoes to ultra-sound and X-ray machines.

While the Cassils’ have never kept track of their spending, they estimate a figure in the range of $500,000 over a ten year period. Why have they done it? “It’s FUN” bubbles Nina, a force of nature, “the gratification is SO immediate, it’s addictive.”

It’s not only addictive it’s contagious. Their enthusiasm and commitment has infected many of their friends and associates so that 3 years ago, with friends Sue and Wieland Wettstein, they formalized their work under the Cassils Wettstein Asia Fund (visit www.cwasiafund.org) in oder to be able to provide tax receipts for the increasing number of donations they were receiving. Since then over $4.5 million has been raised and used to help build childrens shelters, orphanages, hospital,schools and libraries and to fund community development, health and education initiatives as well as provide refeif for the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. 

In this village 185 of the 187 houses were destroyed by the cyclone and a horrifying number of children died. Nina tells that the villagers had cut down all the mangrove forests along the rivers edge to make room for rice farming and village expansion. Now they realize the removal of the mangrove forest left them exposed to the natural disasters of the region as the mangrove forest acts as a break and reduces the impact and severity of the water surges.  Now they are replanting the mangrove trees.

This map from their webpage gives an indication of the extent of their projects and involvement in the region. While their scope has expanded with increased funds their methods have remained the same. “Grass roots” says Nina, “thats how we like to be.” Having built a network of trusted friends and partners throughout the region, as well as donors back home, their fund is able to circumvent the cumbersome bureaucracies and occasional corruption that plagues the “Charity business”. Every dollar reaches its destination. That “destination” has been the impoverished children of rural south east Asia. For donations to the Cassils Wettstein Fund go to http://www.cwasiafund.org/contribute.php

Nina Cassil’s visit to Myanmar this Christmas will be her 13th visit to Southeast Asia in eight years. She can’t help it. She and her husband fell in love with that part of the world during their travels and can’t stop going back. But the couple’s most recent visit will also be an arduous journey as they travel by bus and boat to see how money from their CW Asia Fund helped aid those in the path of Cyclone Nargis in May. While large non-governmental organizations struggled to get food and medicine to residents of the Irrawaddy Delta, the Cassils delivered 8,000 pounds of donated medicine with relative ease.

“I don’t know why the international community just feels that they can’t work or do anything because of the government, ” Nina Cassils said. “It’s really not the case.” Governments could have easily partnered with aid agencies, including World Vision and Save the Children, which operate in Myanmar, said Cassils, a 54-year-old resident of Point Grey who talked to the Courier Wednesday on the phone from Hong Kong. Working with aid agencies is exactly what the Cassils did. The Clinton Global Initiative invited the Cassils to Hong Kong to talk to international heads of state, non-government organizations, businesspeople and philanthropists about how they can work together to improve education and public health and tackle problems involving energy and climate change in Asia.

“There’s been so much focus on Africa with all the celebrities, all the rock stars and the actresses and actors and the Gates Foundation and the Clintons…For the last four and five generations money’s been thrown at Africa and it still has not lifted them out of poverty, ” Cassils said. “Twice as many poor people live in Asia.”

The Cassils have done philanthropic work in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. John Cassils, the retired founder of Strand Development Corp., worked in Hong Kong and Thailand in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the couple would take side trips and explore the countryside, making social connections along the way.

John Beeching, a retired Roman Catholic brother from Victoria who now lives in Bangkok, has served as their mentor. Beeching has done development work for 40 years, speaks Burmese and possesses a deep understanding of an array of religions. He teaches Buddhism in Austria and Taoism in Hong Kong.

The Cassils’ work isn’t based on religious belief–they see their efforts as strictly humanitarian. The Cassils registered their fund with the Tides Canada Foundation three years ago at the urging of their friends Sue and Wieland Wettstein from Calgary. The full name of their fund is the Cassils Wettstein Asia Fund. They’ve solicited money from others only since Cyclone Nargis hit. They previously spent their own money combined with generous donations from friends, family and colleagues to help grassroots agencies improve the health and education of children in countries including India, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. The victims of Cyclone Nargis remain in dire straights, with 500,000 families in Myanmar without aid. To focus on helping those families, Cassils and CW Asia volunteer Leanne Chan created the Myanmar $5 for 5 Campaign, which runs until Christmas. Donors can give $5, which feeds five families for a week.

“I’d never want someone to ever think that what they have to give is too little,” said Cassils. “This shows the impact of our currency. The value of our money abroad is so valuable and it can help so many.” Chan hopes those who can’t afford to donate will pass information about the campaign on to five friends. Cassils has packed all kinds of medical equipment for their trip which will take them to Cambodia and Myanmar. She gives items to local groups to disburse when they do outreach. “There’s things that we take for granted,” she said. “The hospital we support in Myanmar has one laryngoscope [to look down throats]. They see 450 patients a day.”

For more information about the Myanmar $5 for 5 Campaign, see www.givemeaning.com

We are launching into the “cyberspace” universe a campaign from now until Christmas to try and feed 500,000 families that still have received no aid from the Cyclone Nargis destruction in Myanmar. The campaign is called 5 for 5. For every $5 you donate, we can feed a family of 5 for 5 days. Thanks to charitable partners who are incurring all administration costs on our behalf, every $1 will be sent into Myanmar to the grassroots agencies working on the ground.

The cyclone destroyed crop fields, rice stocks, and seed and grain storage facilities, as well as damaged fisheries, aquaculture and forestry resources.

• Leanne Chan is a philanthropist who observed the work of the CW Asia Fund for many years. Finally, she approached Nina Cassils for assistance with the 5 For 5 Campaign, saying, “You know, I’ve just got to work with you. You’re way ahead of the curve.” Chan told the Asian Pacific Post: “They don’t have staff, they don’t have overheads, they do everything themselves. And that makes a huge difference.” Among the Fund’s recent achievements, Chan was impressed with Nina’s success in shipping a container load of medical equipment and supplies to Thailand. “And it was all free – the donations and the shipping.”
• Wieland Wettstein told the Asian Pacific Post that of all the CW Asia Fund’s achievements, he is most proud of the satellite hospital for the Angkor Hospital for Children project. The Wettsteins donated 15 per cent of the $2.5 million needed, and the facility is scheduled to be finished by next year. “That is just fantastic,” Wettstein said. “And it’s been pretty satisfying to get that accomplished.”

  About Nina, Wettstein remarked: “She’s a whirlwind and she’s the most amazing connector I’ve ever met. Her mind is always turning and she’s always thinking about how can this person help that person, and she’s good at getting people to achieve her goals. It just blows you away.”

• In an open letter written in May, Brother John Beeching of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, based in Thailand and Myanmar, wrote: “In Thailand the Cassils have helped fund schools for Burmese migrant and refugee children… In Laos they have assisted with funds and medical supplies for clinics in isolated villages… the contribution they have made is making a significant difference in the lives of many disadvantaged people in Myanmar… I can say with all honesty that it has been a privilege to support the work of Dr. John and Nina Cassils.”

To learn more visit www.givemeaning.com

]]> http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/12/a-letter-from-nina-cassils/feed/ 0 http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/11/mavericks-on-a-mission/ http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/11/mavericks-on-a-mission/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:51:19 +0000 cwasiafund http://www.cwasiafund.org/blog/?p=329 By Adrian Mack



Maybe they should call her Cyclone Nina. When she sits down for a chat with the Asian Pacific Post at a Kitsilano diner, Nina Cassils’ first act is to start dispensing gifts, like a hand-woven basket from the Rawang community in Burma-Myanmar’s Kachin State, along with a rapid-fire history lesson of the region. All this while simultaneously gushing over the Madonna concert she’d attended with a bunch of girlfriends the night before at BC Place.

The youthful-looking 54 year-old is warm, open, and super-kinetic. She leaps from topic-to-topic without pause, sometimes tripping over her words in the rush to communicate as much information as she can.
When she empties her bag on the table in front of her, it’s a messy snapshot of the work that Cassils and her husband Dr. John Cassils are currently engaged in – along with their friends Susan and Wieland Wettstein – on behalf of their Cassils Wettstein Asia Fund. The Fund has spent the last 10 years improving the lives of indigent children and families in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma-Myanmar, throwing its energies behind libraries, orphanages, schools, hospitals, and other relief efforts.



To date, over $3 million has been raised in direct aid benefiting hundreds – if not thousands – of children and their impoverished families. There’s a handsome spiro-bound booklet produced for potential donors to a pediatric hospital in Angkor, Cambodia – a “ten-year dream,” in Nina’s words. There’s a brochure about the Moo Baa Dek orphanage in Thailand. “We’ve been with them for 10 years,” she says. “There’s about 150 children here and it’s actually become so large it’s its own village. It’s neat.”

Next to that is a two-page breakdown of the 5 For 5 Campaign, which seeks to raise money for the victims of Cyclone Nargis. Burma-Myanmar was battered by the cyclone in May, effecting 2.4 million people and leaving behind an official death toll close to 300,000, including 150,000 children (although experts suggest the death toll is closer to one million). The 5 For 5 Campaign is Nina’s priority at present. But she confesses with a sigh that her first efforts in the wake of Cyclone Nargis damn near killed her, when the CW Asia Fund snapped into immediate action with its ad-hoc Myanmar Relief campaign. “I was working around the clock from May 8, and it wasn’t until August that I took time off,” she says. “Nobody saw me.” She continues, “We raised over $700,000 and the bulk of the money came from 42 people.” “That is so generous,” she exclaims, shaking her head. “We decided to give it to four organizations because we have an eight year working relationship with them already, and we trust them.” CW Asia Fund directed the funds to Save the Children, AZG/Medecins Sans Frontieres Holland, the Metta Development Foundation, and the MFH & Medical Relief Society. “100 per cent of that money went to Myanmar, without any interference,” she states. “It didn’t get hung up. The UN lost tons of money in conversion rates and things, we didn’t. We know how to do it. We did it quietly, and it’s all been accounted for.”

Essentially, the Cassils and Wettsteins have developed a network of trusted friends and partners across the region – along with a community of donors at home, mostly friends and family – in a successful effort to circumvent the larger, more cumbersome organizations that traffic, as Nina says, in the “charity business.”

“We can do that because we know the area,” she explains. “We’re on the ground there.” Furthermore, the CW Asia Fund doesn’t usually solicit money; it acts as advisers, directing funds to scrupulous organizations and projects. “When you’re small, you can react fast,” she says. “And then if there’s an emergency and somebody has to make a decision, they don’t have to go through a bureaucracy, or a board of directors. But there’s a lot of little organizations, and you tell them what you want them to do with your money and they can get back to you within the week.”

“That’s why we started to rethink how we wanted to give our money to charity,” she continues. “I think that’s one of the reasons we get so many phone calls, and people will ask us, ‘Where are you giving your money?’ Or vice versa. I’ll call someone and say, ‘I hear you’re going to Angkor to see the ruins, would you mind taking some medicine over and dropping it off?’” She laughs, “It’s very, very grass roots.” So grass roots, in fact, that the Cassils travel at least twice a year to Southeast Asia, dropping in on their various projects, and re-igniting a love affair with a part of the world the couple first began visiting when they would travel to Hong Kong and Bangkok on behalf of John’s work in real estate. Nina’s drive to help disadvantaged children, meanwhile, is something that also informs her day-job on the board of directors at Vancouver’s Arts Umbrella. So what is it that compels the Cassils, the Wettsteins, and their friends and family to get involved? “People give for so many different reasons,” Nina answers. “They give because they have more than they need, or they’ve grown up in a family of giving and it’s a part of their culture, or they’re born with it. And some people have just learned that it’s a thing they should be doing, and people care.” With that, Cyclone Nina gathers up her things for a Halloween date with her friends. The remnants of some ice cream, herbal tea, and a couple of beers remain. Naturally, she picked up the tab.

On the web: www.cwasiafund.org

]]> http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/11/mavericks-on-a-mission/feed/ 0 http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/10/an-angel-in-cambodia/ http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/10/an-angel-in-cambodia/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 07:22:43 +0000 cwasiafund http://www.cwasiafund.org/blog/?p=80 Winnipeg Free Press
Winnipeg nurse helps restore a shattered nation
By: Rick Friedlander



SIEM REAP, Cambodia — David Shoemaker, a nurse from Winnipeg, stumbled upon Siem Reap during a volunteer trip to Southeast Asia in January 2000 and decided to return to continue his efforts. He’s still there.

Siem Reap, site of the architectural wonder of the world, Angkor Wat, shows Cambodia’s tentative steps toward economic growth. When I first saw it in 2004, Siem Reap seemed to be another dusty town with a great attraction, slowly emerging in the global tourism market. When I revisited it a year ago, billboards were promoting new shopping malls and cellphones, and hotels were competing with aid groups for real estate.

It has helped that a decade has passed since Pol Pot died quietly in the jungles of northern Cambodia. Brother No. 1 and his radical form of agrarian communism, enforced by the dreaded Khmer Rouge, brought the country to its knees. No one is doing more than Shoemaker to get it back on its feet.

“What has kept me here for so long? Quite simply, it is the people, the doctors, nurses, housekeepers and the rest of the staff at AHC (Angkor Hospital for Children),” Shoemaker said. “I have never experienced a country where the people want so desperately to learn and improve.”

Sheila Anzarut, the wife of a neurologist from Vancouver who has volunteered here since 2007, says of Shoemaker: “David is, without a doubt, the face of Angkor Hospital for Children, for both the staff, the volunteers and for the many visitors and donors who come into contact with him. He is the person who instills us with so much passion for helping.”

And help is so badly needed. For every 1,000 babies born in Cambodia, 22 or more die in their first month and 66 before their first birthday. Another 17 die before their fifth birthday. Poverty is a large part of the problem: More than a third of 14 million Cambodians earn less than 60 cents a day.

Walking with Shoemaker through Angkor Children’s Hospital is a stirring experience. Everyone we pass along the way has a smile or a respectful nod for him. Every morning, he tells me, the emergency room is filled with crowds of children and tired parents. We encounter a Canadian volunteer play therapist, Liz Harrop-Archibald, surrounded by smiling children, cutting out paper crowns and making fish mobiles for them. Their smiles are the reward, I suspect, that keeps humanitarians like Shoemaker Harrop-Archibald able to carry on.

Shoemaker tells me that his first year here there were about 10,000 visits by families to the hospital — about 25 or 30 a day. By 2007, that number had increased to over 100,000 visits — an average of 350-400 children each day. The increase in the number of tourists since I was first here, reported on various websites, is staggering. From approximately 500 in 1985, 600,000 in 2005, and with a predicted 3 million tourists coming by the year 2010, more than half of them visit Siem Reap.

It is hard to believe that the tourism boom — it’s estimated to bring $600 million to Cambodia in 2010 — is actually hurting the survival odds of its children. Beyond the five-star hotels and fancy restaurants, however, tourist dollars have not filtered down to the people who need it most. At first, I was happy to note that there were not as many street children evident this time, as opposed to the vast number of them I saw in 2004. Soon, however, I learn that the absence of street children is due to a local initiative to run them out of town exactly because of the rapid rise in tourism. It is possible that local bureaucrats fear street kids will somehow threaten their ever-growing windfall of tourist currency.

No one in this country is untouched by the horrors of the past. Mention of the Khmer Rouge creates instant discomfort and a change of subject. Many Cambodians endure poor eyesight and still don’t wear glasses because the Pol Pot regime saw them as a sign of education. Wearing them could be fatal. Fear still affects behavior and signs of that are everywhere.

The next day, I accompany Shoemaker on rounds to outpatient houses benefited by the HIV/Homecare Project. He and Cambodian nurse Dim Sophearin load up the AHC truck and we head to the first house, where a couple of HIV-positive children are tending to their baby sibling in a blistering hot bamboo shack. They get a sack with a week’s worth of nutritious food and snacks. The AHC says “under-nutrition represents the single most important risk factor for the health of Cambodian children.” Shoemaker questions them on the state of their health and the condition of the baby, then takes vital signs and records blood pressure, heart rate and weight. The HIV/Homecare Project consists of health assessments, education and counseling. With it comes the calm, natural interaction of Shoemaker, smiling and joking to lighten the atmosphere. He hands the children his stethoscope and shows them how to listen to their heartbeat.

We head back into the truck and drive another kilometer to visit with a young, stable, HIV-positive girl, whose parents died from the virus and who now lives with her grandmother. Shoemaker patiently explains, this time to a grandmother, how to take the medicines and questions the family on any changes in their health. The little girl reacts happily as pictures are taken, with a beautiful, poignant smile. This image contrasts sharply with the sobering fact that every child we visit today is HIV-positive.

“The hospital has done a lot in the last several years but there is still so much more to do,” Shoemaker said. “The biggest health challenge for Cambodia’s poor children is simply better access to the appropriate health-care facilities. With 80 percent of Cambodia’s population living in rural areas, it is often difficult or impossible for them to find good, effective inexpensive health care.

“What AHC is trying to do over the next several years is work together with the Cambodian Ministry of Health to build up the skills and knowledge of doctors and nurses working in these rural areas, so that these children will not have to travel so far… they will get health care faster and this will save lives.” I ask Shoemaker how he feels the training of the staff is going. He says how proud he is of them and how their skills and knowledge have progressed so thoroughly that they have gained the complete trust of the community. Moreover, he adds, 98 per cent of the staff in his hospital are Cambodian and each year there is less and less need for foreigners. “I am working myself out of a job,” he adds with a grin. (Source: Winnipeg Free Press)

David Shoemaker in the crowded waiting room at Angkor Children’s Hospital in Siem Reap, Cambodia. (Photo By Rick Friedlander )

]]> http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/10/an-angel-in-cambodia/feed/ 0 http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/09/a-little-bit-can-do-so-much/ http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/09/a-little-bit-can-do-so-much/#comments Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 cwasiafund http://www.cwasiafund.org/blog/?p=75 Couple’s Quest to Help Kids in South Asia
by Elaine O’Connor

The Province Sunday
“British Columbians without Borders Blog” -Saturday 27 September 2008
Funding the Future in South Asia



Vancouver’s Nina Bains Cassils and her husband John love to travel. But they want to be more than tourists.
That’s why, after visiting developing countries in Asia for more than a decade they decided to add philanthropy to their sightseeing. Inspired by admirable people they met, they began to donate to causes they encountered.

In 1998, they made their first donation to an orphanage in northwest Thailand called Moo Ban Dek. Since then, they’ve traveled to South East Asia every year, for up to six weeks at a time, to visit projects, connect with local charities, distribute funding and check in on the people they have helped. Now they are funding 16 projects through their CW Asia Fund (named after main contributing families, the Cassils and the Wettsteins of Calgary). The Fund partners with local non-governmental organizations in India, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia working on clean water, education, orphanages, health care, youth vocational training and income generation and nutrition.

They started by making small donations to projects they saw that touched them. Then, they began bringing over boxes of school books and medical supplies. Eventually, they started the Fund.
“We didn’t want to work with a structure,” Cassils says. “If I want to have the flexibility if I want to help an orphanage, if I want to help a village, if I want to build a library, if I want to build a school or hire teachers we can do that.”

Cassils says in the developing world, the value of giving is immediately obvious.
“We realized that a little bit on money can do so much in southeast Asia. When you don’t have a lot to give you can really stretch each dollar there.”

One of the projects they’ve funded is the M’Lop Tapang Centre for Street Children in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. It reaches out to protect children from many forms of child exploitation (the country is a sex tourism destination) and gets them enrolled in schools, often reaching them through their day and night Mobile Library.

Another is the Metta Development Fund’s village drugstores in Myanmar, a network of 15 community pharmacies which are run and funded by volunteer housewives. And through Children of the Forest they are helping house and school more than 230 orphans on the border of Thailand.

The Cassils have recently funded a rural 18-bed pediatric unit in partnership with the Angkor Hospital for Children near Siem Reap in rural Cambodia. It’s a country where one in seven children die before the age of five, 35 per cent of Cambodian children are not immunized for polio, measles, or diphtheria and 45 per cent of children under five are underweight.

This May, after Cyclone Nargis devastated coastal Myanmar, the Cassils turned their focus from development to relief work. Up to 2.4 million people were affected by Cyclone Nargis and up to 300,000 killed — 120,000 of them children. They themselves had missed the cyclone by two days, having just left the country after visiting their seven projects there.

They quickly assembled local donors and raised more than $700,000 for relief efforts there, and shipped an additional $300,000 worth of medical supplies and food to the country. Most of the funds came from well-off private donors, but not all. The students at Vancouver’s Eaton Arrowsmith School donated $1,200 to purchase rehydrating salts for children.

The Cassils love seeing the change their work creates.
“It’s so exciting to go back,” Cassils says. “People are so shocked and they really appreciate that you came back to see them.”

To learn how to donate, volunteer or host a fundraiser visit CW Asia Fund. You can also donate to Cyclone Nargis relief. To contact the Cassils email cwasiafund@strandco.com.

]]> http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/09/a-little-bit-can-do-so-much/feed/ 0 http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/09/friends-in-the-right-places/ http://www.cwasiafund.org/about-cwasia/2008/09/friends-in-the-right-places/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:27:46 +0000 cwasiafund http://www.cwasiafund.org/blog/?p=751 by Colin Hinshelwood

Concierge.com‘s Insider Guide

Last Spring, while Myanmar’s government was refusing foreign aid for the survivors of Cyclone Nargis, local travel companies were among the first to provide relief. When little Ma Pandaw grows up, she can tell her pals she was born on a luxurious cruise ship. She first saw the light of day in its bar, which served as a temporary delivery room after the ship was converted into a mobile hospital to treat victims of the cyclone that swept through Myanmar s Irrawaddy Delta in May.

Ma Pandaw s mother, 17-year-old Khin Mar Oo, named her baby in honor of the ship in which she was born. The Pandaw IV was lent to the cyclone relief effort by Pandaw Cruises, one of dozens of tour companies, hotels, and resorts in Myanmar that responded to the Cyclone Nargis disaster by collecting donations and offering their staff, transportation, expertise, and, in this case, a replica of a nineteenth-century steamboat. We have collected $600,000, mostly from former passengers, said Pandaw Cruises founder Paul Strachan, adding that another $150,000 had been pledged.


Many tour companies have linked themselves to on-the-ground humanitarian relief groups such as Merlin, Save the Children, and the Red Cross. Donations are spent mostly on emergency supplies like cooking oil and pots, rice, salt, water, candles, soap, tools, tarpaulins, and clothing. Mistrustful of the military government-which blocked international aid agencies, including the UN, from entering the cyclone-ravaged delta for weeks following the disaster-former visitors turned to the tour companies they travelled with to ensure that their donations reach the needy. “We face far fewer restrictions on our movements than the relief agencies,” said Brett Melzer, owner of the luxury Malikha Lodge, in Myanmar’s far north, and Balloons over Bagan, a firm that specializes in hot-air balloon trips.

“We have the support of the authorities as long as we inform them of our movements and remain apolitical. There is already a sense of trust in place that enables us to move immediately without time-consuming internal meetings and detailed budgets. As tourism companies, we have experience in logistics and are able to handle and receive foreign funds. This allowed many in the industry to react quickly after the cyclone struck.”

Abercrombie & Kent, the large British tour operator, set up a Myanmar Relief Fund. Eight days after the cyclone, one of its relief teams reached the village of Ta Pyan Gyi, where they discovered 279 survivors in a church, the only building left standing. The relief packages-including blankets, mosquito nets, and rehydration salts-were the first aid the survivors received. By June 20, the fund had collected $340,000, including money for tractors and seeds, urgently needed in the rice-growing Irrawaddy Delta.

Yangon-based tour operator William Myatwunna and his staff at Good News Travels were among the volunteers. After we had fixed our own homes, we helped construct shelters for those in the neighborhood. Some of our staff cooked porridge for the survivors. A few tour companies had charitable foundations in place prior to the cyclone. Asia Transpacific Journeys, a Colorado travel agency, collects donations from clients and others to fund a water-filtration facility in Yangon. It reacted to the crisis by stepping up its distribution of clay water filters, which can be lifesavers during a natural disaster where clean running water is scarce.

Tourism to Myanmar has slowed to a trickle following the military regimes violent response in September 2007 to monks who were protesting inflation and living conditions. Even before then, visiting Myanmar (or Burma as it is widely known) had long been a contentious issue. Some Burmese dissidents and Western activists argue that tourist dollars only help to prop up the isolationist military regime. But proponents of tourism counter that foreign visitors not only help support the local economy but also keep the notoriously reclusive country open-and remind the Burmese people that the world has not forgotten their plight.

Tourism plays a vital role in allowing an exchange of information-something the government is desperate to stop, said a tour operator who works in Myanmar and who asked not to be identified. Without this degree of openness, the world would not have seen the Saffron Revolution take place last year. Tourists are one of the few things that the government cannot so easily control.

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