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

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

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 )

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.

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.

Medical Action Myanmar (MAM) is a new international medical aid organization whose mission is to improve the health of the poorest people within Myanmar. It’s principal goals are to provide basic medical treatment and prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The motivation for the creation of this new NGO is the unmet health needs in Myanmar.

The driving force behind MAM is Dr Frank Smithius, former director of MSF and a long-term veteran in health activities in Myanmar together with three former colleagues Dr Khin Zarli Aye, Dr Ni Ni Tun and Renee Mous. In addition, a number of health professionals who have been involved in health activities in Myanmar are supporting MAM including Professor Nick White (Oxford and Mahidol University), Dr Alex Winkler (former director of MSF) Holland, currently director of Doctors for Children and Guy Stallworthy (former directore PSI Myanmar, currently working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

Why Medical Action Myanmar?
Myanmar’s health system is under-funded. National investment is insufficient and the international community provides very little support. Myanmar citizens receive the lowest amount of development aid (ODA) of all ‘least developed countries’ i.e. 3 USD per person per year compared to 38 USD in CAmbodia and 50 USD in Laos, both countries with higher gross national income (GNI). There are very few medical aid organisations in Myanmar and most operate on a pitiful small scale (therefore being very cost-ineffective.) People in Myanmar have to pay for the health services themselves and most cannot afford to do so. As a result, tens of thousands of people, mostly children die each year of diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, respiratory tract infections and other simple and treatable diseases.

A Lower Mainland couple is doing their best to make sure Myanmar’s cyclone victims aren’t forgotten. Nina Cassils and her husband John – together with another couple from Calgary – have been raising funds for international organizations since Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar in May.

Through private and online donations at cwasiafund.org, Cassils has raised about $740,000 for on-the-ground relief efforts, and she’s gone there to lend a hand herself.
“Imagine a wave coming and continuing through to Surrey, ripping at every tree and building in between and killing women and children,” she said.

Knowing how far a Canadian dollar can go in Myanmar, Cassils set up CW Asia Fund to fund relief efforts through four organizations, including Doctors Without Borders. But as Western society’s memory of the disaster fade away, so do the funds. “It’s a shame because so much more needs to be done,” she said, who is involved with local and international charities. “People don’t even have to give that much. They don’t realize that a dollar can feed an entire family.”

Up to 300,000 people were killed by the cyclone, with another 2.4 million living with the aftermath. Damage has been estimated in the billions of dollars

The May of Misfortune.
Cyclone Nargis hit land in Myanmar on May 2, 2008. As organizations around the world were still negotiating aid endeavours, a major earthquake struck the Sichuan area of China on May 12. HPIC responded to both of these disasters with donated Canadian medicine.

Medical aid for Myanmar was channelled through the Canadian group CW Asia Fund and used on the ground by AZG (Medecins Sans Frontieres, Holland). AZG reports working with local staff to deliver medical aid through fixed and mobile clinics in more than 300 villages. According to Nina Cassils of the CW Asia Fund, “Working directly with excellent global organizations with outposts in Myanmar allowed the donations to be used effectively for the benefit of the cyclone victims.”

Excerpt from Health Partners International Canada

For more information contact:
Margaret Buchanan, Manager, Media Relations – email: mbuchanan@hpicanada.ca

CW Asia Fund is on the leading-edge of Myanmar relief efforts with Canadian product donations delivered right into the ravaged region where help is needed most. CW Asia Fund delivered over 8,000 protein bars plus bottles of Vitamin C, donated by Jamieson Laboratories, plus other donated food products and medicines into Myanmar to provide assistance to malnourished children and adults.

When the CW Asia Fund contacted us, we agreed immediately to provide assistance, said Rob Ricci, Vice President of Marketing, Jamieson Laboratories. The CW Asia Fund is uniquely able to provide assistance directly where it is most needed right in to Myanmar’s worst hit areas. We encourage Canadian food and health companies to contact the CW Asia Fund to see how they can also provide support.

The CW Asia Fund has set a goal to raise $1 million (CDN) to support Myanmar emergency relief efforts. To date they have already raised over $610,000 with additional funds arriving daily through an online charitable giving sites in the UK and Canada.
(www.justgiving.com/burmarelief and www.givemeaning.com/project/cyclonenargis)

Companies can reach the CW Asia Fund directly by contacting cwasiafund@strandco.com or 604-687-1919, local 519.

About Jamieson Laboratories
Established in 1922, Jamieson Laboratories is Canada’s largest manufacturer and distributor of advanced natural health care products. Jamieson’s state-of-the-art pharmaceutical manufacturing laboratories are located in Windsor, Ontario. The company is a world leader in the vitamin and nutrition industry, exporting to over 45 countries including the United States, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore. For more information, please visit the Jamieson Laboratories website at www.jamiesonvitamins.com or call 1-800-265-5088.

For further information please contact:
Stephanie Blok
Jamieson Laboratories
416-960-0052
sblok@jamiesonlabs.com

As Myanmar continues a three day mourning period, CW Asia Fund, made up of a small group of local Vancouver and Calgary volunteers, continues its efforts to raise $1 million (CDN) for emergency aid in response to the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis. In ten days, CW Asia Fund raised over $585,000 (CDN) and hopes to reach its goal by the end of next week, with the expectation that the Canadian Government will step in to match funds raised.

It is estimated that 1.5 million people have been affected by Cyclone Nargis and up to 300,000 killed, including 120,000 children. The estimated death toll now exceeds that of the 2004 Tsunami. The flooding has stopped in Myanmar, but the health risks continue to escalate and the death toll keeps climbing. The immensity of this human tragedy is verging on the unspeakable, said Dr. John Cassils, co-founder of CW Asia Fund:

“It is essential that the appropriate aid reaches those in need in a timely and organized manner through local support in Myanmar. We are making a desperate call for cash donations and it is our sincere hope that the Canadian Government will honour its pledge to match donations and further boost the humanitarian efforts of our country. Canadians have shown great generosity and CW Asia Fund is very eager to assist through our long-standing relationships with organizations on the ground in Myanmar.”

For over eight years, Dr. John and Nina Cassils, two of CW Asia Fund’s co-founders, have worked extensively in Myanmar and have built strong relationships with a number of organizations and individuals that operate within Myanmar, including hospitals, clinics, orphanages, village libraries and local non-governmental organizations (NGO’s). CW Asia Fund is assuring that donations will go directly to those who need it most and in a timely manner. As well as monetary donations, CW Asia Fund is actively sourcing food, medicines and other emergency supplies for those affected by this catastrophe and has been offered the use of a private jet, pre-cleared by Burmese authorities, to deliver emergency supplies. Fully, one hundred percent of donations will be sent directly to local Myanmar organizations.

For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact:
Trevor Howes
CW Asia Fund
604-619-5909
thowes@gmail.com