Dear Nina, John, Sue and Wieland;
I have sent you a thank you similar to the attached but just wanted to make sure you did receive it.

The truck is wonderful and has really made a difference to the lives of the children in our direct care and the children in our free school. I took a group of young children to the zoo near Kanchanaburi last week and they loved going in the truck. So much easier to keep the children safe and to manage large numbers.

The truck has even made a couple of late night emergency runs to the hospital in Kanchanaburi.

It is brilliant, Thank you,

Kind regards, Mark
Manager
Children of the Forest Project
Sangkhlaburi
Thailand.

Over the past four months, we have made tremendous progress towards assisting in the recovery from Cyclone Nargis made possible with your generous donations. Although this disaster has faded from the media, the job of rebuilding lives continues to be a challenge.
Along with providing for the most basic needs of simple food, water and temporary shelter, the donated funds have been used for:

• safe shelters for child protection;
  
• specialty food bars to curb malnutrition;
  
• critically required antibiotics and other medicines not available in large quantities within the country;
  
• materials to construct permanent housing; and
  
• psycho-social support for children and their families.
  

On August 6th, close to 8,000 lbs of donated medicines and high energy food were successfully air lifted to Yangon from Vancouver with 100% of the goods cleared without interference from government authorities. The value of this shipment exceeded $300,000 CDN.

We are pleased to report that all goods have been received in full by AZG - Medicine Sans Frontiers (Myanmar). Working directly with excellent global organizations with outposts in Myanmar, allows the donations in kind and shipment to be effectively used and distributed for the benefit of the Cyclone victims. All your cash donations were successfully transferred in USD without any exchange loss or risk of compromise.

During this crisis, the CW Asia Fund facilitated the transfer of over $855,000 USD of which $670,000 was raised in Canada with the help of the Radcliffe Foundation and $186,000 internationally. In addition, $444,880 of the $670,000 that was raised from Canadian individuals was matched by CIDA. These funds are being allocated by CIDA to established Canadian and international humanitarian organizations for relief efforts that benefit the people in Myanmar.

Without your generous assistance none of this could have happened. Thank you so much for helping to make the relief efforts so significant by giving and acting so quickly. It is making a big difference!

In summary, we are pleased to advise that the CW Asia Fund has managed to achieve the following objectives since May 8, 2008:

• Secured donations from International foundations and NGOs for Myanmar;
  
• safe shelters for child protection;
  
• Secured in kind donations of bulk pharmaceutical products, bulk vitamins, food supplements, dried soy powder, high energy bars, “Gastrolyte” and air freight. Arrowsmith School (Vancouver, B.C.) conducted fundraisers especially for the purchase of Gastrolyte product;
  
• Donor corporations included Jamieson Labs; Nature's Path; Health Partners International of Canada); NBTY ; Novopharm; Rexall Drugs; UBC VGH Dentistry Dept, UBC Dental Association and West Coast Seed;
• Obtained donations from Air Canada and Cathay Pacific to transport the donated goods from Vancouver to Hong Kong and Hong Kong to Bangkok, respectively. Thai Air then delivered the goods from Bangkok to Yangon at a reduced cost;
  
• Received approval by Federal Department of External Affairs to provide financial assistance for Cyclone relief in Burma regardless of existing sanctions;
  
• Awarded $444,880 CAN of matching funds from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA);
  
• Set up a facility for donations in the UK under www.justgiving.com/burmarelief;
  
• Posted relief information on our website www.cwasiafund.org; and
  
• Launched online giving for American and Canadian donors with official tax receipting http://www.givemeaning.com/project/cyclonenargis (100%, 0 deductions) for ongoing rebuilding of schools and healthcare facilities. Kindly forward to family and friends encouraging them to consider… One dollar feeds a family of five per day!
  

In the coming months the CW Asia Fund will continue their efforts in Myanmar.

Once again, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Your generosity allowed timely, effective and appropriate humanitarian assistance to be delivered to the victims of Cyclone Nargis!

Sincerely,
Nina and John Cassils
Co-Founders
CW Asia Fund

Winnipeg Free Press
Life
An angel in Cambodia
Winnipeg nurse helps restore a shattered nation
By: Rick Friedlander
Updated: October 5 at 08:09 AM CDT

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 )

Elaine O'Connor
The Province Sunday, September 28, 2008
“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 travelled 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. See a full list of their projects here.
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 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.