8am Visit to Room to Read project funded by Cassils and Wettsteins

Paul Hancock, Patricia Solar, John and I traveled 40 minutes outside of Siem Reap to visit a village school library. For anyone interested in funding child education Room to Read is well positioned in Laos and Cambodia as we know from personal experience.

In Cambodia the Room to Read team has chosen to focus on all of our core programs, except for the School Room Program. They have identified library construction, Khmer language children’s books, and girls’ scholarships as three of the most important improvements we can make to the educational system and have thus chosen to focus much of their work there. The following table highlights our Cambodia team’s success to date:

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Helping Change the World for Children in Rural Cambodia

Children are the innocent victims of the most drastic consequences of poverty. In Cambodia, thousands of children die each year of preventable and treatable disease and it is not uncommon for a child to die of complications from respiratory infections, diarrhea, and diseases which are practically eradicated in the more developed countries.

In this impoverished and battered country, the mortality statistics are earthshaking:

• 15% of Cambodian children die before the age of 5
• 35% of Cambodian children are not immunized for polio, measles, or diphtheria
• 45% of Cambodian children under 5 are moderately to severely underweight
• 12,000 Cambodian children under the age of 15 live with HIV/AIDS

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www.mloptapang.org

EDUCATION

• The number of children using the centre daily has more than doubled, with well over 300 children coming to the centre daily, over last year.
• Over 220 children studying full time in five classrooms in our special education program representing a 100% increase in 12 months.
• Over 100 children participating in art, IT, English and sport activities.
• All students because of lack of money, child-rearing responsibilities or simple parental neglect are not ready to attend or not able to afford public schools.
• For most of these children this is their first opportunity for any schooling.

IT TRAINING

• IT training represents an important component of our youth programs.
• The existing IT room has 10 computers.
• Over 120 children use it weekly.

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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.

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