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

Support for M’Lop Tapang, 2008

Commitment By: Cassils Wettstein Asia Fund (CW Asia Fund)
Partner(s): M’Lop Tapang and ADM Capital Foundation
Objective: To provide funding for the construction of a new wing of M’Lop Tapang’s day center. The new wing will host a medical clinic for street children and other vulnerable children, 4 classrooms, 1 large computer lab, 1 art room and 1 dance/music room.

Commitment Details:

Estimated Total Value: $100,000
Anticipated Launch: January 1, 2009
Commitment Duration: 1 year
Geographic Region: Asia
Geographic Scope: Cambodia

This commitment is to M’Lop Tapang (www.mloptapang.org ) and focuses on the construction of a new wing of M’Lop Tapang’s day center, catering to hundreds of street children in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. M’Lop Tapang supports street living and working children, granting access to education. Implementation Strategy: The new wing will allow to expand the number of children using the centre from 300/day to 500 (300 females) per day. Monthly reports of construction status and financial reports (through ADM Capital Foundation). Final financial report (end of construction – October 2009. Monitoring visit (November 2009). Partnership Opportunities: The Cassils Wettstein Asia Fund will partner up with the ADM Capital Foundation in order to implement this initiative. ADM capital foundation will provide technical support, monitoring of the project, reporting and additional.

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 Give Meaning (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

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.

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