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.”
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Andrew Kirkwood, Director of Save the Children Myanmar, has been keeping a diary of his life in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) in the days following Cyclone Nargis.
FRIDAY 16 MAY
Ken Caldwell, Save the Children’s Director of International Operations is here with us, so I’ve been in meetings today with the British and American ambassadors, amongst others. There are so many dimensions to this crisis and it seems overwhelming at times. But, at least our mission is clear. Our absolute priority right now is to save children’s lives. I think we’ve been clear and vocal about the dire situation children are in, and the need for urgent action to reach them.
Save the Children has now, less than two weeks after the cyclone, reached more than 120,000 people who have been forced out of their homes by the cyclone, including around 50,000 children – 90,000 people around Yangon and 30,000 in the Irrawaddy delta. And, we’re reaching around 15,000 more people each day. This gives me incredible hope and energy. Today is my last installment. I’ll be relieved not to have this on my list of things to do every day. I usually end up writing at the very end of the day, when I’m impatient to go home – even though the family is usually asleep already. But, I’m really glad I have written it. I think it’s been a good way of staying sane, since it’s forced me to process what’s happened during the day. For most of the past two weeks I’ve had to read my blog every night to someone in our Bangkok office, because I’ve had no other way to send it. At times it was really hard to read it – last Thursday it took me nearly five minutes to read the last paragraph and I was in tears when I finished. It sometimes felt self-indulgent, and I wondered why I was taking time away from my family or from the efforts to save children. But, it’s also been a way for me to stay in touch with friends and family, almost all of whom I’ve had no other contact. I wonder how I’ll feel when I read this in a few months.
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