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.