May 25th 2008: Activities in Australia

Hi All,

It has been a busy two weeks in the AU front.

Fund Raising:
With a lot of different Burmese (Myanmar) groups already putting efforts within the Burmese (Myanmar) community, I went outside the community for fund raising. It was a great opportunity for most of my friends who were wanting to help, but could not find a way to help directly or quickly. On 12th May one of them said "I sent a $500 donation to your account tonight for assistance in Burma. All the best with it and thank you for helping organise a means of contributing when it is so difficult to do it via other channels."

A total of $3950 was collected over the two weeks period. Of the $3950:-
1. $2323 was sent to Moegyo team member in Burma.
2. $997 was spent purchasing -
100 x 75g Savlon Antiseptic Cream, and
50 x 1L Hydralyte drink bottles.
3. The balance is held by myself.

I am looking to organise fund raising dinners and events. Watch this space for further updates on these.

Collection of Supplies:
I approached Fuji Xerox Australia - the organisation I work for to do clothing and supplies collection within Fuji Xerox sites. Management agreed - as long as I can organise for someone to manage each site. At the moment we have 2 sites (out of 7 in Sydney) - managed by myself and a Burmese colleague for the collection. I am working on recruiting some colleagues to manage two other sites. The company has also donated cardboard boxes to use for packaging / shipping. (The total weight of the boxes came to approx. 800kg).

I also reached out to church going friends to help with collecting clothes and supplies. To date 2 churches (a Chinese Church and an Indonesian Church) have donated clothing and supplies which made up 1/2 of what we have collected so far.

Kensington ABC Childcare (a branch of the largest Childcare Centre chain in AU) where my wife works also helped out with collecting clothes and supplies. 1/4 of clothing collected to date came from this childcare centre. Last week, I sent several fliers printed in colour with photos taken from MOEGYO site to the director of this childcare centre - and now five ABC Childcare Centres within Sydney have those fliers posted and are helping out with the collection!

Also, I approached my daughters' primary school and one other primary school. Both Principals kindly agreed to do collection for us at their schools this coming week. I will approach another one this week.

My younger brother is also helping out with fund raising as well as clothing, food and medical supplies collection within his circle of friends.

As the result, we were busy over this weekend collecting various donations around Sydney. By Sunday afternoon, estimated 10 cubic metre of clothing, food and medical supplies were collected (as well as some buckets of nails weighing around 30kg). To put in perceptive, 10 cubic metre is a little over 1/7 of the 12 metre long shipping container with inside capacity of 67 cubic metre. The supplies collected were donated on behalf of MOEGYO to Burmese Community in Sydney.

I am expecting another round of collection next Friday. With the growing donation base, I am asking people to bring their donation to designated collection points to save us having to run around. Even with that, the area we need to cover will be quite large. I have recruited my brother and some of our friends to help out with the collection and sorting of the articles.

That's it for now. I will try to do weekly updates from now on.

Rgds,

WN