Peter Nix

1950 Herd Road

Duncan BC Canada V9L 5W6

November 4, 2009

RE: KAVTV VOCATIONAL SCHOOL

To whom it may concern,

I am a retired biological consultant living on Vancouver Island in Canada. My family (wife and 2 boys) and I first travelled to Cambodia in 2003. There we saw such overwhelming poverty and social chaos that we resolved to “find” a worthy charity that we could support, outside the radar of large NGOs. Returning in 2004, we saw many NGOs with gated office buildings, fancy cars and a large staff. Finally, with the help of the Cambodia Support Group, we met Hem Phang and his vocational school. KAVTV has only the facilities and staff needed to educate disabled adults – no fancy cars, no fancy offices, and no large salaries.

Since then, I have been involved in both the financial and organizational support of KAVTV, and have come from Canada to visit in both 2005 and 2006. Hem Phang, its founder and director, is most worthy of my and your financial aid. His school is a brilliant model of what honest Cambodians can do for their own society, and his personal character is most admirable. Phang is an honest man and has a huge heart - a land-mine victim himself. We have eaten at his house, travelled the country with him and inspected KAVTV’s financial books. We know his family so well that we sponsored his daughter Tola to live at our home on a student visa and attend school in Canada.

KAVTV is a testament to the real meaning of a self-sustaining aid organization that deals with important social needs (the disabled, women’s rights). In the case of this successful vocational school, however, the phrase “self-sustaining” means that its graduates are transformed from utter dependency to self-sustaining people who can support themselves and their families. Unfortunately, it does not mean that the school itself can realistically operate without donations (the disabled in Cambodia are mostly destitute).

I am working hard with KAVTV and have stretched my personal financial resources to keep the school operating. Early plans for working graduates to return some of the support they received had to be shelved or postponed as the collapsing world economy hit Cambodia hard, and its poorest people the hardest of all.

On behalf of the students and staff at KAVTV, I urge you to consider and accept this request for aid and to offer any support you can.

Sincerely,

Peter Nix

1-250-748-7954 paternix@shaw.ca

Peter Nix and his wife Margaret Woodfall give long-term personal support to KAVTV on a par with some major donors. They also sponsored Tola, the daughter of KAVTV founder Hem Phang, for three years of study in Canada.