Dear CAIES members:

I would like to report to you that there were over one hundred people participated at the CAIES 512 Earthquake Relief Fundraising Luncheon on June 18. The event was provided by Mr. Joseph Garbarino, the Chairman of the Broad of the Marin Recycling & Resource Recovery at the Marin Sanitary Service of San Rafael. He provided the facilities, set-ups, and everything needed, including staff support, out of his own expenses, without charging anything to CAIES. The wonderful team of Mr. Garbarino’s staff worked diligently to provide lots of delicious food for the participating guests and created a beautiful environment for the event. Mr. Garbarino also led the participants to visit his large collection of WWII memorabilia after the luncheon.

The entire sum of $7,645, collected at the event, was handed over to CAIES President Larry Lam at the end of the luncheon. This amount has been forwarded to Joseph Ho, CAIES Treasurer for deposit. After combining this amount with the $700 received from CAIES member after 06/07/08, Larry will make an appointment to bring the check with the total amount received to the Chinese Consulate at San Francisco . As of today, the total donation of CAIES 512 Earthquake Relief Fund will be $19,595, including the $11,250 check presented to the Consulate on June 8 and the $8,345 check to be presented within the next few days.

In addition to the guests invited by Mr. Garbarino, we have ten CAIES members & guests attending the event; they were Jane and Larry Lam, Shirley and Bob Yee, Frank Orrell and friend, Raymond Chan, Stan Moy, Philip Fong, and Tony Cho.

Originally, this event was the introduction of Mr. Frank Orrell. At the luncheon, Mr. Orrell provided a Power Point Presentation, with lots of photos and pictures about the 512 Earthquake. The presentation was very touching; we had noticed tears in people's eyes immediately after the presentation. Mr. Orrell had clearly delivered the messages successfully. Although the subject was somewhat gruesome, he did the job in terms of acknowledging the participants that they have done a meaningful thing by supporting the luncheon.

As Mr. Orrell said, something so big is almost hard for the mind to comprehend and still a lot more problems to overcome. And, we all know that it is not the end of the story yet! It will take years to rebuild the cities, towns and villages which were badly and devastatingly damaged. It will take a long time for the folks to recover from the wounds and to get back to their normal lives before the earthquake. Therefore, CAIES has more to do; CAIES board members are currently working diligently together to provide additional assistant to our less fortunate folks in China .

Meanwhile, Larry and Joe (Leung) are working on the CAIES project for engineering support to the rebuilding effort at Sichuan . I am certain that they will keep you posted of the new activities and actions that CAIES is going to take.

Tony

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