This meeting was a “re-zoom-tion” of online Rotary Club meetings that were last held on Sept 13, 2021. It began, as usual with the happy tinkling of PDG Nancy’s bell, then with a reading of the land Acknowledgement Statement, followed by a video of O Canada being sung by the students of Tec-Voc High School in multiple languages. The thought of the week chosen by President Doug was provided by Albert Einstein in a speech delivered to the New History Society on December 14, 1930:
“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”

ROTARY MOMENTS

1) 2021 Christmas Party donations – total of $2,367.08
a. Westgrove School Breakfast program: $428.00 in dry goods / food items plus cash donations equal to at least $800.00. Chuck bought and delivered $803.08 worth of dry goods and food items from the Silver Heights Food Fare to further stock the shelves at Westgrove School. (All 125 students at Westgrove School participate in the breakfast program.)
b. The Fit Feet on the Street program had 284 pairs of socks donated at an estimated cost of $4.00/pair of socks = $1,136.00

2) Chuck has also negotiated the following footwear deal with Canadian Footwear in late December: Westgrove School footwear was also topped up with 46 pair of runners from Canadian Footwear worth: $4670.70. Canadian Footwear donated 14 pair outright worth: $2379.86. They also donated 1 box of red boys hats and 1 box of pink girls hats. The remaining 32 pair of runners were discounted on average around 10% and all this cost the club $1990.84 (including GST)

3) The club Board approved the purchase of 5 stoves through Stove Team International for use in rural Guatemala. The expenditure is valued at $500.00 USD. Stove Team International strives to remove the toxic smoke from cooking over open fires inside the homes in these rural villages.

4) The Board has also voted to make a donation of $500.00 to the ‘Sherbrook Fire Relief Fund’. This is in aid of the ‘Turning Leaf’ tenants forced out of their apartments on New Years Eve due to a large fire in their apartment block. They lost all their possessions in the fire… the ‘Turning Leaf’ organization has made a presentation to the club in the past. They support individuals with Mental Illness and Intellectual Challenges who live in the community.

5) The Board has directed our Grant Writing Committee to complete the 2022 - 2023 District Grant applications for Urban Stable and STARS. The applications will be submitted for $3,000.00 each. We can apply for district grants now, between January 1 and April 15. However, in order to qualify for District Grants, we must attain at least $50.00/per capita in donations to the Annual Fund-SHARE of The Rotary Foundation. Currently we are a little short of the $50/per capita goal. Donations can be made online, by phone or by cheque. (Ed Thompson could help you make a payment to the Annual Fund-SHARE of Rotary International through the Rotary Club of Charleswood Charitable Foundation (RCCCF).

• You can also go online to the Rotary International – Canada site and make a one-time top up donation into the Annual Fund-SHARE program.
• Another option is to arrange a recurring donation through the Rotary Foundation Canada site.
• Click on: Ways to Give > Recurring Donations > then complete the fillable document | click the Annual Fund – SHARE box. Then complete the rest of the document and enter your credit card.
• There is another option right now, and that is to support the 75-Day Challenge that Brenda Banbury and Eva Vida are participating in. Get a pledge sheet and ask for donations in support of the walk. Develop your own relay team and cover Km’s with Donations per Km. They plan on covering all 4260 Kms that it would take to visit each Rotary Club in District 5550. Turn in the pledge sheet and other pledges by March 25th, 2022 to President Doug then Charleswood Rotary will get credit into the Rotary Foundation Annual Fund-SHARE.

6) President Doug met with Past-President Mandy Kwasnica at Fort Whyte Alive this past Friday, to present her Paul Harris Fellow recognition certificate and pin. She was very pleased to receive this honour from the club.

7) Paul Harris award: Lloyd has another Paul Harris Fellow recognition certificate and pin for PDG Nancy (her 8th Paul Harris, which supports the work of The Rotary Foundation around the world. Lloyd will arrange to get the hardware out to PDG Nancy.

8) MUNA (Model United Nations Assembly) registration is open for the 2022 online version. Clubs are looking for MUNA teams to register. If you have any contacts for possible MUNA participants, contact Glenn or Iain.

• Students from grades 9 thru 12.
• Virtual – April 28 – 29, 2022.
• $25.00 / team of Two students & one counselor.
• Schools from across Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, North Dakota, and Minnesota are invited to participate in the Winnipeg MUNA.

9) Chase the Ace raffle:
As an update for series #2: we have had these individuals as winners so far…
Eloise Lyon > Week 1 | 2 | 6
Nancy Morris > Week 3 | 4 | 5
On week #7 our Weekly Winner was Jack Wilson (Weekly Jackpot: $22.00) This fundraiser supports the club’s work on Assiniboine Forest enhancements. Please continue to support the raffle by purchasing tickets on the site www.rotarychasetheace.org

10) Club Meetings – re: Covid-19 / Omicron. A discussion with Cory at Breezy Bend asking about having meetings out there right now with the Omicron surge in the community led to the information that the Rotary Club should likely consider staying with online meetings for now until February. His direct quote was “We thought that it might be best to wait until February to try again.” A discussion with the 21 members at this meeting led to the decision to stay with online meetings using Zoom until end of January. This decision will be re-evaluated then. Currently we will plan on having our first in-person meeting back at Breezy Bend on Feb. 7th, 2022. President Doug will advise membership if this plan changes.

Membership Chair Ed Thompson officially inducted Wendy Hales as a member of the Charleswood Rotary Club - which immediately made her the newest Rotary Club member in the world! Lloyd will arrange to get both the ‘Certificate of Membership & a Rotary pin to Wendy. Welcome to Rotary, Wendy!

Between November 2 and 16th, 2021, Glenn and wife Eloise fulfilled their wish to undertake a tour of locations associated with both the first and second world wars. They organized their own agenda, which started and ended in Paris, France and which covered World War II (1939-1945) first and then World War I (1914-1918) sites.

First stop – Bayeux, France, visiting the Bayeux Tapestry Museum which held a medieval embroidered tapestry, 230 feet long long, depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066 in the Battle of Hastings.

Next – the Bayeux Cathedral, which was completed during the reign of William the Conqueror. It used to be the place where the Bayeux Tapestry was housed for several centuries, being displayed once a year for a short period of time then stored until the following year.

World War II sites:

• The D-Day Invasion on the Normandy Beaches took place on June 6, 1944, with the Americans landing on Omaha and Utah beaches, Great Britain’s troops landing on the Gold and Sword beaches, and Canada’s troops landing on Juno Beach. Visiting these beaches was preceded by a visit to the Omaha Beach museum and discovered how little they knew about D-Day and World War II
• Commonwealth War Grave site – one of 23,000 locations around the world (many of them in Northern France and Belgium) that are organized by the Commonwealth countries (Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and United Kingdom) to honour citizens of the Commonwealth who died in the two World Wars and to ensure that they will never be forgotten.
• American Memorial Cemetery – largest cemetery in Normandy, with almost 10,000 US soldiers buried there,
• Juno Beach Centre – pays homage to over a million Canadians that served during WWII (including the 45,000 who lost their lives).
• Near Caen, France is the Ardenne Abbey - a collection of medieval buildings - where, after D-Day, during the Battle of Normandy, in Une 1944, up to 156 Canadian prisoners of war were massacred by members of the 12th SS Panzer Division (under the command of Kurt Meyer), most of whom had been part of Hitler Youth. In the garden outside the Abbey, 20 Canadian soldiers (most of them from Nova Scotia) were beaten, shot and buried. Commander Meyer was sentenced to death, which was changed to life in prison, but he was released from a New Brunswick penitentiary after serving 8 years.
• Beny Sur Mer Canadian War Cemetery – a short distance from Juno Beach – contains over 2000 burials, the majority being Canadians who had died either on D-Day or in the early days of the Battle of Normandy.
• Merville Gun Battery - was a German fortification built as part of the German Atlantic Wall with guns that were able to destroy ships from a far distance. A pre-D-Day operation to disable this battery was only partially successful when only 150 paratroopers of 600 (with some Canadians) had made it to the rendezvous spot.
• Dieppe – The raid on Dieppe that took place on August 19th had 6,100 troops of which almost 5,000 were Canadian (of whom 916 lost their lives). A Canadian cemetery outside of Dieppe was unique in that it was created by the Germans. The headstones were placed back-to-back in long double rows typical of German burials.
• Dunkirk – is the home of the museum featuring Operation Dynamo, which took place May 26 – June 4 in 1940 using 222 ships, 800 civilian craft and 300,000 British, Canadian, French and Belgian troops in the evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk. Because of the lives that were saved, Operation Dynamo was also called Miracle of Dunkirk in spite of heavy losses.

World War I sites:

• Ypres -Ypres Salient was the area in Belgium that was fought over from October 1914 until nearly the end of the first world war in November 1918. When Canadians arrived in April 1915, they discovered that the trenches were woefully inadequate, shallow, poorly constructed, littered with human excrement, pools of water and unburied corpses of soldiers killed in previous battles. Canadians were also subjected to chlorine gas attacks. The outstanding In Flanders Fields Museum, dedicated to the study of World War I is in Ypres. The Menin Gate Ceremony features the Last Post and that takes place daily (since 1928) at 8 PM to commemorate casualties up to August 15, 1917 who have no known grave from the forces of Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and United Kingdom who died in the Salient. Casualties (numbering 35,000) occurring after that cutoff date are recorded at a separate memorial at the Tyne Cot Cemetery, which is the largest cemetery for Commonwealth forces in the world, for any war.
• St Julien Memorial, also known as The Brooding Soldier is a Canadian war memorial in the village of St Julien, Belgium. It honours the memory of Canadian soldiers who died from the first gas attack on the battlefield there that took place April 22-24, 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres.
• Memorial Museum Passchendaele is devoted to the 1917 battle of Passchendaele where in only 100 days almost 500,000 men were killed for only 8 km gain of ground. The Passchendaele Canadian Memorial marks the site where Canadian soldiers encountered some of the fiercest resistance they were to meet during the war.
• Arras – after a three day respite in Bruges (often referred to as Venice of the North) in the north of Belgium, the Campbells drove back to France and the city of Arras. The Battle of Arras in April 9 to May 16, 1917 helped break the German army’s final defensive positions.
• Vimy Ridge was a Canadian victory and a defining moment for Canada in April 9 to 12, 1917 and Glenn was there on Remembrance Day, Nov 11, 2021. The area is large with several cemeteries, a museum, different memorials and serves as a tribute to all Canadians who served in the first world war. The names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers who were missing and presumed dead are inscribed onto the ramparts of the huge Vimy Ridge memorial.
• Sheep are used to maintain the grounds of the Vimy Ridge Memorial area, which is a terrain full of underground tunnels and active landmines.
• Other sites near Vimy include the French Cemetery at La Targette (contains the graves of 11,443 French soldiers and officers who fell in World War I, a German Cemetery with over 44,000 burials, Ulster Memorial Tower (Northern Ireland’s national war memorial) commemorates all Ulster soldiers who served in the first world war, the Newfoundland Memorial honours all Newfoundlanders who served in the first world war and those lost with no known grave.
• Following this, the Campbells visited Amiens and Paris. On their last evening in Paris they had supper with Anne-Sofie who had lived with them in Ottawa for 6 months as a Rotary Exchange student.

Chuck thanked Glenn for sharing this really tough history with us. He felt blessed because his father had spent most of his time in the war in the Holland and Belgium areas. The family was blessed that he came home and did not wind up in a grave there. Other appreciative and comments related to their own eye-opening experiences were made by PDG Nancy, Jagdish, Lloyd and President Doug.

Sarge Mike introduced Wendy Hales as our meeting guest “for the last time” (since she was about to be inducted as a member of the Charleswood Rotary Club later in the meeting.)

Happy Bucks

Jagdish was happy simply because “We have New Year”

PDG Jim was happy to be in a warm location with the screen door open and enjoying the weather in Yuma.

Iain was thankful for the great picture taken by Rod Delisle at the Christmas Party. He has placed his image onto several bus stop benches (advertisements for his business).

Chuck was pleased that although his grandson’s positive COVID test meant that the family Boxing Day meal had to be cancelled, rapid tests indicated that everyone else tested negative. (after having spent about an hour with family members while the grandson was at work, according to wife Pat).

Nancy Hansen was greatly appreciative of “the wonderful people” at Morris Insurance for saving all the envelopes to add to her collection of stamps that she sends off to a Rotary Club in Australia for their fundraising efforts.

UPCOMING MEETINGS

Next club meeting will be: Monday, Jan 17th on Zoom Only and the guest speaker is expected to be Kristy Stefanson-Tarasoff, ‘Life & Times’.

Assiniboine Forest Meeting: Tuesday, Jan 11th @ 2:00pm on Zoom.

RCCCF Board Meeting: Wednesday, Jan 12th @4:00pm on Zoom

District Talk Show: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. Wednesday, Jan 12th @6:30pm on Zoom.
(You will have received a few reminders from Fred Wright. There is a link in his email to register for the ‘Talk Show’.)