President Jerome and Maria thank guest speaker Margaret Van Haren of Ekenywa.
Member Birthdays
Wayne Stevens, March 29
Bob Kieswetter, March 31
Bingo next week – April 4th
John Vickery
Jake Thomas
Judy Nairn
New Business
Good Friday Fish Fry- Knights of Columbus. Walk-ins and take-out available. See Jerome for more details.
Fireside Chat for this evening has been cancelled.
50/50 Draw
John Villemaire, John Vickery and Jairus Maus all tried to pull the elusive black marble but had no luck. The pot continues to grow.
VFL
Jairus Maus shared highlights of the VFL Trips. Trips include:
Escorted tour of Japan
Windstar 7 Day Luxury Yacht Cruise
St Lucia 5 Star Spa Holiday
Celebrity Western Caribbean 7 day cruise
Romantic Paris Week
Early bird prize of 4 day New York getaway OR 4 day Las Vegas getaway OR 4 day Nassau Bahamas all inclusive weekend.
Leo shared that he has handed out many of the tickets to date. Just a few more people need to get theirs. Also to watch for an email with details on the on-line ticket management system.
Guest Speaker:
Ed Simon introduced our guest speaker Margaret Van Haren. Margaret spoke to the club about her work with Ekenywa in Nakura, Kenya. She volunteered on this initiative for a month. The focus is to break the cycle of poverty in rural Kenya by providing access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene education, nutrition and an innovative learning environment.
When Akenywa coordinates projects such as this the entire community gets involved. Work that was completed included rebuilding a classroom, adding new roofs and gutters to collect water, installing water reservoir, building a new latrine, building a reservoir for biogas and piping of dirty water for crops.
We learned some interesting information such as that children and seniors walk 5 kms per day for access to water. And that the ratio of teachers to students there is 1:70 and ratio of books to students is 1:5. We also heard about water ATM’s
Margaret asked our Rotary club to consider taking on a project.
Maria thanked Margaret for her presentation today.
