Bulletin for August 30, 2018
Our presiding President to day was our Past President, Janet Canavan.
Guests: Anel Neumann, exchange student from Estonia; Mana Saanamori, our second exchange student from Japan who just arrived this week; Sean Thompson of Smith’s Funeral Home and a prospective new member; Trevor Gard, gust of Keith Williams.
Anel gave a review of her past week where she went to Niagara Falls, Toronto and went up the CN Tower and last weekend she visited a cottage near Blackstone.
Mana spoke, in pretty good English, and told us that she was 17 years old and was born on July 4th (I hope I have the day right). She made a small gift for everyone and passed it out. It was what I would call a small poppy – albeit in different colours (I took a red one) attached to a small clothes peg. She told us the Japanese name for it and said it represented peace and craft. She concluded by stating in a very gracious manner “Thank you for having me”.
Announcements: Janet introduced the Nominating Committee for the 2019/20 year. They are herself as Chair, plus Mae Radford, Lawrence Leung, David Roscoe, Lesley Allison, Alan Ramsay and Glenn Warnica. They will be announcing the slate of candidates at the first meeting in October and if there are no objections or other interested candidates, the slate will be confirmed later that month.
Nancy Penney, our Director of Community Service announced that her committee is going to focus on team building and getting to know each other within the club. A couple of upcoming events are the Telling Tales Festival and Polio Plus.
Rod Collard reported that the Soup Kitchen that was to be held the previous day is now scheduled for Friday at Next Door Social Space. He mentioned that the recipients of the food were very grateful and that he was using the $25 gift cards gathered at the Golf Tournament to buy the food.
Bob Martin announced that our September 13th meeting would be held off site at the Food Bank. No we will not be eating their food but instead breakfast will be catered.
If you have books for Telling Tales Festival, get them to Gerry Willard and he will get them to the Festival
Sergeant at Arms: Mae Radford was on duty today and introduced the Charter Members of the Club and promptly fined them - Dean Rutty excepted. She had two quizzes prepared , one on Aretha Franklin and one on Rotary Ribfests in Ontario. Answers were expected from each table. Thankfully our table didn’t have the most correct answers as the ones that did had to pay a fine.
Rob Sybersma was named Rotarian of the Week for all the work he does weekly and probably daily collecting money from all us members and writing cheques for expenses and keeping the books straight for the club.
Guest Speaker:
Peter Thoem was our guest speaker today outlining his most recent Life Experience which he experienced this July during a 2 week expedition to Kyrgyzstan. Where is this nation? It is a nation located in Central Asia. Landlocked and mountainous, Kyrgyzstan is bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Uzbekistan to the west, Tajikistan to the southwest and China to the east. To put it another way, it is just northeast of Afghanistan. How did he wind up there? He enlisted with an organization called Biosphere Expeditions that conduct wildlife conservation holidays and research work in many parts of the world. In Peter’s project, he was a paying volunteer to help a scientist to find snow leopards or evidence that they exist in Kyrgyzstan and encourage that government to designate snow leopards as an endangered species so that their numbers would be allowed to grow.
Peter was one of 14 volunteers plus a cook, guides and team scientist from Kiev in the Ukraine. They worked from a base camp set up in the Suusamyr Valley which is a long, wide glaciated valley with many tributary valleys feeding into it. Of course several large mountains encompass the whole area. Base camp included a so-called ‘comfortable’ 2 man tent for each person, a cooking tent, drying out tent and a dining tent. There were a couple of washroom tents and two impossible to use shower tents, so on the rare occasion anyone bathed they did so in a nearby wild and rushing stream with water fed from ice melt off the mountains. Two seconds immersion was about enough and if you happened to let anything out of your hands it was gone, you’d never see it again. Peter said that even though he has a good sleeping bag he was dressed in many layers most nights as the temperature rarely got above 10C and there was frost some mornings.
In terms of the research work they were conducting, they grouped themselves into smaller groups and hiked into the valleys heading up to the glaciers or moraines at the valley-heads to look for evidence of Snow Leopards such as footprints, scat and prey species (Argali a wild mountain goats, Ibex and Marmots). Camera traps were set up to capture images of any animals that might pass through. The team was told not to expect to see a Snow Leopards (and they didn’t) but one of the camera traps caught a photo of one (first in 5 years) . They also found the footprints of a mother and cub Snow Leopard and heard a credible account from a shepherd of finding the corpse of a cub high up in one of the valleys. The team found several petroglyphs (rock carvings) from another era. Peter’s team was in the mountains from July 9 -21 and another group was to follow them July 30 – August 11. Each year a full expedition report is prepared by the expedition’s scientist.
The Kyrgyzs (men) are excellent horsemen and whenever they have a social event they compete in a game called Kokboru, a team game resembling a cross between polo and rugby in which two teams of riders wrestle for possession of the headless/legless carcass of a goat. It is played at a full gallop and they attempt to deliver the carcass across the opposition's goal line, or into the opposition's goal. It is a mad race with no hold barred. Peter’s team got to watch a kokburo game when they were invited to attend the birthday party for a 6-month old (Probably it was traditionally worth celebrating when a child had survived the first 6 months) Guest are invited to several rounds of food all laid out inside a yurt. You have to sit on the floor, it’s hard on the knees and ankles because it is considered rude to sit with your feet pointing towards the food.
Peter told the story of another time and place where he was invited into a family’s spotless yurt where the floor was covered with many brightly coloured carpets and the walls draped with rugs and tapestries. They enjoyed a half hour or so taking and sharing photos , goodwill and happy conversation and using gestures and the handful of words they had in common: Kyrgys, Roosky, Canada, foto, niet, and da. (Canada flag pins opened a lot of social doors and were highly appreciated.)
One evening, a week or so after the Snow Leopard expedition was over, Peter had two maybe-one-litre beers over the course of dinner and while listening to entertainment after (a couple of hours). Next morning when he woke (and sat up) he couldn’t figure what on earth he’d drunk the night before. But when he went for breakfast and checked the brand of beer he discovered that it had 11.5% ABV.
Terry Sedore thanked Peter for his presentation made at the last minute as a fill-in replacement speaker.