The meeting was held in person at Centennial Tower, 17 Stewart Street, Oakville. Centennial Tower is a Rotary project. There were 22 people in attendance, including 5 guests (Peggy Dodds, Partner of Bob Dodds), Nancy O’Neil Eichenberg (Africa Mercy Ships and Guest Speaker), Melanie Warrington (Manages Rotary Residences), Arthur (Superintendent of Rotary Residences), and Carol (Spouse of Arthur).

 

A lovely invocation was presented by our speaker Nancy O’Neil Eichenberg from Africa Mercy Ships.

 

The meeting was opened at 6.30pm by Rudy Habesch (who was standing in for President Amin who was away in Jordan). Rudy toasted the King and Canada.

 

George Farrow was then thanked for being the visionary who started the RCO housing projects so many years ago.

 

Ralf Soeder announced that our next meeting (Feb. 27^th) will be a cluster meeting, where we will have the opportunity to meet members from the other three Oakville Rotary Clubs. We will have the privilege of hearing our district governor, Sandhya Maini speak at this meeting. It will take place at the Oakville Golf Club - further information to follow!

 

Mike Henry announced that there will be a fundraiser on March 4^th (lunch) at Baton Rouge restaurant in Oakville. This fundraiser is to raise money for the Shooting Stars Basketball team (Special Olympics team). For more information, please contact James Montague or Mike Henry.

 

Mike Henry also indicated that there are two opportunities for leadership training available to members: (1) Club leadership training and (2) Rotary Leadership Institute that starts in April. For more information on training, please contact Mike Henry.

 

Mike Henry said that we are on the continuous lookout for members to sit on various boards: boards that run the housing projects, the RCO Charitable Fund, RCO foundation board as well as the RCO club board.

 

George Vincent gave an update about the Electric Car Lottery. This year we are giving away a Mustang Mach E. It will be in our hot little hands in March 2023. Since we will have the car early, we can drive it around to the Ribfest, Midnight Madness, and other events to advertise the lottery. Additional prizes in the lottery draw include a Toro Electric Snowblower, Toro Lawn Mower and an Electric Bike. If you have any ideas related to advertising, please contact George Vincent. All the funds raised go to 4 nominated charities.

 

Sundeep Khosla mentioned that the next Global Medic Volunteering will take place Feb. 25^th between 1-3 pm. Address: Global Medic web site: https://globalmedic.ca/ Address: 1494 Wallace Rd. Oakville, ON L6L2Y2. (Third Line and Speers – SE corner). Contact Sundeep if you require further details.

 

Mahendra Shah let us know about the Halton Environment Network (https://haltonenvironet.ca/) , which is hosting a Generation Green Youth Conference event at Queen Elizabeth Park Community Center on Feb. 17^th between 9-4 pm . Here is the link to their marketing page: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/generation-green-youth-conference-202223-tickets-514230074997. The event is for students in Grades 7-12. The Halton Environment network requires 4-6 people to assist with the event on the day of, either in the morning or in the evening. Please contact Mahendra if you are interested in helping.

 

Next, we heard from our fabulous Speaker, Nancy O’Neil Eichenberg about Africa Mercy Ships. Nancy has worked as an operating room nurse for 51 years. She is a volunteer nurse with Africa Mercy Ships https://mercyships.ca/en/. In her talk, she shared her personal experiences, having now gone to five different countries on health/surgical missions with Africa Mercy Ships (Sierra Leone, Guinea, Congo, Madagascar (2x), and Cameron).

 

She told us that Africa Mercy Ships is a Christian organization with a mission to provide free medical care to people living in poverty in Africa.  Africa Mercy ships started in 1978. To achieve this mission, their hospital ships dock in various African countries, and patients come on their ships and receive medical care.  Their ships are invited by the governments of the countries to come. Africa Mercy Ships also set up an on-land hope center to help the patients recover after their procedures on the ship. They also provide mentorship and training programs to support local medical professionals.

 

 There is a great demand for what they do, so they must screen patients to see whom they could help. They do a lot of reconstructive surgeries. Some statistics she shared with us include: 67,000 operations performed, 572,000 patients treated, and about 200 volunteers hired and trained with each mission to come and help them. Interestingly, there is no blood bank on the ship. The volunteers on the ship, donate their blood.

 

Nancy then presented a powerful video that highlighted the results of their work on patients they cared for. Nancy also mentioned that through her work, she became aware of an orphanage in Africa with 45 mostly abandoned children that she ran across in her work. She is raising money to help support the orphanage.

 

We welcomed new members, Dilraj Sandhu, Martin Reist and Baljit Toki into our club with a wonderful induction ceremony.

 

We then did happy bucks and fines. Attendees were happy for Nancy’s presence at our meeting and the work that Mercy ships does, happy we were meeting at Centennial Tower and not on Zoom, and happy that we have three new members.

 

The meeting was closed at 8.00pm (ish)