Minutes from May 8, 2017

 

President Elect Richard Schwahn called the meeting to order promptly at 12:29, with the ring of the bell and welcomed everyone to today’s meeting.

Percy Anderson and Dan White were the greeters today, and Dan  introduced the members who brought guests:

Gary Pehrson had us all stand and led us in singing “Home on the Range” in honor of May Day, May the Fourth (be with you), and Cinco De Maio, and he threw in Mother’s Day as well;

We had two some red badges traded for blue badges today, congratulations to Wendy Lucas, Phil Giffin, and Steven Schnell.

Today we had the immense pleasure of having Alyssa Burton as our student of the month today, she is a very impressive young lady with great plans for the future.

Bill Schilling announced that they will be doing some work at Rotary Park Saturday at 10:00 to sculpt the foundation for the kiosk at the parking area.

Peaches Lynch announced the golf tournament that is to raise money for our international project at the Panama schools to build them some classrooms. They are in need of sponsors as well as teams to golf so please sign up.

Liz Becher gave us an update on District conference and let us know that she has paper registration sheets to help those who were unable to register online. There are lots of opportunities to get involved, speak with her if you would like to help out.

Hal Hutchinson announced that highway cleanup will be Thursday May 25^th 5:30 – 8:00, meet out across from the airport entrance at SST Energy. There are sheets on the table to sign up to help and we need 24 people to make it go smoothly.

Anne Ladd was nominated for her work on April 30^th with the Academic Awards, a tradition that her mom started many years ago.

Brian Deurloo nominated Bill Schilling for his continued work with Leadership Wyoming.

Bill Schilling nominated Dave Elmer and Craig Valdez both whom just graduated from Leadership Wyoming with honors this past weekend.

Jim Anderson nominated Denise Prugh for running in a half marathon in Denver this past weekend and finishing as a top contender.

Steve Loftin nominated the following for helping out with the Food Bank Of The Rockies packing last week; Tom Broumley, Rick and Vicki Diamond, Steve Loftin, Brian Deurloo, John Griffith and Clay Hawthorne.

PE Richard Schwahn thanked Susan Stubson, who was scheduled to be the speaker today, for allowing our speaker to present today before he had to leave the country. He then introduced our speaker for today, Thomas Lockhart, son of Tom and Lynn Lockhart. Thomas started by thanking Wyoming for supporting veterans and told us that Wyoming has 49,000 veterans in the State. He spoke to us about Afghanistan and what the U.S. is doing there. He works for the Combined Security Transition Command Afghanistan, their main mission is to train, advise, and assist the Afghans with their military and police forces. We no longer have the 60 to 100 thousand troops there, we now have 8400 and with the coalition partners that are also there to assist there are just a little over ten thousand total troops there to assist, advise and train both the military and police which are about 385,000 men. A lot of the equipment that they receive comes from the U.S. as they are a very poor country. The purpose of us being there is the long term institutionalization of the country. It is a huge undertaking with a price tag of about $5.1 billion, his group’s annual budget is about $2.3 billion. He works for a 2 star General but he is actually a civilian. In training and advising they also have to supply the equipment such as uniforms, weapons etc. He showed us a map of Kabul and all of the different areas they have to travel to which was neat to see the large area that they cover in order to do their jobs. Some areas they have to get to via Chinook Helicopters in order to visit the equipment depots. With the amount of stuff that comes through the depots they have to go help them organize everything to keep it all straight. In his capacity he does logistics, medical, and information and communication technology for the Afghanistans. They have to build trust between the Afghans themselves as they are not a very trusting people, and they have to build transparency so that the Afghans can see where the supplies are and know when they will arrive so they can understand that the stuff will be delivered and when. They are also struggling with the professionalization of their staff, they have many that do not know how to read and they have never had leadership or known how to take orders or direction from leadership so they have to train them and educate them on all of these aspects of professionalism. With the logistics they have to teach how to keep the depots organized and how to track all of the equipment. With the medical side they have to make sure that the Doctors have the supplies and equipment they need to treat the patients rather than having to send a patient away to somewhere where they can treat them. The part of information and communication technology, they have to train them how to use a computer and how to translate things and understand all of the technical aspects of the jobs of shipping, inventory and ordering. It is important for us to be there to help because there are too many influences in the countries around them like Russia, Iran, China, etc. also the influence of the 22 of the known 82 terrorist organizations reside in Afghanistan and they move back and forth between the surrounding countries so it is very crucial for us to be in Afghanistan. In order to get the equipment to Afghanistan it takes a long time and is very complicated to have it travel around the world and then around the country. The long term plan is that we need to get out of there so they are teaching them how to maintain the equipment, with trained mechanics that can fix the equipment if they have the right parts. It is a balancing act to keep the peace while building the capacity for them to take care of their own country as it is a very fragile situation.

 

President Elect Richard Scwahn concluded the meeting at 1:25; letting us know that next week we are back at the Parkway Plaza. Our Speaker will be Erich Frankland from Casper College.

“Rotary Serving Humanity”