Rotary meeting May 3rd, 2017

Posted by Bill Lawrie on May 06, 2017
 
Great meeting.....Cross your fingers and toes for Sunshine on Thursday for SFPP.
 
Tri-cities Interact Club Claire Song and Kate Sim attended our meeting. 

Kate and Clare spoke to us about their excitement in being part the organizing process of a new Interact Club for the TriCities. The inspiration and motivation for starting the club comes from the excitement the students experienced from the RYIA weekend in March. The club will be sponsored by all 4 of the TriCities Rotary Clubs  and will be led by Karly Simms from the PoCo Club. Their first project will be to help Seniors with Technology and they will be participating in our RIBFEST with an information booth plus volunteer hours.

Guest speaker Elmer Stobbe with Pres. Patty and his wife Wilma.  
This will be Patty’s last meeting before she leaves for a month to spend time with family.  Her birthday will occur this year while she is away so we sang her our traditional Happy Birthday rendition.
Dan Gallant with Rotarian John Crowther.....John is from Ladysmith and will be joining us....Darrell not only books all our Guest Speakers, he works the cashiers desk in the morning too.
Nice to see Gary back at Rotary.  We always miss him when he is absent 
 
Peter giving us the update on SFPP....Bring in your coolers this week please...[with your name on it]
Bill thanking Elmer for his most informative talk on Lesotho.  Here is an excerpt from the quarterly report.
The last 50 years of aid has impoverished many nations especially on the African continent.  Lesotho, my home country is not an exception from the countries hard hit by dependency due to aggravation of services by international NGOs threatening economic sustainability and the self sustaining capacity of individuals.  The very same people that were supposed to be helped by these NGO's are now in many cases worse off with greater dependency upon aid. 
Basotho Building Lesotho [BBL] has adopted and adapted the Asset Based Community Development [ABCD] approach to break the cycle of poverty in rural Lesotho, by promoting within the communities viable solutions for long term financial sustainability and stable food production.  For more information go to Basotho Building Lesotho or the Multi-Nations Mission Foundation.

 

Our Guest speaker was Dr. Elmer Stobbe, retired Professor from the University of Manitoba, talking about Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) as a method to break the cycle of poverty in rural Lesotho, Africa. During his teaching and research career he was a Business Development Officer of projects for CIDA. In all cases Canada invested significantly in the equipment and somewhat in the training of the locals but he found the long term benefits did not match the financial investment. What he did find on 1 of his last trips was a University educated young man who was motivated to work with his local countrymen and women to teach them to support themselves. Dr. Stobbe has developed a mentoring program with this local young man (made possible with new technologies-internet/skyping, etc.) to empower the local farmers to grow for themselves to provide for their families and to grow products they can sell the excess through the local community markets. His “role has changed from program implementation to encouragement and mentoring the young next generation farmers”. He calls his project Basotho Building Lesotho (BBL) to break the cycle of poverty in rural Lesotho by promoting within the Communities viable solutions for long term financial sustainability and stable food production.