Off to Mazatlan
Henry Kroeker and Fred Gardner depart from the Grande
Prairie Tim Horton’s at 6:00 am on March 9th heading for Mazatlan Mexico along
with 4 other emergency vehicles driven by Swan City and Sunrise Rotary members.
Thank you to Sean Sergeant and the employees for their
helping to get the vehicle ready for the trip.
A nice history of the event was in Friday's newspaper.
Local Rotarians bound for Mexican sister-city
Posted 3 days ago
For the 10th straight year, thanks to Rotary clubs in Grande Prairie, some villages in Mexico are about to get much-needed and much-appreciated vehicles.
Rotarians from all three GP clubs today begin a seven-day road trip to Mazatlan, Mexico, the Swan City’s sister city, where they will donate two fire trucks, a tanker, an ambulance, as well as a school bus to nearby villages in need.
A Rotary club from Edson will also join the convoy with an additional fire truck.
The vehicles were given new life before heading on the 5,000-km journey, since some have been out of use for many years.
Sunrise Rotary president Mike O’Sullivan will be hitting the road in a 31-year-old fire truck adorned with Rotary logos, with past-president Tracey Vavrek. This will be his fourth road trip down.
“It’s a great international project for us, we’re basically recycling vehicles that would normally sit around because there isn’t much other use for them,” he said. “So we invest a bit into them, taking them to an area that can definitely use them.”
The Rotary Club in Mazatlan goes through applications from several groups before deciding which receive the vehicles.
“There’s criteria they all have to meet. They have to provide a licensed driver, insurance, repairs, that sort of thing.”
O’Sullivan cites a Mexican village where students are living far from home because there just wasn’t any transportation between home and school.
“A lot of times, students would sleep in abandoned houses, or try and live with other families. Some would sleep on the hillside, and they’d go back on the weekend.”
He recalls an ambulance donated to a city roughly the same size as Grande Prairie in the Mazatlan region.
“The hospital had no ambulance service, there was a first aid room in the town hall…and if you had to go to the hospital in Mazatlan, you had to wait until the public transit bus came along, and it was a day’s journey to get to the city to get to the hospital,” O’Sullivan said.
Vavrek said she’s excited for this project, as it’s one of the most visible and well-known projects Rotary does.
“It’s another amazing project of Rotarians working together on a local level, and as well on an international level,” she said.
O’Sullivan admits although the truck only has just over 20,000 km on the odometer, the trips can sometimes be a little long with such an old truck. The trip is not only great exposure for the club, but gives the members an opportunity to see aspects of the country tourists don’t see, and may not want to see.
“It’s a real eye-opener,” he said. graeme@dailyheraldtribune.com