Meeting of January 16 2008
The meeting was presided by President Michael Sheehan.
We had 10 members in attendance and 3 guests, which were visiting Rotarian Wendy Jennings from London North with their exchange student Nicolas Delagneau from France, and Visiting Rotarian and our speaker for the evening Blain McCutchen from Tavistock.
Happy Bucks from Coral Sheehan for losing her braces, Doug Vincent for his successfull Mexico shoebox trip, Tracey Hillier for her student program about phylantrophy and her students to start raising funds for Malaria nets for the Red Cross.
Which also started a short discussion about which charity to donate to and as explained by Doug that with the Rotary Foundation 100% of the donation goes to the assigned project with the possibility of matching grants which could raise a donation from a person of $100.00 to $300.00, and with other charities most of the time you lose anywhere from 10 to 60% of your donation for administrative cost.,
Happy bucks continued, Wendy Jennings for being with us and Peter Stam for going on a holiday to Chile.
Doug spoke about the shoebox program that got started with about 300 boxes some years ago by our club and successfully continues and is up to 1400 shoeboxes now and on top of that a number of families that received food.
The program is continueing the whole year and they will keep shipping monthly into th U.S. where it will be stored for distribution at Christmas or New Year.
So please keep the donations coming if you feel inclined to participate, just contact Doug for more info.
President Mike informed us that Susan Halyk's Father had passed on this last week and our thoughts are with them in this time of need.
Doug Vincent introduced our Speaker for this evening, Blaine McCutchen, who enligthened us about the Rotary program of Malaria Bed nets for Tanzania, called REMIT, which is short for Rotarians Eliminating Malaria in Tanzania.
As Blain explaned this is a United Nations and Rotary combined project. Malaria is the cause of about 3000 deaths of childreneach day, which could partly be prevented by the bed nets at a cost of $5.34 per net. In Tanzania alone, Over 100.000, mainly pregnant women and children under the age of 5, die each year from Malaria.
The life expectancy of Females is 46 years and males is 44 years, and the % of Adults wit HIV/AIDS (15-49 years), in 2003 was 8.8%, infant mortality of over 10% of live births. Malaria cases take up over 85% of the hospital space in Tanzania. In 2003 Tanzania registered over 11 million cases of Malaria.
Malaria is the most infectious desease and the mosquito is ranked as the most dangerous animal in the world.
A critical component of Malaria prevention is the use of a insecticide treated Malaria net, which most people can not afford and with this in mind, Cida,(Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has started this project with a contribution of $193.000, providing Canadian Rotarians can come up with $228,875. And the Rotary Club of Ridgetown has taken on this program and applied for matching grants of over $200.000 to make it all work.
To date our District 7080 alone has already raised over $50.000, so it would not be difficult if all Rotarians participated in Canada to raise a total of $228.875
We are all asked to pledge to this project if you can or want, we know that not everyone will participate, because there are many worthwhile programs to give to. Any donation is very much appreciated.
For more info on this, Blain McCutchen bmccutchen@rogers.com or contact our club.
Our winner of the 50/50 draw was the visiting exchange student from France, Nicolas Delagneau.
Meeting adjourned at 8 P.M.