Minutes Feb. 25th 2009
Presided By: President Norm Narancsik
In Attendance: Rick, Mike, Tim, Al, Keith, Norm, Steve, Erik, John, Peter V W, Paul L, Rama, Coral, Paul T, Peter S.
Guests: Jeff Workman, our guest speaker.
Happy/Sad Bucks and Voluntary donations: Erik realy went after people that had been on holidays and collected over $65.00 in voluntary donations. Several persons also volunteered a Happy Buck.
Announcements: We have a combined meeting coming up with the Tavistock Rotary Club in Tavistock.
Erik and Norm attended the Presidents meeting where there was talk about the District Simplyfied Grants Pilot project to start now for the next 3 years, ask Norm/Erik for more explanations if needed.
We are looking for a person up to 24 years of age to apply for an ambassadorial scholarship for 1 year to go outside of North America to attend school, the grant is for up to $25,000 dollard including living expenses.
A meeting coming up March 25th, our guest speaker will be someone from Toyota Canada, the meeting will be combined with other Rotary Clubs, more info to follow.
The Fish Fry is coming up quickly, april 18, tickets should be available soon.
Our Guest speaker, Jeff Workman was introduced by Paul Turner, Jeff is married and lives in Sheakespeare and works for Investment Counsel in Woodstock.
Jeff has been working with Big Brothers and Sisters and his dream was that he wanted to do something special for this group, and his motto is "live your dream"
This 8 year dream that became reality was climbing Mnt. Kilimanjaro.
His goal that he set with 2 friends was to raise $1.00 for every foot of hight of Mnt. Kilimanjaro, so it ended up to be $19,340.00 as this is the height of thye mountain.
It took 7 months of planning, 6 months of training for which the YMCA gave Jeff a free membership. So far Jeff has done about 15 presentations of their climb and raised $17,600.00
Jeff explained, Mnt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is the world highest free standing mountain. They started their climb in the rain forest with his 2 friends and 12 people as guides and porters which they had to hire.
There are lots of rules to follow when you go climbing and it is not very easy as you have to deal with high altitudes. They needed to take in about 4-5 liters of water each day and walk very slow. The porters were carrying about 45 lbs. each and don't have as much of a problem because their system was used to thye altitudes as they climbed more often. the total distance is about 25 miles to reach the top.
They started at Machane gate the first day, the 2nd day at Shira camp/Ridge, the 3th day at lava camp, 4th day at Barranco wall. The final camp was at 4681 meters, it was the last stop before the summit and the temperature was quite low.
It would take about 6 hours to reach Stella point and they started at midnight so they could see the sun come up, once there they were told they had to go another 45 minutes to 1 hour to reach Uhuru peak where the wooden sign is located at 5895 meters high. it took lots of efford to climb, but it took only 1.5 days to come back down.
Thank you for a great presentation, it opened our eyes to thing we were not aware of our hats off for raising so much money for Big Brothers and Sisters. It take someone special to do what you did.