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Dear Fellow Rotarians, visitors and guests!
WELCOME TO OUR E-CLUB!
Thank you for stopping by our club meeting! We hope you will enjoy your visit.
Our E-Club banner is shown at left! Please send us a virtual copy of your club banner and we will send you a copy of our new club banner in exchange. We will also display your club banner proudly on our meeting website.
We are now officially a fully-fledged chartered Rotary Club in District 7020. We celebrated our Charter Gala with the meeting posted the week of January 24. Our charter date is August 12, 2013. We hope you will find the content of our meeting enlightening and will give us the benefit of your opinion on the content.
Our club celebrates our 2014 Butterfly Storybook! Volumes One and Two are available online. Email us at rotaryeclub7020@gmail.com.
Visiting Rotarians. Click this link to Apply for a Make-up. We will send you and your club secretary a make-up confirmation.
Active Members. Click for Attendance Record.
Happy Hour Hangout. Happy Hour Hangout. Our Happy Hour Hangout on a Saturday morning is early enough so that you can join before your day gets away from you.
We meet for a live chat and sometimes business discussion. If you are interested in dropping by, please click the link below. Morning coffee is on the house! (Your house, that is...) Hope to see you there!
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The link to the Happy Hour Hangout for Saturday is at the bottom of this meeting.
Interested in joining us? Click the link Membership Application and Information.
Our President, Kitty, would now like to welcome you to this week's meeting. Please listen in...
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ROTARY E-CLUB OF THE CARIBBEAN, 7020
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ABCs OF ROTARY (Cliff Dochterman)
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| Cliff Dochterman RI President, 1992-93 |
Recreational and Vocational Fellowships
From stamp collecting to wine appreciation, the hobbies of Rotarians are as diverse as the membership itself. Yet, among the more than one million Rotarians worldwide, an amateur-radio enthusiast or a chess player is bound to find others who share the same passions.
But Recreational Fellowship members share more than just their common interest in sport diving or Esperanto; they share an interest in fellowship and service and in promoting world understanding. As such, it is no wonder that the International Skiing Fellowship or Rotarians donates the profits from ski events to The Rotary Foundation or that the Flying Rotarians help ferry medical personnel and supplies.
One as only to look at the types of Vocational Fellowships to recognize how they differ from their recreational counterparts. With Rotarians united by their shared professional interest in such fields a Hospital Administration and Finance/Banking, it is obvious that Vocational Service is as important a concern as international fellowship to the members of these groups.
Members exchange technical information and seek opportunities to employ their expertise in service not just to their own communities and countries, but to their professions as well. For example, the Ophthalmology International Vocational Fellowship organized a professional seminar on the subject of eye surgery in developing countries.
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FIRST SPEAKER - Cannabis
The surprising story of medical marijuana and pediatric epilepsy.
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CYCLING - Comparing the U.S. and Netherlands
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ROTARY FRIENDSHIP EXCHANGE
An interesting Rotary program of fellowship is the rotary Frienndshihp Echange. This activity, originally recommended by the New Horizons Committee in 1981, is intended to encourage Rotarians and spouses to visit with Rotarian families in other parts of the world. It may be conducted on a club-to-club or district-to-district basis.
The idea is for several Rotarian couples to travel to another country on a Rotary Friendship Exchange. Later, the hospitality is reversed when the visit is exchanged. After a successful pilot experiment, the Rotary Friendship Exchange has become a permanent program of Rotary.
The Rotary Friendship Exchange is frequently compared to the Group Study Exchange program of The Rotary Foundation, except that it involves Rotarian couples who personally pay for all expenses of their inter-country experience. Doors of friendship are opened in a way which could not be duplicated except in Rotary.
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UPDATE ON POLIO IN PAKISTAN
May 5, 2014
LONDON (AP) — For the first time ever, the World Health Organization on Monday declared the spread of polio an international public health emergency that could grow in the next few months and unravel the nearly three-decade effort to eradicate the crippling disease.
The agency described current polio outbreaks across at least 10 countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East as an "extraordinary event" that required a coordinated international response. It identified Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon as having allowed the virus to spread beyond their borders, and recommended that those three governments require citizens to obtain a certificate proving they have been vaccinated for polio before traveling abroad.
"Until it is eradicated, polio will continue to spread internationally, find and paralyze susceptible kids," Dr. Bruce Aylward, who leads WHO's polio efforts, said during a press briefing.
Critics, however, questioned whether Monday's announcement would make much of a difference, given the limits faced by governments confronting not only polio but armed insurrection and widespread poverty.
"What happens when you continue whipping a horse to go ever faster, no matter how rapidly he is already running?" said Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who led the WHO's initiative to get rid of smallpox, the only human disease ever to have been eradicated.
The WHO has never before issued an international alert on polio, a disease that usually strikes children under 5 and is most often spread through infected water. There is no specific cure, but several vaccines exist.
Experts are particularly concerned that polio is re-emerging in countries previously free of the disease, such as Syria, Somalia and Iraq, where civil war or unrest now complicates efforts to contain the virus. It is happening during the traditionally low season for the spread of polio, leaving experts worried that cases could spike as the weather becomes warmer and wetter in the coming months across the northern hemisphere.
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The vast majority of new cases are in Pakistan, a country which an independent monitoring board set up by the WHO has called "a powder keg that could ignite widespread polio transmission."
Dozens of polio workers have been killed over the last two years in Pakistan, where militants accuse them of spying for the U.S. government. Those suspicions stem at least partly from the disclosure that the CIA used a Pakistani doctor to uncover Osama bin Laden's hideout by trying to get blood samples from his family under the guise of a hepatitis vaccination program. U.S. commandos killed the al-Qaida leader in May 2011 in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad.
At the end of last month, there were 68 confirmed polio cases worldwide, compared with just 24 at the same time last year. In 2013, polio reappeared in Syria, sparking fears the civil war there could ignite a wider outbreak as refugees flee to other countries across the region. The virus has also been identified in the sewage system in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, although no cases have been spotted.
In February, the WHO found that polio had also returned to Iraq, where it spread from neighboring Syria. It is also circulating in Afghanistan (where it spread from Pakistan) and Equatorial Guinea (from neighboring Cameroon) as well as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.
Officials also worry countries torn by conflict, such as Ukraine, Sudan and the Central African Republic, are rife for polio reinfection.
Some critics say it may even be time to accept that polio may not be eradicated, since the deadline to wipe out the disease has already been missed several times. The ongoing effort costs about $1 billion a year.
"For the past two years, problems have steadily, and now rapidly mounted," Henderson said in an email. "It is becoming apparent that there are too many problems (for the polio eradication effort) to overcome, however many resources are assigned."
Henderson and others have suggested the extraordinary efforts needed for polio eradication might be better spent on other health programs, including routine vaccination programs for childhood diseases. But he conceded that transitioning to a control program would be difficult. "If not eradication, how does one accomplish a 'soft landing' which could sustain the global program on immunization?" Henderson said.
Aylward said the WHO and its partners, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, aren't yet considering pushing back their latest deadline to eradicate polio by 2018.
CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said the reemergence and spread of polio out of Pakistan, Cameroon and Syria pose "a serious threat to our ability to eradicate polio."
"Conflicts in many areas where polio is circulating are hampering efforts to vaccinate but success remains within reach," Frieden said.
Still, the independent board monitoring the progress being made on polio has called for overhauling the program.
"Few involved in (polio eradication) can give a clear account of how decisions are made," concluded a recent report by the group. "If a billion-dollar global business missed its major goal several times, it would be inconceivable that it would not revisit and revise its organizational and decision-making structure."
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AP Medical Writer Mike Stobbe contributed to this report from New York.
...http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/05/polio-spread-un_n_5266849.html#slide=start
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A MESSAGE FROM RI PRESIDENT, RON BURTON
Dear Club President,
On behalf of RI President Ron Burton, we’d like to thank you for your hard work to support Rotary.
Recently, President Burton recorded a message for all club presidents addressing ways to strengthen Rotary’s membership. As club presidents, you have a tremendous opportunity to affect membership at the club level.
We invite you to view President Burton’s video below.
Membership is the top organizational priority at Rotary after the End Polio Now Campaign. Take a moment and identify ways that you can grow membership.
We also want to hear about your successes. Share your ideas and best practices for increasing membership at the Membership Best Practices discussion group at Rotary.org.
Best regards,
Cindy Meehan
Director, Membership Development
Rotary International
Ron Burton membership message from Rotary International on Vimeo.
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SPEAKER FROM BOGOTA, COLOMBIA
Enrique Peñalosa was the mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, between 1998 and 2000. He advocates for sustainability and mobility in the cities of the future.
Enrique Peñalosa sees urban transportation not as a matter of convenience and economics but as a matter of justice, of equality for every resident. In his own city of Bogata, Colombia, where he was mayor from 1998 to 2001, he proudly says that more than 350 km of protected bicycle ways have been created.
These days, Peñalosa works as a consultant on urban strategy, advising officials in cities all over the world on how to build a sustainable cities that can not only survive but thrive in the future. He is president of the board of directors of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, an organization promoting sustainable and equitable transportation worldwide.
"While mayor, Peñalosa was responsible for numerous radical improvements to the city and its citizens. He promoted a city model giving priority to children and public spaces and restricting private car use, building hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, greenways, and parks. "
--Big Think
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FROM THE ROTARIAN MAGAZINE...
The Troubled Waters of Potosí
LEGEND has it, more than 400 years ago in a sparsely populated region of what is now southern Bolivia, Diego Huallpa, a young Quechua man, lit a fire at the base of a mountain to ward off the bitter cold. When he awoke the next morning, a trickle of molten silver had bubbled out of the ground beneath his fire.
He tried – and failed – to keep his discovery from the Spanish conquistadors. In 1545, they claimed the mountain, christened it Cerro Rico (“Rich Hill”), and built the town of Potosí at its foot. Within 50 years, Cerro Rico had become the most productive silver mine in the world, and Potosí one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the Spanish empire.
Over two centuries, miners removed 45,000 tons of silver from the mountain – 200 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty, and about 5 percent of all the silver in existence today. Most of it was stamped into Spanish dollars, or “pieces of eight,” which spread throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, becoming the world’s first global currency. The coins were legal tender in the United States until the mid-1800s.
By the time the Spanish had left, most of the silver was gone and millions of slave workers had died in the mines, which had been honeycombed with unstable tunnels that collapsed and entombed the miners.
Despite losing hundreds of feet, “the mountain that eats men,” as it became known, still looms over Potosí – which now ranks as one of the most polluted places on earth.
THOUSANDS of miles away, Tom Cooper is getting ready to take office as president of the Rotary Club of Norman, Okla., USA. It’s 2009, and Cooper, a former hydrologist with a passion for water projects, is eager to head up an effort that will have a lasting impact. That’s when it occurs to him: Universities typically have research projects in need of funding. He visits his alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, and meets Robert Nairn, director of its Center for Restoration of Ecosystems and Watersheds. Nairn tells Cooper about his team’s work on a low-tech, sustainable system to treat water contaminated by mining. The group had tested it in the state’s northeast corner, at the Tar Creek Superfund site, where lead and zinc mining had so severely degraded the environment that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had declared the water there “irretrievably damaged.”
That changed when University of Oklahoma researchers, working with the government and private sector, installed a passive treatment system that uses gravity to route contaminated groundwater through organic material and limestone gravel. The water, discharged from old mining boreholes, travels through several stages. Once clean, it flows into a tributary of Tar Creek.
Nairn tells Cooper that the system is working in Oklahoma, and that the team is trying out the technology in a smaller, pilot system near another severely polluted area: Potosí. He introduces Cooper to one of his most promising PhD students, Bill Strosnider, who is leading the research in Bolivia.
STROSNIDER visited Potosí for the first time in 2003, as a college student. He was volunteering with a nonprofit that designed fuel-efficient stoves for locals, but he never forgot his first glimpse of the town’s river. “Under the bridge in Potosí, the water looked like a strawberry garbage milkshake,” he says.
The image struck him. Strosnider, now 33, grew up in Pittsburgh’s Monongahela Valley, an area of heavy industry. He often played in the stream near his house, only to learn later that an abandoned coal mine had polluted it.
While working toward his PhD in environmental engineering, Strosnider returned to Potosí and spent a month sampling water downstream of mines throughout the region. Some of the water near the city registered nearly 0 on the pH scale. (Anything over 7, such as baking soda, is basic. Anything under 7 is acidic. Hot sauce is around 4; vinegar is 3.) As he researched acid mine drainage – the source of pollution in Potosí – he learned that the rock in the mountains of Bolivia (and in many U.S. mining regions) is full of naturally occurring lead, cadmium, arsenic, and other heavy metals that are harmful to human health. They pose no threat until miners expose new rock and hit the water table. When water and air meet the freshly cut rock, the water becomes acidic, and as it runs downhill, the acid water dissolves these metals into a toxic slurry.
“I couldn’t believe the concentrations of heavy metals,” Strosnider recalls. “When I ran the samples, I found arsenic, but also cadmium, chromium, cobalt, lead, nickel – so many toxic metals in these acid mine drainage sources, it just blew me away.” The arsenic in some places he sampled was 100,000 times higher than the legal limit in the United States.
His Bolivian research partner, Freddy Llanos, a professor of mining engineering at Tomás Frías University in Potosí and the owner of a small mine that operates without hitting the water table, was less surprised by the findings. He had seen firsthand the effects of the toxic water – stunted fruit trees, water that burns the tongue, wetlands scorched by the acidity.
In an area of such widespread pollution, the men searched for a site big enough to implement a passive treatment system, but small enough to manage. The Juckucha Valley would work. Even better, Strosnider knew a mine-owner there who was willing to team up with them.
AT FIRST GLANCE, you might mistake the Bolivian highlands for the golden hills of California. At 15,000 feet, you realize that these are not the craggy Sierras or the sharp Rockies; the Bolivian mountains are massive, with broad flanks and wide peaks. In between lie many river valleys.
The Juckucha Valley surrounds the Juckucha River, which weaves past villages down to an indigenous farming community called Vitichi. Here, the land is gentle and rounded. The river meanders through cottonwood stands, quaint town squares, and small farms. People are quiet and polite, growing grapes, peaches, and corn and raising alpaca. Villagers siphon river water to clean clothes and to water crops when rain is lacking, but few are foolish enough to drink from the river. Still, the town’s mayor says that many people don’t fully understand the danger. “They bathe in this water, even the children. After they bathe, their skin starts to itch,” he says. A few limited wells provide water for drinking, but not enough for the fields and livestock.
One fall day, almost everyone in Vitichi is at a market outside. Kids play on a ragged outdoor pool table while farmers move cattle past people selling dyes and vegetables, and drinking a sweet corn alcohol called chicha. “The contamination every year gets worse and worse, and the fruits are not the same quality as before. Now there are no peaches,” says one farmer, Hilarion Romero. “We started noticing it 10 to 15 years ago.”
As other farmers talk about their crops, a few toddlers splash in the water while a mother looks on. Another child walks over and dips his hands in for a drink.
Far above Vitichi, two main sources of runoff pollute the river: Kumurana mine and Andacava mine above it. The proprietor of Kumurana, a third-generation mine-owner named Patricia Monje, has committed to working with Strosnider and Llanos on an engineering solution to clean the river valley. “When they first talked to me, I thought, “Finally,’” Monje says. “The environmental problems here need technical solutions.”
Monje runs a small tin mine, which, unlike a silver mine, requires no added chemicals. Even so, a steady bright-orange stream runs all day from the mine, through her processing plant, across a series of ponds, and into the river. The water in the river above her mine is not much cleaner. The two alpine lakes that feed it are, by turns, bright red or bright blue from the metals within. Ringing them are about a dozen abandoned, century-old mines. Monje’s neighbor – Andacava, a larger operation – releases its runoff into a valley above her, and it sometimes feeds into their shared watershed.
Strosnider and Llanos proposed that they start by cleaning the water that flows into the property of the Kumurana mine with a passive system. “You start upstream and work your way downstream,” Strosnider explains. The engineers would clean the water flowing into Kumurana by lining two river channels above the mine with limestone quarried 40 miles away. Limestone offers a simple, sustainable solution: On the pH scale, limestone is basic, so when water runs over its surface, the water’s pH increases. As the water becomes less acidic, the dissolved metals can’t stay in a solution state, so they essentially coagulate and settle out.
In addition, the team would close an abandoned mine nearby to reduce its contamination of the area. As a next step, Monje agreed to construct an active system to treat the runoff from her mine, which will improve most of the water flowing into the Juckucha River.
BACK IN OKLAHOMA, Cooper knew he’d found the project he wanted to work on. He was excited by the idea that, if introduced successfully in Bolivia, the passive treatment method could help other developing countries clean their water. The project would be low-cost, sustainable, and manageable if the club could secure a grant from The Rotary Foundation.
“I told Bill, ‘You know, to get a Matching Grant, I need a host club. Do they have anybody in Potosí?’” Cooper recalls. “I said, ‘Get me a name and I’ll do the rest.’”
That name was Alfredo Porcel, one of Llanos’ university colleagues and, at the time, a member of the Rotary Club of Potosí. Cooper called him and said he was coming to Bolivia and hoped the Potosí club would act as host club on a Matching Grant to fund a cleanup project in the Juckucha River Valley. Potosí Rotarians were surprised and skeptical. “We’d seen a lot of scientists coming to Potosí – anthropologists, engineers, geologists. They did studies, but nothing ever happened,” says club member Marco Ortega Berrios. Another Potosí Rotarian, Sady Pardo, says they assumed that interest in the effort would fade.
But Strosnider and Cooper were determined. They went on a “road show,” visiting nine clubs across Oklahoma and Texas to ask for help. They raised about $50,000 for the project, and the Foundation provided $25,000 in Matching Grant funds, with the Potosí club as the host.
Cooper fulfilled his promise and made a trip down to Potosí with Jo Glover, of the Rotary Club of Norman-Cross Timbers. They met the local Rotarians and representatives from partner organization Engineers in Action. Cooper credits the Bolivian club members with securing key resources, including limestone.
“Finding the limestone suppliers – that’s something you don’t do from America,” Cooper says. “You have to know the ins and outs of that. That is a major undertaking. Sady Pardo did that.”
Until that point, the Potosí club had consisted of a few friends who met in a tiny room and talked about local news and made business contacts. Suddenly, they felt connected to the entire world. Cooper even arranged for them to attend a water conference at the University of Oklahoma to share their project with other environmental engineers.
IN 2010, workers began filling in the abandoned mine near Kumurana with limestone and sealed it with concrete so that all the water trickling out would pass through the limestone first. They also started hauling limestone to line the channels.
The process was difficult. They needed nearly 2,200 tons of rock, or about 150 dump-truck trips. Any project in Bolivia can easily fall into a political ditch – or an actual ditch. The massive trucks drove on impossibly narrow mountain roads, often coated with ice. When truck drivers met impediments, whether locked gates or mechanical problems, they often would dump their loads and leave. Strikes are common, and Bolivian workers regularly barricade roads, halting traffic, for days or weeks. Engineers in Action, based in Tulsa, Okla., and La Paz, Bolivia, acted as the contractor, helping to monitor the project on the ground and responding to each crisis.
In May 2011, with piles of limestone scattered across the valley, three dozen locals – young and old, women and men – showed up to haul boulders. The Potosí Rotarians, along with Llanos, Nairn, Strosnider, Cooper, Norman club member Neil Robinson, another professor, and several students helped out. They worked all day until the limestone-lined streams gleamed like long white snakes in the sun.
“HERE IS SOME ALGAE, SEE? It’s a good sign. Before, there was nothing green here,” Berrios says. It is 2013, and he is leaning over a tiny, whitish rivulet near the Kumurana mine on a chilly, overcast day. Up the valley, Strosnider and students from Saint Francis University, a small Pennsylvania college where he is now a professor, are taking readings of the water. He keeps them going all day, even through a heavy downpour of freezing rain.
In the two years since the team laid the limestone along the streambeds, the pH has crept up. Tiny, mossy wetland plants are sprouting up next to the stream, and algae are flourishing in places that were once barren. Birds have returned.
A few sprouts and a handful of slimy algae may not seem like much of a victory, but in this devastated ecosystem, they’re a small miracle. They’re also an indication that the graceful, imposing mountainsides here are not beyond hope.
Still, the project has a long road ahead. Due in part to red tape, Monje has not been able to finish constructing her plant’s treatment system, which has kept the project from moving on to the next step.
However, in early 2014, something “amazing” happened, Strosnider says: The Bolivian government agreed to fund active treatment systems at both the Kumurana and Andacava mines. Officials were spurred to action after villagers marched from rural Vitichi to Potosí, blocking roads and barricading government offices, to demand better water. The details are still emerging, but Strosnider says he hopes the government will pay for the installation of the active systems and the yearly costs to run them. Plans are for Engineers in Action to serve as contractor, and for Potosí Rotarians to administer the funds. Strosnider, along with Nairn and Llanos, will continue to advise during the project’s next stage.
Once the installation of the treatment systems is complete, a team can build a bigger passive system through a series of pools to further reduce the heavy metals. Cooper says the Norman club is standing by to help fund the next phase. Once that is complete, not only will the water be clean, but this small river valley may act as a model for other watersheds devastated by mining pollution.
“With a small investment from Rotary, we showed that there are solutions,” Strosnider says. “We’re going to bring back water quality for impoverished people.” – Erik Vance
http://therotarianmagazine.com/the-troubled-waters-of-potosi/
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CHEST-COMPRESSION-ONLY CPR
The new CPR - without mouth-to-mouth breathing - will help to double the victim's chance of survival.
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- Peace and Conflict Resolution
- Disease Prevention and Treatment
- Water and SanitationIf yo
- Maternal and Child Health
- Basic Education and Literacy
- Economic and Community Development
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ROTARY ANTHEM
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ROTARY WISDOM - Why I am a Rotarian
Austvik, of Trondheim, Norway, joined the Rotary Club of Trondeim in 1955. In addition to serving on the RI Board, he was governor of District 2300 in 1977-78 and aide to the RI president in 1998-99.
He held other RI positions, including International Assembly discussion leader, committee member and chair, and vice chair of the European Regional PolioPlus Committee, and served as
Austvik retired as director of the Thomas Angell Foundation, in Trondheim. Chair of a housing development company, he was a member of the Fulbright Alumni Association of Norway and was active with the Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
He was also a former assistant professor at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, USA.
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"THIS CLOSE" - We are ...
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TO END OUR MEETING
To end our meeting, please recite aloud (on your honour!) the Rotary Four-Way Test of the things we think, say, or do.
Keturah de Weever leads us:
1. Is it the TRUTH?
2. Is it FAIR to all concerned?
3. Will it BUILD GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
4. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
...and official close of meeting
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Thank you for stopping by our E-club meeting! We wish you well in the next week in all that you do for Rotary!
The meeting has now come to an end. Please do have a safe and happy week! If you have enjoyed our E-club meeting, please leave a comment below.
Rotary cheers!
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NEXT HAPPY HOUR HANGOUT - Wednesday, May 21
Our Board meeting will be held on Saturday morning, May 17
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