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Rotary's Theme for 2015-16
The GREETERS:
05/19/16 Gary Kuntz and Tom Zobrist
05/26/16 Matt Kuhn and Drew Carter
05/26/16 Tom Broadwell and Carrie Lifer
06/02/16 Dave Wolf and Drew Carter
06/09/16 Joyce Young and Arnie Biondo
If you cannot greet on the day assigned, contact Kitty and she will schedule a replacement.
05/12/2016
Vice President Ron Hollenbeck opened the meeting at the Clubhouse at Yankee Trace with the Pledge of Allegiance. Harvey Smith gave the prayer, and Peachy Metzner led the singing of God Bless America.
The guests at the meeting included:
Mark Febus, guest of Judy Budi. Mark is a potential new member. He is with Home Care Assistance, which offers non-medical home assistance for older adults; Noe Camp, Isa Velez, and Abby Magoffin, Interact Club members from Centerville High School. Noe and Abby are juniors and Isa is a senior. They came with water bottles to sell to support the water pump project to bring clean water to a village in Malawi, Africa; Matt Biondi, the son of member Arnie Biondi. Matt is a student at Bowling Green; our speaker Greg Bixler, the CEO and co-founder of Design Outreach; and Mato Palovic, our exchange student from Slovakia, one of the most pleasant young men you might
ever meet. We wish him well when he goes back home. As you may have noticed in the pictures above, he is also a member of the school's Interact Club.
Greeters at the next meeting will be Gary Kuntz and Tom Zobrist. Help our new members get to know you as they greet you.
Announcements:
Vice President Ron Hollenbeck announced that member Harvey Smith was recognized for his Service Above Self at the District Conference for his training of club officers.
Ron said the club put in its request for project grant money by the end of April, but that there may be more funds available and that he was adding a project grant request that member Joyce Young has put in. The window for applying for the grants has been extended, he said. He said an assistant governor has been assigned to physically bring the grant money to the club when available. Our club has given the most to the Foundation per capita, "so that helps us with grants," he said.
Ron said the club officers had a meeting Wednesday night that Peachy forgot to attend. He said he hopes when Peachy becomes president that he will not forget to come to Rotary.
Reminders:
Ray Merz passed along a note at a previous meeting stating that Dr. Squire Brown will be making a presentation about the new Fourth Hangar at the Air Force Museum on May 26. The hangar is entirely for presidential airplanes. This will be days ahead of the formal ceremony.
On Friday, May 27, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., members are needed to work at the House of Bread.
Further Announcements:
Members from the Centerville Interact Club were at our May 12 meeting and the group raised $544 from the Happy Bucks for their student effort to help with the African clean water project our club has been working on.
HAPPY BUCKS:
Sgt.-at-Arms Erich Eggers collected Happy Bucks for the student water project. Members who gave $10 would get one of the water bottles. They came in black, blue and fuschia.
Many member bought one or more bottles and some just gave to the group without taking a bottle.
Harvey Smith gave his $10 for a bottle which he gave to Ann Blackburn, who forgot about the sale of bottles and only had a dollar to give. Yeah Harvey!
The goal is to raise $3,970 to buy a full water pump, with a company to match their sum, Noe Camp said. They have raised about one-third of the money thus far, Isa said.
Members could tell something happy or just buy a water bottle or donate during the Happy Bucks time.
Jeff Senney said his son graduated from OSU with a Doctor of Philosophy in economics. He has a job in Washington D.C. At the graduation 14 people showed up wearing FOG shirts....Friends of Garrett (sp?) kept by Jeff from a party long ago.
Butch Spencer bought 5 bottles and Patrick Beckel six. Patrick said his two sons have auditioned for a movie at the WSU movie department.
Peachy not only bought two water bottles, but he also donated $40 as a fine for his missing last night's meeting for club officers.
Because of a hand water pump in her village this Malawi woman has been able to make bricks, which
she used to build her house, and to grow a vegetable garden for food. Vickness Nyirenda stands
by her house in Zolomondo village in the central region of Malawi. The LifePump was installed
in 2013.
SPEAKER: Greg Bixler, CEO of DesignOutreach, creating life sustaining solutions for developing countries.
Greg said his company has 12 partner organizations that work to provide clean water in developing countries.
He has made trips to Central Asia, Honduras, El Salvador, Central Africa, and Malawi.. In partnership with
World Vision and donations from various organizations such as Rotary, DesignOutreach has been able to
provide LifePumps designed to reach depths of 325 feet, bringing clean water to those who otherwise might
not have water enough to drink or build bricks for houses and water gardens for food.
Greg said there are 660,000,000 people in the world who do not have access to safe water, meaning they do not live within a one kilometer radius of a water source.
He said 2,300 people a day die of water-born illnesses. About 1,000 of them are children, he said. As the father of a 6, 3, and 4-year old, he has great concern for the welfare of children, he said.
His company is a Christian humanitarian, non-governmental nonprofit organization, he said. He founded it seven years ago, not knowing at first how big the water problem is, he said.
In Malawi there was barely enough water for the 300 people living in the village he visited there, he said.
The picture below shows the small water hole the villagers had used to get water.
Girls had to learn to carry water on their heads and often have to walk two to three miles to get water several times a day. Many have had to drop out of school because they are too tired to walk so far and do all the carrying of water. In the picture below you see a young girl 3 or 4 learning how to carry water.
The picture above shows a man in Malawi using one of the old pumps that often broke down,
leaving the people without water at times.
These were high maintenance pumps that did not have the depth reach of LifePumps.
The glass on the left is not milk but the unclean water before the LifePump was used. The
glass on the right shows the water obtained from the deeper wells. With the LifePump
they can get 600 gallons of water a day for a 300 person village, Greg said. He showed the
area of the 100 pump project, taking place in Ethiopia, Nairobi, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, and Mali.
The pumps allow the people to plan for their future, Greg said. They have 68 LifePumps in Africa,
in six different countries, Greg said. They have one LifePump in Haiti and 10 or 11 in Mali. He
said 27,000 more peope now have safe and reliable water.Their goal is to reach two-and-a-half
million people by 2030, he said. They will need to build and supply 10,000 LifePumps. They are
progressive cavity pumps, which allows them to go deeper than other pumps, he said. The pumps
have rotary handles, and can be on a five-year maintenance schedule, making them a sustainable
solution. It takes about $10,000 to build a pump, he said. There is cost sharing with the
drilling. Steel and PVC are used for well development, he said. "We work with partners who are drillers."
