Bulletins - 2007 - 08/07/2007
This
Week's Bulletin Was Written
By Jenny K. Goodman
President Whitehurst called an unusually rowdy group to order at 7:30 a.m. Dave McKee provided the invocation and Jonathon Stone lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Jonathon Stone got right to work raising money. He raffled off a gift certificate to one lucky winner. Oh, that would be me! Yay! Jeff Hogue paid a fine to announce his engagement to a fellow Rotarian (with the UTC club). James Bickford paid a fine for getting one of his clients off on a hung-jury for drunk driving despite clear evidence of the crime. We hope his client at least had to pay some big bucks for that service. Mel Gallegos and Melissa Blackburn celebrated birthdays. Jonathon announced that he plans to fine any member who fails to bring in something for the golf tournament fundraiser so you had better get your donations in order.
Pete McGuire welcomed many guests and visiting Rotarians. The Rotarian traveling the farthest today was from the Fredricksburg Germany club.
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Foundation Seminar is coming up. Sign up on the District Website.
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Make sure you register on the Rotary International website for QuickBits which will alert you to many interesting things going on with Rotary worldwide.
Maureen Eberle proudly introduced Daniel who is a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar who is staying with her. He is a 30 year old from Lampo Grande, Brazil. He showed us many pictures of his family's cattle farm and proudly described the natural beauty of his country. Daniel is a doctor doing research on nuerological disease. We look forward to getting to know Daniel over the next several months.
 The club acknowledged Don Lang and Mary Dawe for their multiple Paul Harris Fellowships. These two individuals are a great asset to our club and we thank them for their generous support.
 Lynn Hamilton introduced our speaker, Suresh Submaranian, who updated us on the Power of Love Foundation project. Suresh is the founder and Director of this community based HIV prevention program. There has been a significant increase of awareness of the global AIDS epidemic and as a result, the epidemic is starting to stabelize in Asian countries. Unfortunately it is actually increasing in teh U.S. and Europe because the pool of infected people is larger and live longer due to the availability of medicine here. Suresh reported that with a lot of the research that has now been conducted, they now know what needs to be done in order to eliminate and eradicate this problem but we need to be better at implementation. In Africa, the middle generation has practically been wiped out in a lot of families and the older generation is left to care for the younger generation. The Zambia project, which the club helped support with its matching grant, there are 141 children in the program who are now getting medicine and being monitored. The success of the program derives from the Foundation's insistence that the caretaker from the family learn to take care of the sick kids and the caretaker goes through an eight day program. We were inspired to see the faces of many of the kids that the Power of Love Foundation has been helping and we look forward to hearing from Suresh again. He, of course, did not go away empty handed as the club presented him with a check for $4,000.
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