Lonnie Hackett Speaks to Rotary

 
Pres. Domenic opened the meeting at 12:30 pm.
 
Your scribe today was not well organized at the beginning, and missed some essential info, such as who did what to get our meeting started.
Fortunately, I did notice that PPs. Freehling, Sherman and Olsen were involved. But for the others who helped out, my apologies for failing to record your names and duties.
 
Fines & Happy $ - Pres. Domenic clearly wanted to move quickly into this phase of the meeting; he started things off with a generous number of Happy$, for PP. Frank’s great job with the planning and coordination of this year’s “Sand4Seniors” project, last Saturday at Brookhaven. Everything went smoothly, and Frank reported that we distributed 65 buckets of salt to seniors around town. That’s about 3,250 lbs of salt.
 
Other Happy $ came from PPs Don Martini, Dave Siekman and Don Sherman; the latter to commemorate recently retired Bob “Ace” Cunningham’s driving skills (?). PP Murry also contributed in honor of PP Frank’s leadership of the S4S event.
 
Our President had quite a list of announcements today:
            • PP Dave Sears has resigned from our RC; he’s now a farmer, somewhere east of the Berkshires, but too far from Lexington to ride his horse to Lexington every Monday.
            • Treasurer Donna will be mailing our next invoices in “early January.”
            • Holiday meeting, 21 December - sign up online, please, Yes or No, and then add the name(s) of any guests you are bringing to this annual festive meeting.
            • D.7930’s Polar Plunge is coming up on 23 Jan. 2016. Pres. Domenic and Steve Mead are already signed up. Sign up and help raise lots of money for RI’s End Polio Now campaign.
           
Weekly raffle prizes were donated by Eagle Bank, People’s United Bank, Arlex Oil and a couple of others, too, that I couldn’t hear because of all the chatter at the table — clearly, this chattier was not “fair to all concerned.”
 
Our Speaker today was Mr. Lonnie Hackett; without question, he is one of the most impressive young speakers we have heard. An honors graduate of Bowdoin College in 2014, he has already accomplished much for the children of a poor region of Africa, and he is just getting started. While teaching at a low-income school in Lusaka, and researching the HIV/AIDS epidemic there, he recognized both the scope of the challenge, and the opportunity to do something major to help out: empower the teachers, who see the children daily, to be the first line of defense. Train them to recognize the symptoms of HIV/AIDS (and other diseases), and report their observations to the Zambian government’s health authorities. This led him to found a non-profit organization in Lusaka, “Healthy Kids/Brighter Future” [HK/BF], “Because Every Child Has the Right to Health.” To date, HK/BF has helped over 11,000 children in 56 schools, trained and equipped over 90 teachers to also be health workers, to assist these children in getting health examinations, basic first aid, malaria testing, better nutrition, and safer drinking water. This program, initiated by one visiting scholar from the U.S., with financial assistance of several Rotary Clubs, plus lots of other people in both Zambia and the U.S. is off to a great start, and has ambitious growth plans. Mr. Hackett’s goal is to further modify HK/BF, and then expand this program to other regions of Zambia, then to the adjacent countries of Angola, Dem. Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia. in southern Africa. Then the rest of the continent, and the rest of the developing world!
 
To train, equip and employ one school teacher/health worker costs about US$550, to serve each child costs US$4.
 
If you missed his presentation Monday, please take a close look at www.HealthyKidsBrighterFuture.org.  HK/BF is a 501c3 non-profit organization in the U.S.
 
 
DBH
 
PS - Prior to todays speaker District 7939 Giving Chair Bob Gravino, PP Ipswich, presented our club with our (annual) 100% sustaining member club banners.