QB SUNRISE
SCUTTLEBUTT

The QB Sunrise Scuttlebutt is a weekly publication that highlights the activities of the Rotary Club of Qualicum Beach Sunrise.



Last Week in Rotary


Visioning Session
What do we want our club to look like in 2015?
That was the question we were asked to respond to at the Visioning session held last Thursday. Wayne Beckwith (RC of South Cowichan), Cathy Power (RC of Nanaimo Oceanside) and Craig Gillis (RC of Campbell River Daybreak) led us through an exercise that:

1. Had us each identify our personal vision for the Club in 2015
2. The Vision statements were then all posted
3. We followed up with a consensus voting exercise
4. And finally the vision statements were prioritized

President Ken’s job is to take the prioritized vision statements, organize them and then present them to the club at our Club Assembly next week.




Allan Gannon volunteered Lauren to head a small group that will then work with the Vision Statements and create a Long Range Plan for our club. The Long Range Plan will be presented to the club for discussion at the Club Assembly on March 16th.




President Elect David and his 2010-11 Board will then prepare an Action Plan for the next Rotary Year and the Action Plan is to be completed by May 31. How David and the Board will share the Plan with club members has not yet been determined.


Wayne, Cathy and Craig indicated that there are three measures of success for clubs that complete a Visioning process:

1. An immediate measure of progress will be our pledge and willingness to move the planning processes from a nice-to-do concept to meaningful growth program for the club, our members and our community.
2. The second is that the output from this session is woven into the annual plans of the incoming and succeeding Presidents. It will be reflected in the continuity and consistency of programming and leadership of our Club.
3. Finally, the long-term mark of accomplishment will be at the end of five years when our club advances from where we are now to where we want to be.

We owe a vote of thanks to Wayne, Cathy and Craig for helping us through this, the first step in our long range planning exercise. Thanks Wayne, Cathy and Craig!



This Week in Rotary


WCS Mid Island Meeting; Saturday Feb 13; 0930 – 1200 noon; School District #68 Admin Centre; 395 Wakesiah Avenue


Valentines Day is Sunday – forget your sweetie at your peril


February 16th Activity Roster

1. Greeter – Allison Morgan
2. 50-50 – Doug Sly
3. Rotary Moment – Ron Stothers
4. Invocation – Bob Brown

February 9th Meeting

Program

Wild Life and Young Life
The thought occurred to me, as we listened to this mornings presentation - isn’t this community fortunate to have a Doug Lochhead in our midst! People like Doug, and there are hundreds, no thousands across our country, just like Doug, who certainly aren’t in it for the money, who possibly go without some of the material things that others in our society deem essential but who on the scale that matters, the scale of true job satisfaction, must score a perfect 10.


Young Life was formed in 1941; came to Canada in 1954; to Qualicum Beach in 2004; and has 30,000 volunteers world wide.
There are 2 Clubs serving the Qualicum Beach, Errington, Coombs, Whiskey Creek and Bowser communities; Wild Life for children in grades 6 to 8 and; Young Life for kids from grade 9 through 12. St Stephens donates their Hall which is used as a drop in center for the kids. Doug describes the centre as a “safe place for kids to go”. The organization helps kids to make choices, kids that are lost or confused or lonely or scared can find their way, and with Doug’s help, make good life choices. They see 100 to 150 kids each week.


The local Young Life chapter operates on a very meager budget of $52,000 annually and receives gifts in kind from St Stephens and others as well as cash donations from local churches, businesses, service organizations like Rotary and from individuals. We supported Doug and Young Life 2 years ago and I for one think that support should continue on a regular basis.

Spotlight on Rotary and Rotarians

NOWHERE TO GO
In the January edition of the Rotarian an article by Rose George caught my eye. The story caption reads: “Health Crisis Thrive Where Toilets Don’t Exist. It’s a Problem No One Wants To Talk About.”

I n the bustling main street at the entrance to Shanti Nagar, off Mumbai’s western expressway, men in suits go about their business. Women carry containers, hurrying to fill them in the two hours that water comes through the taps.
The shopkeepers and doctors and quacks and barbers do a brisk trade. It looks and sounds like any Indian street – only narrower and darker – and looking in, perhaps you wonder what makes Shanti Nagar a slum. So you turn around and see, on the dusty roadside, as the cars zoom past, a series of little children’s bottoms, perched nakedly and shamelessly in public, defecating with composure. After the children jump up and scamper down the embankment, disappearing back into the slum, you notice that the roadside is dotted with feces, as far down as you can see.


Why does it matter? It’s not simply a dereliction of dignity. Human waste is a highly efficient weapon of mass destruction. Feces can carry 50 communicable diseases, including cholera, hepatitis, and schistosomiasis. Where people have poor or no sanitation, human excrement gets tramped into living environments on people’s feet and carried in on fingers. It finds its way into food and drink, with desperate consequences. Diarrhea – 90 percent of which is caused by contaminated food or water – kills up to two million people a year, most of them children. It kills more children under five than AIDS, tuberculosis, or malaria. In graphic terms, diarrhea’s death toll is equivalent to two jumbo jets full of children dying every four hours, or one child every 15 seconds. Several have died in the time it has taken you to read this far. Read that sentence again, and there’s another one gone.


Our Bukati Project, where our club, under Doug's leadership, spearheaded the construction of 16 latrines, will have gone a long way toward addressing the potential for disease at the Bukati School; its for that reason I thought it appropriate to focus on this topic in today’s Spotlight on Rotary and Rotarians.