By Bill Maule
In addition to its work to benefit our local community, the Kingston-North Kitsap Rotary Club extends its efforts worldwide.
The funds raised in the club’s annual Golf Tournament, the weekly summer Beer Gardens and the July 4 Fun Run are divided among the club’s local, international and youth programs.
Over the years, the club has contributed to the Wheelchair Foundation to help people in many countries, and to Clear Path International to benefit its work with the civilian victims of land mines in south Asia.
Other contributions have gone to orphanages abroad, to send school supplies to Peru and Guatemala, and to join other Rotary clubs in a major freshwater project in Honduras.
Club members are excited now by two new special projects. One uses a creative construction system to build schools in Guatemala. A local post-and-beam method is used to build the framework, but it is nothing more than accumulated trash that provides the walls! Thousands of discarded water bottles are gathered, filled with plastic trash, and packed between two strands of chicken wire, then carefully cemented to provide inexpensive yet durable walls.
The club provided a substantial portion of the funds for a two-room schoolhouse now under construction in the village of Tzibal in far eastern Guatemala.
The second special interest focuses on the Hamar tribe of the remote southwestern corner of Ethiopia. The Hamar people and their unique culture have survived for many decades with little change to their semi-nomadic life of herding cattle and small plot vegetable farming. They have little knowledge of modern cash economies.
The ongoing draught has eliminated grass for the cattle and rain for gardens, forcing the tribe members to concentrate and settle where they survive on food aid.
The club’s funds are channeled through GTLI, a Bainbridge Island foundation that specializes in helping the Hamar survive in its new situation while preserving as much of a fascinating culture as possible. Last year’s project brought well water and, perhaps of even more importance, training in the proper sanitation needed to prevent disease in the Hamars’ now more sedentary lifestyle. This year’s efforts are helping the Hamar transition to a cash economy by providing training in literacy, business practices and the establishment of small local enterprises.
The club combines its local and international interests through its recent entry into Rotary’s Short-Term Exchange Program. Rotary facilitates a direct exchange between carefully selected families here and in some 15 countries abroad. A Kingston youth is a guest abroad for about a month, then returns home with a teenager from the overseas family and introduces the guest to the Kingston community. Last summer, Virginia Magnaghi was the guest of Kingston’s Megan Martin.
If all goes as planned, there will be triple the fun in 2012, thanks to plans to send abroad Buccaneers Simon Campos, Taylor Larson and Leah van Lieshout to countries not yet determined. Watch for them around town next summer.
