

The Rotary Club of Pagosa Springs, working with Rotary Clubs in Vienna, Austria and Niamey, Niger, has completed a project that provides both drinking and irrigation water for a village located in the Sub-Sahara desert of Africa. Drilling of this 350 foot deep well and management of distribution of the water was organized by the Catholic organization, Fraternité des Servantes du Christ à Maradi. This region, like most of Niger, is primarily Muslim.
This organization seeks to educate and generally improve the lives of the 7,500 residents living in the village of Saé Saboua. Because most of the water in this region comes from the July/August rainy season, water is scarce throughout much of the year. Most residents use contaminated surface water for drinking and bathing.


9:00 – 9:05AM | Overview of Participation Procedures Alexa King, Program Manager at the Open World Leadership Center Opening Remarks Jane Sargus, Executive Director of the Open World Leadership Center |
9:05 – 9:15 AM 9:15 – 9:50 AM 9:50 – 9:55 AM 9:55 – 10:25 AM 10:25 – 10:50 AM | Welcome Back to Pagosa Springs David Smith, Rotary Club of Pagosa Springs Host Families:
Alumni Updates from Kyrgyzstan: Presentation on what they have been up to since they participated on the Open World program and the effect of COVID-19 on the tourism industry in Kyrgyzstan.
Break The Effect of COVID-19 on Tourism in Pagosa Springs Mary Jo Coulehan Director of Tourism in Pagosa Springs Questions & Answers Brian Sandy, Park Manager V, Arboles, Navajo State Park, Colorado Questions & Answers |





Attend the District 5470's
Polio Day Virtual Event
November 1, 2020 from 12:00PM - 1:00PM LIVE with RI President Holger Knaack
During the COVID pandemic, the Pagosa Springs Rotary Club actively continues to serve our community and those most in need. The Rotary Club’s “Feed Our Children” program was established nine years ago by Rotarians Jo Bridges and Lassie Olin to meet the needs of children in elementary school who frequently came to school on Mondays and reported to their teachers that they were hungry over the weekend. Often these children utilized the free and reduced food program at the Pagosa Springs Elementary school during the week but were left without food support over the weekend.
When school suddenly switched to on-line this spring due to the pandemic, we had to quickly adapt our food model. For the past nine years, Rotarians have purchased large quantities of food and stored it in a food pantry, and then each week we would pack backpacks for individual families. On Fridays we would transport the backpacks to the elementary school and at the end of the school day Rotarians would hand out the backpacks to each child.
Fortunately, when the COVID related changes occurred in the local school, the school district decided to continue to provide daily breakfasts and lunches to those families in need. The Rotary Club has been able to work with the school transportation department, who agreed to deliver our weekend food via the school bus routes, as they were doing for the daily school food delivery. Rotarians have continued to serve the same families who had been in the program when the school closed.
Our communities’ economic strain continues, so when the school district received funds to be able to deliver food Monday through Friday throughout the summer, the Pagosa Springs Rotary Club jumped on board too. We reduced our volunteers to only three people working each week, two packing and one taking the bags to the bus barn. By doing this we were able to work in entirely separate areas safely. Currently, the Rotary “Feed Our Children” backpack program is serving 58 children weekly.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on 25 August announced that transmission of the wild poliovirus has officially been stopped in all 47 countries of its African region. This is a historic and vital step toward global eradication of polio, which is Rotary’s top priority.
After decades of hard won gains in the region, Rotary and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) — WHO, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Gavi, the vaccine alliance — are proclaiming the milestone an achievement in public health. They offer it as proof that strong commitment, coordination, and perseverance can rid the world of polio.
The certification that the African region is free of wild poliovirus comes after the independent Africa Regional Certification Commission (ARCC) conducted thorough field verifications that confirmed no new cases and analyzed documentation of polio surveillance, immunization, and laboratory capacity by Cameroon, Central African Republic, Nigeria, and South Sudan. The commission had already accepted the documentation of the other 43 countries in the region.
The last cases of polio caused by the wild virus in the African region were recorded in Nigeria’s northern state of Borno in August 2016, after two years with no cases. Conflict, along with challenges in reaching mobile populations, had hampered efforts to immunize children there.




