The Pagosa Springs Rotary Club is a diverse group of engaged individuals participating through friendship and camaraderie in opportunities to serve our community and other communities around the world.
Lead teachers in a high school in Niamey, Niger learn how to use voltmeters to determine the characteristics of resistors, diodes and capacitors.
The Rotary Club of Pagosa Springs is in the final phase of a project to improve science education in six high schools in Niger, Africa. There are nearly 4000 students in these schools, which include the last three years of secondary education. Girls make up 42% of the students.
Niger is a large country that includes much of the Sahara Desert. By most measures of prosperity, Niger as the least developed country in Africa. Yet, many students have set high goals for themselves. They want to become physicians, engineers, airline pilots and teachers. To achieve these goals, these students need access to quality education, including modern science classes.
Poorly developed countries need good science education if they are to lift themselves out of poverty. Niger has little coal, gas or oil, but it has lots of Sahara Desert sunshine. It also has substantial mineral deposits. Developing solar power and mineral assets is a high priority and will require engineers and technicians who understand science.
Although science teachers in Niger understand theory rather well, they have had little or no practical experience. They have not done lab experiments because they have had no lab equipment and no training. They have no lab manuals that describe how to do experiments.
The principal goals of our project is to help the Nigerien teachers develop lab manuals that align with their curriculum, provide supplies that are necessary to perform these experiments, and to train the teachers to perform the experiments. Good lab experiments help students to understand theory, to develop good technical skills and to see how science is connected to their lives.
High school science students use equipment provided by Rotary to study basic electronics
After travelling for 30 hours, I arrived in the capital of Niger, Niamey, with my five suitcases filled with lab supplies. Five Rotarians from our twin partner Rotary Club in Niamey met me at the airport and cleared the way through customs. All projects supported by the Rotary Foundation must have a host club in the country where the project will take place. The host clubs know the needs of their communities and how to best meet these needs
Having completed the first week of teacher training, I attended a physics class in the equivalent of our junior year of high school. There were 50 students, about 15 of which were girls.
There were no text books, so the teacher worked from a blackboard and dictated. The students took meticulous notes. This classroom is different from most physics classrooms in Niger because the teacher had some lab supplies, which had been provided several years ago by our Rotary Club.
The current project, which started three years ago, will cost $60,000. Most of the funding comes from a grant from the Rotary Foundation, which receives its funding from donations from 1.2 million Rotarians in 200 countries. Rotarians volunteering their time increase the value of these grants several fold.
My visit will last three weeks. The first week, which we have just completed, focused on training three lead teachers to do the lab experiments. During the next two weeks, these lead teachers will train an additional 30 science teachers from the six high schools supported by this grant. Each of these schools will have the equipment necessary to perform the lab experiments and teachers who have been trained to perform the experiments.
We had a very tasty Creamy Chicken Green Chili Stew this week thanks to our Sponsor, Pagosa Springs Rotary Club!
We served 230 hot meals and 385 frozen meals for a total of 615 meals this week.
Rotarians Ronnie Doctor and Larry McClintock assisted in the kitchen on Thursday and Kim Moore braved the not so bad weather outside distributing the meals. We even had people come back for seconds.
Our mystery donator struck again and we received $195 in donations for Loaves and Fishes.
Rotary’s area of focus for February: Peace and Conflict Prevention/Resolution
How we have supported Ukraine locally
While an ongoing conflict rages in Ukraine, it is difficult to see how we can help to build peace and prevent conflicts from our little corner of the world. While we, as Rotarians, are powerless to deter Putin we can continue to help ease the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Early on Rotarians contributed $15 million dollars to the Ukrainian Disaster Relief Fund. Over the last year this has funded many projects in collaboration with Ukrainians on the ground:
Provide ambulances, medical supplies, and medical units for the sick and injured.
Provide food, shelter supplies, water purification systems, and generators to ease the suffering of the civilian population.
District 5470 along with District 5440 (Northern CO, WY, and Western NE) District 5390 (Montana), and District 5180 (Central California), has used $200,000 of that money to provide beds, bedding supplies, and water purifiers to a Rotary Club in Kyiv.
As of January 30, Rotary International has reopened the Ukrainian Disaster Relief Fund for more donations. It’s another opportunity for District 5470 Rotary clubs and Rotarians to continue supporting the Ukrainian people. Donations to this Fund through the remainder of 2023 will be used for grants through June, 2024.
You can support THE ROTARY FOUNDATION to build peace and prevent conflicts worldwide
Through Peace Scholarships, our 7 World Peace Centers educate young men and women from all over the world in the important work of diplomacy and conflict resolution.
Funding of other areas of focus include: Disease Treatment and Prevention, Literacy, Water and Sanitation, Maternal and Child Health, Community Development, Supporting our Environment and Empowering Girls initiatives all help to alleviate problems that can ultimately sow the seeds of war and conflict.
I ask you to continue contributing to the ANNUAL FUND of THE ROTARY FOUNDATION. You can rest assured that you are helping to build peace and prevent future wars in our world.
Clean water is a basic need for human beings. When people, especially children, have access to clean water, they live healthier and more productive lives. However, at least 3,000 children die each day from diseases caused by unsafe water, which is what motivates our members to build wells, install rainwater harvesting systems, and teach community members how to maintain new infrastructure.
While very few people die of thirst, millions die from preventable waterborne diseases, providing the impetus for our members to also improve sanitation facilities in undeveloped countries. Members start by providing toilets and latrines that flush into a sewer or safe enclosure and then add education programs to promote hand-washing and other good hygiene habits.
From the various water projects in which Rotary has participated, we have come to know the obstacles that many people across the globe face when it comes to some of the basic necessities of life. We tend to take for granted the clean and generally safe and plentiful water sources to which we have access.
Rotary International, through the combined actions of individual Rotarians and Rotary Clubs, seeks to assure that all people have adequate access to clean and safe water. The Rotary theme for March, Water and Sanitation, asks us to focus on the life changing improvements that we can make through these international projects to provide a more readily available and healthy supply of water to all people.
The problem is not that the world will run out of water (that amount is fixed through evaporation and re-condensation). The problem is the unequal distribution of water and the lack of universal proper sanitary practices to assure safe water for drinking. While some regions and peoples are certainly at greater risk than others and deserving of greater attention, we have seen recently that no population is free from concern. Consider the lead problems in Flint, Michigan and the approaching Day Zero for Cape Town, South Africa (which fortunately has been moved further out and may never happen). Water and sanitation issues will certainly continue to be an area of focus for RI and deserving of our attention as Rotarians.
Rotary is dedicated to seven areas of focus to build international relationships, improve lives, and create a better world to support our peace efforts and end polio forever. Water and Sanitation is one of those seven areas of focus.
The members of the Pagosa Springs Rotary Club would like to thank our sponsors for their generous contribution to our 2022 fundraising campaign. These business and individual contributions helped us to raise over $45,850 this past year.
Our largest endeavor is providing scholarships for graduating High School Seniors. Since 1982, the Club has awarded $518,125, to 192 graduates. It is with great joy that we are following 13 Pagosa Springs college students, monitoring their class loads and grades to assure that we are being good stewards of the funds you have donated and that they are successful in their college careers.
The Club provides support for classroom needs through teacher mini grants. Last year, 14 specific teacher’s projects, unfunded through the schools, were able to come to fruition through Rotary.
3rd grade students were provided with hard-back, beautifully illustrated dictionaries of their very own.
Our Exchange Student, Agustin Periz Leal, from Las Grutas, Argentina arrived in August. He is enjoying our community and attending High School. We are thrilled to offer him this opportunity.
Rotary Youth Leadership Awards will be granted to 2 outstanding Sophomores or Juniors. The RYLA Retreat weekend provides a series of professionally developed presentations and activities that take participants through a process of assessing their personal leadership characteristics and understanding the ethics of leadership and setting personal goals.
The Club also continues to support the Pagosa Outreach Connection with representation on that review panel and funding for those in need of a one-time or emergency ‘hand-up’.
Your sponsorship is acknowledged and celebrated on our website! If you have a website URL, folks visiting pagosaspringsrotary.org can click on YOUR LOGO as our sponsor and be immediately re-directed to YOUR WEBSITE. It is one way we can say Thank You all year long. How many our ‘clicks’ or re-directs from our Rotary page directly to your website content can be monitored. Your company or name will be featured prominently as our sponsor in our publications and events.
We hope to have earned your trust and continued support as we move into another year of service in our community in 2023. One of our Rotarians will be calling or stopping by your business to answer questions or provide more information. We spend every penny thoughtfully. Check contributions can also be made payable to the Pagosa Rotary Community Assistance Fund and mailed to Rotary Club of Pagosa Springs at PO Box 685, Pagosa Springs, CO 81147.
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