MEAL BOOKINGS FOR PEEL MANOR HOUSE - GENTLE REMINDER!
Please make your meal requests and payment direct to Peel Manor House by Sunday evening, prior to the Monday meeting. This will enable Paul to cater for the correct number of guests! Your attention to this is greatly appreciated. The link can be found at:
Country Director Zimbabwe - Tererai Trent International
Ms Munengwa is the Country Director of the TTI Foundation in Zimbabwe. She established the Country Office, policies and systems of TTI Foundation. Her responsibilities include co-ordinating and administering all operational aspects of TTI, liaison with donors, partners and stakeholders, board secretariat, social media content production and management. She manages a staff of 4 people and a number of volunteers.
Ms Munengwa spoke about the work of TTI in 12 public schools in rural ZImbabwe. the Foundation aims to create opportunities through access to quality education, with a focus on girls.
Girls in Focus
The power of girls’ education on national economic growth is undeniable. An educated girl holds the power to increase her earning potential and reduce poverty in her community. Unfortunately girls in rural areas are often forced to drop out of school early and suffer unequal treatment. It is still commonplace for rural girls to get married before they attain their high school diploma. For that reason, the TTI Foundation consciously targets rural schools – they believe they can narrow the gender gap in primary and secondary education ensuring that all girls in their schools system complete their full course of primary education.
(Link here - https://tererai.org/index.php/our-approach/
Water is Crucial
Whilst the TTI Foundation has a major focus on the education of girls, they also work to address the issues of water and sanitation, and nutrition, within the schools and communities. For the large part, rivers and streams are not safe places for children to source water, given that most of them can't swim. Drownings have occurred and the water quality is sometimes poor.
The Foundation has set a goal to place water bores within reach of schools. This water is used for sanitation, food and sustaining gardens producing food. Ms Munengwa noted that ablution books in schools are not necessarily flush systems, adding to the need for potable water.
The cost to install one bore is about USD12000, which includes all aspects of the work. Some bores only need to go down a short distance, while others are much deeper. The work in undertaken by specialist drillers and requires specialised materials. Many of the bores are accessed through manual pumping, which has been most efficient given the lack of electricity supplies in these areas.
Eclipse Driving School & The Rotary Clubs of Baldivis, Rockingham & Palm Beach provide the only Pre-Learner Drivers Course in Perth
This course is aimed at 15-16 year olds and is designed to help reduce the high fatality rate in our younger drivers, who are up to 40x more at risk of being in a crash in their first 6 months of driving.
You will be driving fully insured dual controlled vehicles with a professional instructor next to you.
PARENTS/CAREGIVERS MUST ATTEND WITH THEIR CHILD
Next available course - WATCH THIS SPACE!
LOCATION
Perth Motorplex
Cnr Anketell & Rockingham Roads, Kwinana Beach, WA 6167
Monica and Joel Hunter run Drip Hunters Plumbing and Gas so if you have any plumbing or gas needs, please contact Joel on 0439 922 548 and receive a discounted price for being a Rotarian.
ROTARY PROJECTS AROUND THE GLOBE
Through the years, Rotary has carried out thousands of projects to protect the environment. In just the last five years, we’ve allocated $18 million to projects that help our planet. Members have even more opportunities to focus on issues that are important to them, now that the environment is one of the causes we focus on.
Here are ways Rotary members are already supporting the environment.
Brazil
In Campo Mourão, Brazil, only 5 percent of garbage is recycled, and workers at the local recycling facility lacked the equipment needed to increase productivity. Without a conveyor belt, they had to sort recyclable materials at tables and move them by hand, requiring extra time and effort. And their outdated press was slow and created bales of recyclables that were smaller than standard for the regional market.
Working with a local environmental program that coordinates the recycling cooperative, the Rotary clubs of Campo Mourão and Little Rock, Arkansas, developed a project to increase workers’ capacity to separate and process recyclable materials, providing both economic and environmental benefits. The project funded equipment to improve worker safety and efficiency and provided environmental and financial training. Workers sorted an additional 2.63 tons of recyclables per month after the grant project was implemented, and their income increased nearly 25 percent per month.
• This story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue of Rotary magazine.
Kenya
In the remote villages of Ndandini and Kyaithani in eastern Kenya, families live on less than $1 per day, and their homes are not connected to any electrical grid. Most cannot afford kerosene or paraffin to light their homes, which means students cannot see to do their homework in the evenings. The Rotary clubs of Sunshine Coast-Sechelt, British Columbia, and Machakos, Kenya, learned about the problem while working in the area on other projects. In 2014, the Rotarians embarked on a project bring environmentally friendly solar power into homes and schools.
About 1,500 students attending local schools were each provided a solar light under a rent-to-own program; students pay $1 per month, less than the cost of paraffin, for eight months, after which they own the light. The proceeds are used to provide another student with a solar light the following year. Project partner Kenya Connect, noting that the time students spend reading has tripled with the introduction of the solar lights, described the program as “a game changer in our efforts to improve the quality of education for rural schools.”
The project also included the construction of computer labs at two schools and a solar system to provide enough power for the entire setup. More than 200 teachers received training on digital learning and ways to better make use of computers in their teaching.
This story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue of Rotary magazine.
India
Residents of two communities near Aurangabad, India, get their water from wells that are recharged annually by monsoon rains. But within a few months after the rains end, the wells run dry, and community members either must go further afield to fetch water or must buy it, which many cannot afford.
The Rotary clubs of Aurangabad East and Chatswood Roseville, Australia, collaborated on an eco-friendly solution using a simple, traditional technology: check dams. These small dams are constructed across gullies to control the rate of stormwater flow. They decrease erosion and increase the amount of water that percolates into the ground. More than 200,000 check dams have been built across India for this purpose; a check dam constructed in India in the second century is one of the world’s oldest water diversion structures still in use.
In Aurangabad, the monsoon rains flow via a channel across a government-owned sports training center toward the sewage-contaminated Kham River. Rotary members funded the construction of two concrete check dams on the campus. The increased percolation of the monsoon rains into the ground is expected to lengthen the period each year during which the area’s 20,000 residents can obtain water from their wells. The dams have an anticipated life span of 75 years and require little maintenance.
This story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue of Rotary magazine.