Rotary Club of Parramatta City Newsletter for Monday 29 August 2011

1. Rotary Club of Parramatta City
COMMUNITY NETWORKER
ROTARY CLUB OF PARRAMATTA CITY
PRESIDENT MESSAGE AQUABOX
AUSTRALIA
Last week Dr Mai Nguyen, a very small Vietnamese women who
lectures at the University of Netherlands in applied Science told us of
her plans to spend twelve months travelling through the middle east to
understand and show that a young, female, single non-Muslim woman
with no particular power can embark on a world trip with deep Aquabox Australia is a project of the
Rotary Club of Eltham and
involvement within the Middle Eastern life in search for ultimate is a variation of the Aquabox project
understanding and intention and to share this understanding conceived and developed by the
Rotary Club of Wirksworth in the U.K.
Gutsy, yes and she travelled through the Originally, the Rotary Club of Eltham
invited donors to fill boxes with
center of Africa already on her quest to humanitarian aid from a long list of
items that included clothes, personal
demystify misunderstandings. items and toys.
Our members showed concern for her However, following an agreement with
our Government’s aid agency
welfare, because she is small, alone and the AusAID, a prescriptive list of
components is now supplied and
perception of a female travelling in a land that packed by the Club before the filled
we have heard of some many stories of box is sent to AusAID’s holding
station in Brisbane. From there,
mistreatment. AusAID provide shipment to disaster
zones where the boxes can help
I remind members that we have witnessed provide potable water to needy
communities.
in Rotary many Rotarians that have been What is an Aquabox? .
alone and determined to undertake what others said as impossible. • It is a 78 litre container containing
water purification equipment and
Australian Rotary health, ROMAC and perhaps the biggest Polio. I humanitarian aid.
• It is able to purify 2,000 litres of
would like everyone to take some courage from Mai and perhaps if not polluted water.
change the world, but you can change some person’s life in our • Aquabox 30 is a version which
contains only water purification
community. We have so many programs that affect people’s life’s equipment (able to purify 33,000 litres
of water). Since 1992 over 85,000
within our reach, lets reach out and grab them and be engaged. Aquaboxes have been distributed to
disaster areas around the world,
I ask members to reserve Saturday afternoon September 17 th for a
providing in half a billion litres of
club visioning day between 1-5pm. David Ross is working on a location potable water.
The Rotary Club of Eltham adopted
to facilitate this and we may also need members to home host the Aquabox as a project in 2001 and
since that time boxes have been
facilitators who have travelled some distance to assist our club. distributed to disasters in Nepal, Iraq,
There will have to be a very good excuse for members not to attend Cambodia, East Timor, PNG, Niue,
Chad, Bangladesh, Colombo, Sri
and as I am expecting 100% attendance. If you want our community to Lanka, Samoa and Philippines. The
Club even provided 110 boxes to
benefit from having a Rotary Club in Parramatta and for our club to go the fire affected townships in Victoria
following “Black Saturday” In the first
forward and grow past our 39th year of operation, be there.
weeks of October 2009 over 400
Aquaboxes were distributed to
disaster affected areas in Samoa and
Philipines. The 2009 agreement with
AusAID to store and transport
Aquaboxes to disaster zones in our
region has added extra impetus to the
Club’s program. The Club has leased
premises in Eltham to enable it to
store, pack and prepare boxes for
shipment

2. Rotary Club of Parramatta City
CALENDAR OF EVENTS
August
29 Prashanth- The Wedding with all its glory and
splendor
September
5 Andrew Best-PPYC
17 Club visioning afternoon
18 Walk with me- BBQ Kings School 10am to 2.00pm
26 District Governor Visit
GUEST SPEAKER
Prashanth Paramanathan Bachelor of Business- Charles Sturt University
The Branch Manager of
Westpac South Parramatta
Branch, he is specializing in
Retail & Business banking,
Home finance, Relationship
Banking, Leadership and
mentoring coaching, public
speaking and business
management. Prashanth
speaks fluently three
languages (English, Tamil &
Sinhalese) and a limited
working proficiency in French.
He developed these skills
while attending Parramatta
High School.
Not only is he on the Board of Rotary Club of Parramatta City, but also on the board of the Parramatta
Chamber of Commerce. But today Prashanth will be presenting on his highly staged managed wedding in
Singapore and the honeymoon tripping the islands of Bali and the Pacific.
MEMBERS MATTERS
John Jenkins is in Concord Hospital and his daughter is now looking for a nursing home where better care
can be taken of him. John would enjoy a chat with members.
We have a visiting Rotarian Susan Okroglic from the Rotary Club of Dardanelle, please make feel
welcomed.

3. Rotary Club of Parramatta City
CLUB INITITIVE
John Surian’s walk/stroll/run/crawl Friday morning event at Parramatta Park is now in it’s second week
with a brave set of four commencing their walk at 6.00am. John is looking for a name, so for the member of
friend that can come with a beaut name, John is offering a prize to the lucky one. Otherwise be there next
Friday again at 6.00am. (Ample parking is available at that time on the RHS before you get to the Queen St
gate.)
OUR COMMUNITY
WALK WITH ME - PARRAMATTA
You are invited to take a step towards making a difference in the lives of people with
disabilities by participating in Northcott's annual Walk With Me event in Parramatta.
Hundreds of people of ALL abilities are coming together to walk side by side
to encourage us all to see a person first and not their disability, as well as raise vital
funds for respite services.
Walk With Me is a great way to spend a Sunday morning, with entertainment and
plenty of sporting and family-focused activities.
What: Walk With Me - Parramatta
When: Sunday, 18 September - 10:00am to 2:00pm
Where: The King's School - Doyle Oval, North Parramatta
To register for the walk contact Tony Warner, otherwise John Ching is looking for BBQ
volunteers to operate the club BBQ on the day.
OUR YOUTH
At the recent Board meeting approval was given for four young people to attend this
years Rypen course. Great work Tony and we look forward to hearing from these
young people at one of our meetings.
OUR INTERNATIONAL SERVICE
School of St Peters, Uganda
I hope this e-mail finds you well.
I am writing to confirm that we have received the money transferred to our bank account. The
amount received is $ 21,005.00. We will sit down as a club and implement the project accordingly. I will
let you know of the progress. I want to that you and members of your club for supporting this project to
help war affected children. God Bless You All ………………………..Robert Hardy Opira

4. Rotary Club of Parramatta City
FACEBOOK
We have now available for the club a new facebook page the shortcut is http://alturl.com/wvqj5
Please visit, make comments, open discussions and for your initial visit please hit the “like button”. The
reason is the more members who like the page, we receive additional features. The Facebook page is not a
substitute for our website, but more of an additional way to reach our audience.
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
ALBERT S ADAMS –RI PRESIDENT 1919-1920
Rotary Club of Atlanta, Georgia, USA
―Never take in a man for whom you will later have to make excuses, and never take in a man merely for
his bigness in material success unless it be sure that he is a Rotarian at heart. It is better to have 15 good
members than 75 members who are Rotarians in name only.‖
—1919 Rotary convention
REGISTER FOR 2011 ROTARY-UN DAY
The annual Rotary-UN Day will be held on Saturday, 5 November, at United Nations headquarters in New York
City.
Organized by the RI representatives to the UN, this year’s event will feature presentations from senior
UN staff and Rotary leaders as well as panel discussions on health, water, literacy, and youth.
High school-age students, including Interactors and Rotary Youth Exchange participants, can attend a
special youth program in the morning and join the adult program in the afternoon.

5. Rotary Club of Parramatta City
Download the registration form for RI-UN Day and the youth program.
For more information contact Brad Jenkins.
FROM RUSSIANS, WITH LOVE
by Daisy Sindelar
The Rotarian -- August 2011
I n the tiny Russian town of Beloomut, a pensioner named Vyacheslav is lucky to be alive. He had
minutes to escape before a wildfire tore through the village, 80 miles south of Moscow, last August.
When he returned several days later, nothing remained – neither his house nor a lifetime’s worth of
modest possessions. ―We fled with nothing more than the clothes we were wearing,‖ he says.
Stories like Vyacheslav’s played out in villages throughout western Russia last summer as record
temperatures and a prolonged drought sparked weeks of deadly forest fires. By the time it was all over,
tens of thousands of acres of pristine birch and pine forests had been destroyed, thousands of houses had
burned to the ground, and more than 50 people had died, trapped by the fast-moving walls of fire, some
of them stretching as long as 3 miles, with flames as high as 130 feet. (The heat wave itself claimed
thousands of people, most of them elderly, who succumbed to the choking smog and high temperatures
that smothered Moscow for more than a month.)
The government was slow to respond to the disaster. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has honed his
image as a relentless man of action, appeared on national television comforting victims and copiloting a
firefighting plane over burning tracts of forest. But such images were not enough to placate an
increasingly angry public.
Then an unexpected new resource filled the gap: a swell of public support, volunteerism, and charity.
The massive relief effort by private citizens was everything the Kremlin’s was not – organized,
effective, and humane.
One of the most active groups was Spravedlivaya Pomoshch, or Fair
Aid, a three-year-old charity based in Moscow. It accepted hundreds
of donations a day, ranging from single toothbrushes to carloads of
bottled water, clothing, and canned milk and meat.
Natalya Avilova, a coordinator at Fair Aid, says the group’s strategy
was to identify precisely what was needed and where – and then to
ensure that those supplies went directly to the people who needed
them, not to local bureaucrats. ―We don’t use a middleman,‖ she
says. ―We don’t work with local administrations or people who

6. Rotary Club of Parramatta City
consider themselves the heads of things. We work directly with the people who need the help and hand
things straight to them.‖
A natural impulse toward charity has not often been on display in today’s Russia. Although civic unity
was idealized during the Soviet era, many people grew accustomed to relying on the paternalistic state,
not their fellow citizens, in times of need. The collapse of the USSR left Russians reeling, emotionally
and economically. Any vestiges of communal spirit rapidly hardened into a practice of looking out for
yourself and your family – and no one else.
In the 1990s, pensioners who had spent a lifetime serving the country saw their meager savings vanish
overnight with currency devaluations. One devastating war in Chechnya ended and another began.
Prices skyrocketed, and so did crime.
The response of the average Russian was to turn down the volume. ―The thing that will bury us is that
we simply have no compassion for each other,‖ a Russian friend once told me. ―We never have, and we
never will.‖
But as living standards rise and frustration with the government mounts, compassion is emerging. In the
beginning, Fair Aid was hoping to collect enough supplies to assist a single fire-ravaged village. But the
group’s efforts proved so effective that it was able to deliver help to several dozen towns across three
regions.
―There’s never been something of this magnitude,‖ says Tatyana Protsenko, a lawyer who took a leave
of absence to answer phones and sort through supplies. ―People are simply helping each other. This is
the kind of situation where you have to put your own affairs aside for a while and deal with something
serious and important.‖
Avilova credits much of her organization’s success to the Internet, which it used to disseminate reliable
news and advice. Fair Aid’s Elizaveta Glinka, a physician who maintains a blog under her nickname,
Doctor Liza, posted lists of needed supplies. ―The next day,‖ Avilova says, ―Internet users would bring
us exactly what we asked for.‖
Such communication handed enormous power to Russia’s web-using public, particularly at a time when
the nation’s highly managed television stations were slow to react. Volunteer firefighters could turn to
the Internet for accurate information on what clothing and equipment to buy, and for the GPS
coordinates to get them to the blaze. And, perhaps most crucially, Fair Aid and other groups were able to
publish photographs and testimonials proving that donations had been delivered into the proper hands.
Olga Serebryanaya, a Russian Internet expert, says these events have given her countrymen back their
sense of community. ―All the social connections that used to exist between people have fallen apart in
recent years,‖ she says. ―And a moment of calamity like this has somehow shown us that we need to
create new connections. I see in this not only a need to help but a need to experience solidarity.‖
A year after the wildfire crisis, Russia’s charitable mood remains strong. After a terrorist blast killed
dozens of people at Moscow’s busiest airport in January, volunteers immediately began offering free
rides to stranded passengers. And in a New Year’s message on her blog, Doctor Liza listed Fair Aid’s
many 2010 achievements, which included helping to raise 50,000 rubles in aid for deaf and hearing
impaired children, donating funds and supplies to orphanages and homes for the elderly, and providing
more than 10,000 hot meals to homeless people at a city railway station.

7. Rotary Club of Parramatta City
―Without you, none of this would have happened,‖ she wrote to donors and volunteers. ―We not only
survived the crazy summer of 2010, we came to know an enormous number of people with whom we’ve
fallen in love and with whom we’re continuing to work now, in the cold. It means we’ll survive this
winter too.‖