Vegetables, Frayne Mathijs, Coronado Function, Arts Festival, Phishing and a Fire.

Last Meeting
I stepped into the breech to talk about Vegetables I have Known...well, really to chat about where certain vegetables come from and some of the problems people have had with vegetables in the past.

Romain Lettuce

For example, Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the 6^th century tells of a holy nun who swallowed a lettuce leaf without making the Sign of the Cross over it and inadvertently swallowed a small devil along with the leaf.  Apparently small devils like hiding in lettuce leaves.  The resulting stomach ache was eventually relieved by a priest who admonished the small devil.  The devil was quite unrepentant and blamed the nun for her lapse of memory!  
Naturally the Catholic Church through its monasteries cultivated and developed other varieties of lettuce to make them less bitter that resulted in a reduction in the laudanum content and by the early Middle Ages round lettuces with good hearts had been created.  
The papal exile in Avignon was when lettuce was introduced to France hence the name above.

This Week
Frayne Mathijs will be talking to us about the Rotary Humanitarian Centre and Health Service.  I am not sure what that is about but Frayne is a member of the Rotary Club of Johannesburg New Dawn and they man the centre on Saturday mornings.

This is what she has to say about herself: 

Frayne at Rotary Family Health Day

From working in the metal industry and in timber and growing up in a mining town in Zambia, I have an interest in occupational health, safety and employee wellness. I have worked in regional, provincial, tertiary hospitals and district health services. Having been involved in primary health care in cancer, disability, HIV/AIDS and maternal and child health, I have a broad view of the challenges of transformation and service delivery particularly in rural areas. I have been involved in the SADC Health Sector National Integrated Strategy on Disability, National Cancer Control Programme and HIV/AIDS programmes. As an oncology nurse I have been in education, training and examining and at national level and Director Patient Service and Support for the Cancer Association in human resource development, palliative care and community development. As National Training Manager for St John Ambulance I was responsible for manual development, first aid training and community programmes. From experience in KZN, Western Cape and exposure in all provinces, together with my role in the National Progressive Primary Health Care Network and unification of nursing, I have gained enormously from a network of leaders at all levels of South African society. Working in chronic diseases and HIV&AIDS nationally, regionally and with SANAC has reinforced my commitment to health as a universal right and I am a champion for the NHI and willing to speak in the public domain on "Why we need the NHI and what we can do about it"

Social Function Friday 12th May with Rotary Club of Coronado
There are seven of them coming and they will be going to the Cradle of Humankind in teh morning so a lunchtime braai is not an option.  We could have the braai in the evening but it may be a bit cold and they will have been out for most of the day.  We have given them the option of having the braai or just joining them for a meal out somewhere.  They are having a meeting and will let us know what they would like to do.

Rotary Arts Festival

Costa Qually has been sending round the roster for people to make themselves available.  Today's is full of gaps.  It's in our interest to fill them up as quickly as possible because this one big effort is all we really need to make for fund raising.  If it doesn't work then we will have to have a number of fund raising events through-out the year and that's not easy.

Phishing
Lyn Collocott received a phishing email purportedly from me asking for R3 800.  I don't think it went to anyone else but it's obviously not my email address or my standard of English. I have reported it.

On 28 November 2016, high winds blew through the drought-stricken area around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, whipping a few isolated wildfires in Great Smoky Mountains National Park into a massive natural disaster.

“The whole horizon was aglow,” says Roy Helton, a member of the Rotary Club of Pigeon Forge. “My wife and I were taking turns getting up, checking to make sure the fire wasn’t getting close to our home. We have roughly 100,000 people in Sevier County, and I don’t think any of us slept very well that night.”

 The Heltons were lucky, but many others weren’t. The fire raced through the towns around Gatlinburg, destroying more than 2,400 structures. It spread over 17,000 acres so quickly that 14 people were trapped and killed, while others had to flee their homes. Around 14,000 people were evacuated from the area and not allowed to return for a week. Many lost everything, including their jobs. Gatlinburg, which sits on the edge of the national park, is a major tourist destination with millions of visitors each year

, but in the aftermath of the fires, many stayed away. 

“This wasn’t a regular forest fire,” says Jerry Wear, also a member of the Pigeon Forge club. “It was a firestorm.” Most fires, he notes, leave debris such as charred stoves and cars. But the Gatlinburg fire “was so intense, they melted.”

The following day, Helton, Wear, and other members of the five local Rotary clubs began emailing one another. A makeshift distribution center had been set up in Pigeon Forge, but it was not well-organized.

“I called it beautiful chaos,” says Helton. “But it was chaos.”

A few days after the fire, the Rotarians met with city officials. “I opened the meeting,” says Fred Heitman, then governor of District 6780, “and I said, ‘I’m sorry that all this happened. We’re Rotary. What can we do?’”

Helton had been working at the center. “They asked me a bunch of questions, and I kept saying, ‘You know, I really think Rotary would do a great job of managing this.’ And after an hour’s worth of discussion, everyone in the room said, ‘Yes, they would.’”

Roy Helton

Helton and Wear took over running the center, with Helton organizing the inside and Wear managing logistics. Every morning, Wear would email a list of needs to Heitman. Heitman would send the list on to 200 local Rotarians and to other district governors; each email eventually reached tens of thousands of people. The response was overwhelming: Whatever the center needed showed up the next day, in boxes from Amazon, in shipping containers, in people’s cars. Volunteers traveled to the center from across the country. 

“For the first six weeks, we averaged about 35 Rotarians a day,” says Helton. “One day we had four past district governors, plus the current district governor, working in the center.” All told, 24,000 people volunteered, many of them Rotarians, some of whom had lost their own homes and jobs.

The first day, a man limped in on burned feet, wearing bath slippers and the only clothes he could grab as he fled his house. He was one of up to 3,400 people a day who came for help in the first weeks. Because some victims were in shock and didn’t know what they needed, everyone who came in was paired with a volunteer. The center set up a pharmacy, worked with the Lions Club to procure new glasses for people who had lost theirs, and eventually collected some $4.1 million in mostly donated inventory.

Another thing that fire survivors needed, Wear says, was counseling. “We had children who’d been waking up at night crying because they were afraid the house was on fire and they were going to die. So we gave a $35,000 grant to our mental health organization.” 

Rotary Distribution Centre

Helton and Wear organized the center’s inventory into categories: groceries, women’s clothes, men’s clothes, kids’ clothes. Shoes were sorted by size. Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency were impressed. “They marveled at our setup,” Heitman says. “They said, ‘What logistics company did you get to do this for you? Someone with a logistics background obviously did this.’ And Jerry said, ‘No, it was me.’ And they said, ‘What’s your background?’ And he said, ‘I’m a schoolteacher.’”

Says Helton, “People from both FEMA and TEMA told us it was the best-run disaster relief center they had ever seen.” 

After 2½ months, it was time to close the center. Helton and Wear spent two weeks redistributing the remaining goods and began working on long-term recovery with a newly organized nonprofit called the Mountain Tough Recovery Team. 

“Rotarians have the right attitude,” says Wear. “They are willing to put their hands and back into it. That gave people a much better feeling about the situation because there were people here who cared and really worked hard to make life better for people who’d lost everything.”