Lighthouses, a Social Meeting and Roots of Peace

Last Week

David Kinghorn

David Kinghorn gave us an extremely interesting talk on Robert Stevenson and Stevenson Lighthouses in Scotland.  Building lighthouses became a family and generational activity and the the Stevensons were still building or updating them well into the 20th century.

RLS

As in every family there is a black sheep and Robert Lewis Balfour Stephenson rebelled against his father and grandfather and succeeded in failing his engineering degree at Edinburgh University.  He eventually gained a law degree but never practiced law; a disappointment to his family.  He became increasingly bohemian and changed his name to Robert Louis Stevenson and the rest is history.

 The sunlight faded out some Rotarians but not our visitor, Thabelang Ralefu.

This Week
It's a social meeting and no doubt we will have a some feedback on Discon from President Jean.  We have also found that these meetings provide a very useful forum for prospective members to ask questions about the club and our projects...so if you are interested come and do so.

Vocational Service Awards
Start thinking about people whom you would like to propose for one of these awards.
First of all they must be people who have not received any recognition in the past.  We have made mistakes about that, one of our awardees had even received a Paul Harris from another Rotary Club!
Ideally we are looking for someone who is unobtrusive in what they do and yet the community benefit enormously from their involvement.
It maybe because of their skills but it must be pro bono work and it mustn't just be because they do their job well.
As usual we will make the awards at a Friday lunchtime meeting in February 2020 and the Lester Connock Award will be presented at the same time.

Heidi Kühn

Rotary Club of San Francisco

Heidi Kühn arrived in Utsunomiya, Japan, in 1975, a few months after the end of the Vietnam War. She was a Rotary Youth Exchange student, and what she saw and experienced in Japan led her to reflect on the post-World War II reconciliation between that country and her native United States. “The idea of former enemies bridging borders for peace left an impression in my heart,” she says.

More than 20 years later, Kühn had become a successful television journalist. She was asked by the Commonwealth Club of California, a well-known public affairs forum, to host an event featuring Jerry White, a land mine survivor who had escorted Princess Diana on her last humanitarian mission in 1997. It was a short time after the death of Diana, whose efforts to ban land mines had inspired Kühn. “That night, I made a prophetic toast,” she recalls. “‘May the world go from mines to vines.’”

Kühn decided to act on those words and founded a nonprofit called Roots of Peace that has worked to remove hundreds of thousands of land mines and other unexploded ordnance from farmland and replace them with productive fields, such as orchards and vineyards.

In Afghanistan, the organization has helped restore fields in the Shomali Plain north of Kabul, which had been a thriving agricultural region until the Taliban burned vineyards, cut down fruit trees, and laid land mines. Since 2003, Roots of Peace has connected growers with supermarket chains in India. 

Roots of Peace is also partnering with the Rotary clubs of San Francisco and Bangkok Klongtoey, Thailand, which received a $197,000 global grant from The Rotary Foundation to remove land mines and plant black pepper vines and taro in Vietnam’s Quang Tri province, and help farmers market the high-value crop.

Kühn and her husband and Roots of Peace partner, Gary Kühn, visited Afghanistan in 2018 to see the fruits of their labor. They flew out of Afghanistan on a cargo plane carrying the harvest. 

“To me, that was the greatest inspiration, the greatest moment in my life, to know that we can turn dreams into reality,” Kühn says. “Not just for ourselves, but for countless farmers and families around the world.”