Lansing Rotarians - Hope For Haiti

Jim Bodenner made a presentation on March 19 to the Lansing, Michigan Rotary club regarding the HydrAid BioSand Water Filter and the effort by Michigan Rotarians from Rotary Districts 6360 and 6290 to raise funds to send HydrAid filters to Haiti.  Rotarians are raising funds to ship 1,000 filters to Haiti in collaboration with Project Handclasp and the United States Navy. 

Jim recently returned from Haiti where he saw first hand the critical need for food, shelter and water by hundreds of thousand of people impacted by the January earthquake in Haiti.  

Rotarians from Rotary District 6360 can support the Hope for Haiti effort  by donating to the Rotary District 6360 Foundation at:

HOPE FOR HAITI
Rotary District 6360 Foundation
% Shari Labrenz
198 West Crooked Lake Drive
Kalamazoo, MI  49009


Rotarians from Rotary District 6290 and others can support the same Hope for Haiti effort by donating to the Rotary District 6290 - 501 C 3 organization at www.thirstingtoserve.org

Invocation: Omar Keith Helferich PhD

Water Conference 2010 March 27: The Calvin College

Meeting the Challenge?

Lord as citizens in Michigan, the Great Lakes State, we are blessed to have access to a key element of life- water.   As Rotarians we are able to take as a given the benefits from this critical element beyond our daily needs to include;

- Water is recreation

- Water is a resource for our businesses and

- Water is even plentiful enough to become a commercial product to be sold

Through natural processes our water resources also serve us through beauty, health, and life.

In contrast many of our global neighbors through no fault of their own must see water in a different vision-

- water is a scarce resource requiring total family commitments just to acquire daily needs

- water, when acquired, is frequently filthy, contaminated, with resulting illness and often contributing to the death of their precious children.

Let us be reminded that these circumstances result in the death of 5,000 to 8,000 of our global neighborhood children each day.  One of our Rotarians Lillian Cos has written a short poem that should cause us to think about this critical element- water.

Lord we dare not ask you bless our feast of clean water

Till it is sent to the poorest and to the least.

We dare not drink deeply from our wells

Unless our thirsty brothers and sisters drink too.

Not only at this time, but every day

There are thirsty children who are dying while we pray.

Teach us to do with less, and so to share

From our abundance even more than we can spare.

As we go about our busy lives let us apply the four way test – Truth, Fairness, Goodwill and Better Friendships, and Beneficial to All to Meet the Challenge of creating smiles on multitudes of our global neighborhood children as they are able to change their vision from  water is death to water is life.  Amen.