Jim Schmidt opened the meeting with an awful joke. Ron Thompson promised to fine him. He was obviously under the influence of drugs – courtesy of his dentist.
Ray Smith led us in a rousing rendition of “In the Good Old Summertime”. In her presentation, our speaker from Ghana found the verbiage particularly amusing considering our current weather in AZ.
Lucinda offered a Rotary gift bag of items from Rotary International HQs. Daryl Bethea was the lucky winner and was even happier when he didn’t have to pay for it.
Our guests included Sandra Franco, AG from Westwood Interact Club. Jeremy R was the guest of Tim Troy. And just for good measure Frank Rosenberg’s daughter, Sammy, volunteered to taste the chocolate pie and pronounced it delicious.
On a very sad, but also happy note, Matthew Rotty announced he and his family are moving to Prescott where he starts work on Monday with Keller - Williams. This has been a long-time quest and has finally come through for him. We wish him well and will forward all good wishes for his new Rotary Club in Prescott.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
Kristin Klein’s ticket was drawn and all she had to do was pick the Ace of Clubs out of three cards. The small pot was $217 with the mega pot at $2313. The pictures say it all - anticipation and disappointment!
During happy dollars, Warren Williamson offer a suggestion for the food survey – eliminate anything that Greg O would not eat!!!!!
Don LaBarge still crying over his downed tree, and how his gate and trailer got tangled up. The poor man really wanted to win the pot this week.
Dan Coons reminded us that our exchange student, Carlos, from Ecuador arrives Saturday at PHX, terminal 4 at 3:59 pm.
GUEST SPEAKER
Debbie Koeneman introduced our speaker, Josephine Godwyll. She is pursuing her PHD at ASU in the School of Community Resources and Development.
Josephine’s early life in Ghana was tremendously influenced by her dad’s involvement with Rotary. She grew up in a small village and learned about the 4 – Way Test as a young girl. She still thinks about it today in her everyday actions and decisions.
As she became educated, she saw the need for rural areas and young people to learn about computers. At first, they only saw drawings of computers on a blackboard. She wanted to do more.
She founded a non-profit, Young at Heart and created DiggieClass training young people how to operate real computers – having never seen a real one previously. Through these classes they were able to create websites, research projects relative to them such as recycling scrap plastic, etc.
As a Geo-spatial engineer she was honored by the Ghana Institute of Engineers in the 2014 Engineering Excellence Awards for her research prowess and her passion for extending engineering principles into community development. She has been recognized as one of the top 3 young Africans championing a revolution in education on the continent. And was also chosen from over 40,000 applicants as 1 of 1000 young Africans who partook in President Obama’s Mandela Washington Fellowship program.
“I can only imagine what the next generation will be able to achieve and the problems they will be encouraged to solve using I.T. as a tool, but it all depends on encouraging creativity with digital tools at an early age” - Josephine Marie Godwyll
At the end of her presentation, Josephine expressed an interest in becoming a Rotarian. Lucinda General and John Pennypacker, both offered to help introduce her to a club close to ASU.