Rotateller Rotary Club of Owego, NY
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 Gary Williams, Editor

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. H. L. Mencken

VISITORS AND GUESTS:
Former member, Wilma Betcher

Hope, Kyla, and Malia, representing Sylvie’s host family

Bob Banker, guest of Bernie

Cody Rosenbarker who was our student in Belgium two years ago with his mother (on her birthday) and father

Sylvie Van De Velde

Chris Baumback, who will be Sylvie’s second host mother

Carolyn and Orv’s very attractive granddaughter

MUSIC:
Carl and Carole led us in “Home on the Range”

Happy Birthday to Glenn Srope

PICNIC:
Steve announced that our annual picnic will be in two weeks on September 2, at 6:00 PM at the Hickories. Plan to have a good time!

Maxime will be arriving at Binghamton Airport this Saturday evening at 7:30 PM. Jody and Paul Phillips, who just hosted Mati, will be his first host parents.

HOW ARE THE RAFFLE TICKET SALES COMING?

CROP WALK:
Terry announced that the walk will be in October. $10,000 was raised last year. ¼ of that stays in our area. Over the years, over $250,000 has been raised to feed the poor through this project in our area.

BOARD MEETING:
Thursday at 7:30 AM at the Treadway.

PROGRAMS:
Next week our speaker will be our exchange student who has returned from Russia who also got to visit China.

Cody shared with us about how being an exchange student has changed his life already. He took Spanish in high school but is now a French Education major. His minors are teaching English as a second language and anthropology. He has just returned from a service trip to China where he was teaching English for three hours each morning to children 12 to 16 years of age. One outcome of his Rotary experience is that he has been bitten by the travel bug.

Sylvie said “hello” and thanked us for this opportunity.

FINES:
Bernie fined everyone who did not get to meet Sylvie at the airport and Alice penalized those who were fined by giving them a squash.

Congratulations to Carole who has a great grandchild on the way!

PROGRAM:
Al introduced Ed Kang who moved south in Korea in 1950 during the war. He shared some of the highlights of the history of his country and a little of what it is like to live in a dictatorship which does not allow people to leave. North Korea may have lost 2 million people a few years ago as a result of flooding. The population is 20 million. There are 40 million in South Korea. In response to Orv’s question, Ed said that everyone in the north would move to the south if the border was open. Isn’t it interesting that the nations of the world without democracy have “democracy” in their name (?) Ed said that there are 12 million separated families in Korea. He got to see his mother once in 1981 after being separated for 30 years. He contrasted the situation with the Germanies prior to unification because East Germany was one of the most prosperous of the eastern block European nations. When we were in Seoul visiting Colin a number of years ago, Brendan and I felt foolish when we visited The Korean War Museum. We thought that it was about the Korean War that we knew, but was actually about 2000 years of wars. Korea is one of the locations in the world which has been trafficked and fought over for centuries.

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