At our in-person meeting last week we had some good discussions on a few topics and made a few decisions as well.

We agreed to purchase a peace pole with a view to it being installed at the city campus of Haileybury College. Depending on how that goes we will consider if one will be suitable for Simmons College as well.

We also agreed to participate in this year's International Women’s’ Day event by purchasing the $100.00 video file option to screen at an event that we need to organize. I have now gone ahead and made that purchase. I also contacted the North West Melbourne Precinct Association to see if they were interested to get their members to be involved in the event but their Executive Officer, Rebekah Symons wrote back today to say she just wasn’t up to organising anything from their end as she so under the pump holding everything together given that they currently are looking for a President, Secretary, Vice President, and committee members. Basically, she is working single handed to hold everything together and in doing so was successful in getting a $50,000.00 state government grant for the Precinct and later this year the City of Melbourne is about to give $100,000.00 to the precincts as well so they will be very cashed up and will be on the lookout for projects.

Anyway, for us, it means we still need to work out the best way to use our $100 investment in this project. When I purchased it I was advised that the way it is downloaded it can only be used on 1 occasion.

Of course, with the list of speakers I advised last week there should be plenty of interest from people to watch it. In case you forgot here is the speaker list.

We also discussed supporting Lorna Hannan’s idea of hosting a regular morning tea for the ladies in the highrise public housing buildings. Susan Robb has spoken to her and it looks like getting off the ground later this month on a fortnightly basis with our club providing assistance at the events with Susan, Cheryl, and Judy helping out.

Its good practice for me to be doing these weekly newsletters as I have had a reminder this week to get an article together by Friday about our club for the local paper and just in the last hour have been contacted by Networker to get some dot points together about our club for them to write an article.

In last week’s newsletter, I inserted a Stop Press with an update about Sainab incidentally did a short Wattsapp Video Call during the meeting last week. Well, a further update is she is still safely in her hotel in Nairobi, Kenya but she is not returning as planned. Her seats on her scheduled flight which was for today have been canceled due to capacity limitations due to the limitations of hotel quarantine and her next flight she has been put on by Qatar airlines is on 29^th March 2021 and this is not guaranteed and in fact, she will probably be lucky if she does keep that flight.

Ted and I have both spent a fair bit of time trying to help her and will continue to do so but it is limited as to what we can do. I will keep you updated.

Lastly, I am enclosing an article written by a friend of our club in India, being Alok Beswala from the Mumbai Western Elite Rotary Club that entered a team in a MUNA event. I enclose it as it includes what is probably a unique Rotary living situation where Alok lives in a large residential complex wherein the one complex there are 66 Rotarians, 11 Rotaractors, and 26 Interactors. They could almost have their own mini district conference in their own complex. Of the 66 Rotarians, 46 are in his own club and 20 from one other club. Let me know if that can be beaten anywhere in the world.

So I close with our speaker program as follows: