Provo Rotary Weekly Bulletins

August 18, 2016 This week Tracey Christensen from the Now I Can Foundation came to speak with Provo Rotary. It is a special therapy program for children with very special physical therapy needs. Many of the children suffer from cerebral palsy or other very debilitating maladies. The founder, Tracey, went to Poland for four weeks in order to provide intensive training for her daughter. The trip was a great success, however, because more trips to Poland did not seem reasonable, Tracey and her husband decided to bring the intensive treatment style here to the US. Now they have a full-fledged program. If you would like to find out more about the foundation or how you can get involved, visit their website: http://www.nowican.org/.

August 11, 2016 Utah pioneer historian, Tom Alexander, came and spoke with Provo Rotary this week. He shared many things about the pioneers concerning life after they entered the Salt Lake Valley. The pioneers thought the valley was  beautiful when they entered. There were groves of trees and plenty of land ready to be farmed and irrigated. Struggles came though because of hardships with the weather and shortages of food. Some of the farmers would sell their grain to emigrants passing through to California, but it would mean that others still in the valley could not buy bread so all were encouraged to only sell grain to those in the valley. Conditions improved after 1849 when most of the shortages ended.  Two local students were also awarded Rotary scholarships!  Lovely view from the Riverside Country Club

August 4, 2016 Ron Pugh, one of our very own Rotary members, spoke with us about his many humanitarian trips to deliver eye glasses and offer his optometrist skills to third world countries. Ron uses a special method to test eyes which take about thirty minutes. This way he can help hundreds of people every day and people line up to see him when he comes. He collects hundreds of pairs of used eye glasses as well in order to give them to those he helps. Here is a video of one of expeditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7h9RCgMTuA.

August 3, 2016 This summer Rotary members went to the South Franklin Community Center to help plant their community garden. Thank you to all those who came and for your hard work.

July 28, 2016 Steve Gibson s tarted the nonprofit, ACE (Academy for Creating Enterprise), when he and his wife moved to the Philippines. For their nonprofit they help returned missionaries in cultivating countries become successful entrepreneurs. The country of the Philippines has the fourth largest number of LDS members, which is a part of the reason why they chose to move their first. Now ACE has been established in the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Zimbabwe, and Cambodia. Steve and his wife love their work and if someone's life has been changed, it's because that person chose to change their life. Poverty dies in people as they change. 

July 21, 2016 This week Emily Stevens from the  AMAR Foundation came to speak with us. As she has visited Iraq, she let us know about the people there.  Many of the people she met were doctors, nurses, scientists, or one of many other highly educated professionals, but now they are refugees. The AMAR organization in Iraq is staffed mainly by individuals from Iraq. However, there are only certain locations in Iraq that are still safe. Those who find a refugee camp are lucky as many others are stuck on the side of the road or half finished construction sites. If you would like to know more about how you can help or about this organization, you can find their website here:  http://www.amarfoundation.org/en-us/. We were also excited to introduce our newest member, Anna Bates. 

July 14, 2016 Al Switzler, co-founder of Vitalsmarts, came to speak with us. As a part of his work now, post-retirement, Al works on what he cares for most in life, mainly poetry. In Al's terminology, petry is the thing that causes you to see an dfell beauty in your life. You use poetry to leverage your life and the more you have of it, the better your life will be. There are moments every day where you can choose to leverage your life. His closing wish to us was this:  may you and I find the poetry (leverage) that will help you seek, and see, and become your best you-joyful, growing, and grateful.  We had some great moments today!