Friends Programme, March 2008At the March Friend’s meeting we attended a Lecture Evening on DVT sponsored by Boehringer-Ingelheim and hosted by our own Rotarian, the Managing Director of BI, Uwe Weiler. This was the 4th Boehringer-Ingelheim lecture on current Medical Topics with top Professors lecturing and the first to co-incide with a Friends evening. The Guest Speaker on this occasion lecturing on DVT was Professor Ajay K. Kakkar BSc, MBBS (Hons), PhD, FRCS from the Thrombosis Research Institute – an excellent talk with a very good Q & A session. After the lecture the Company very generously donated the food and wine free. The £1000 donations raised from circa 100 people attending was then matched by BI and the £2000 funds raised was donated to Anti Coagulation Europe. For the April Friend’s meeting we are very pleased to welcome John Stafford from the Rotary Club of Burnham Beeches who will talk to us about “Rotary Hand Up for Africa - Micro Credit in Malawi”. Micro-loans received considerable publicity when a University Professor in Bangladesh received international acclaim for his work in raising the living standards of many poor persons who had initiative but lacked access to funds. The scheme has now spread worldwide and the current Rotary District 1090 aim is to raise £100,000 over three years and channel it, via ‘Opportunity International UK’ in Oxford, to Malawi. Malawi is the 7th poorest country in the world. It has seven months of drought and five months of rain, leading to subsistence farming with an average per-capita income of 45 pence per day! Micro loans are arranged through the centralised administration of Opportunity International Bank of Malawi which vets all applicants. There are, currently, about 9,000 borrowers with an average loan of circa £77. Repayments are reliable with 98% clearing their loan within the period agreed. The dream of Rotarians is to enable those severely disadvantaged and excluded, to get back on to ‘life’s wheel’ and advance out of poverty and illiteracy. The Rotary Club of Ascot commitment to this scheme is £500 p.a. for three years and is a small price to pay to fulfil a dream and give Africans a ‘hand-up’. John Stafford will give us a full insight into the inner workings of this very worthwhile scheme. Format for the evening 1900 - 1930 - Meet in the bar Kind regards Peter |