Southtowne Rotary Stories

Gary Brown

Springs Satellite Club

My Rotary History. I joined The Estes Park Colorado Rotary Club in 1984 and have been a Rotarian ever since. We have hosted seven Rotary exchange students. I am a past president and past District Governor Assistant. My real love for Rotary stems from the incredible Polio Plus program, eradicating so much of the disease around the globe. What a humanitarian effort! I was a founder of the Springs satellite group under Southtowne, and serve on Southtowne’s Foundation board, currently co-chair of the scholarship program. My wife Kelly and I live at the Springs, and have a daughter in Eugene with two grandkids, and a son in Bend also with two grandkids. Lucky grandparents are we!

Gary Brown

Springs Satellite Club

My Rotary History. I joined The Estes Park Colorado Rotary Club in 1984 and have been a Rotarian ever since. We have hosted seven Rotary exchange students. I am a past president and past District Governor Assistant. My real love for Rotary stems from the incredible Polio Plus program, eradicating so much of the disease around the globe. What a humanitarian effort! I was a founder of the Springs satellite group under Southtowne, and serve on Southtowne’s Foundation board, currently co-chair of the scholarship program. My wife Kelly and I live at the Springs, and have a daughter in Eugene with two grandkids, and a son in Bend also with two grandkids. Lucky grandparents are we!

Lonny King

Back in the year 2000 the company I worked for, Mckenzie Commercial Contractors, built the Parish Hall for St. Johns Church.  Through that experience I met Maurice Moore, who was the business manager for the church.  He invited me to Rotary out at the Veterans club on W. 11th Ave..  The rest, as they say is history.  It’s been a wonderful experience through the years meeting many wonderful friends.  All in all one of the best things I’ve done.

Flash Flood

Our Rotary group in Uganda was doing follow-up visits to villages that had borehole water pumps installed previously by other Rotary groups. We checked to see if the pumps were working properly and we sometimes inaugurated a new pump or reviewed other possible projects like shallow ponds to raise tilapia fish.

One time we had been out in the jungle all day and returned to stay at a much nicer place than we normally got, called “Mountains of the Moon” motel. It had hot water. We got cleaned up and had a nice dinner. Our fearless leader said, tomorrow is a rest day, we’ll just go visit a village, show the Rotary flag for an hour and then come back here.

It’s a rest day, we can just wear sandals, we’re not hiking anywhere. Off we go. Our safari bus goes into the jungle on dry creek beds and game trails. As we come to the top of a rise the local driver says: “looks like big rain over the Rensori mountains, we need to go back”. Nope, says fearless leader, we can make it into the village, short stay and get out before rain. He was wrong. At the village, torrential rain, flash flood and our safari bus sinks axle deep in mud.

After about a half hour of steady downpour the rain lets up, but the bus won’t move. So, the solution is, we will follow some village people and hike out of the jungle through the mud (did I mention we were in sandals?) to a higher elevation. Meanwhile the 80 men of the village would pick the bus up and carry it to meet us. We did, they did, and we made it back muddy but unbowed to the hot water at Mountains of the Moon.

Project Amigo

Project Amigo is a Rotary project in Cofradia, Mexico which is co-sponsored by Southtowne Rotary and several other Rotary clubs around the US and Canada. This project is designed to lift this small Mexican village out of poverty by educating its children. It has been an ongoing project for more that 30 years and has been a tremendous success.

Many of the children sponsored by Rotary from grade school through college have now graduated and some have returned to their village and are now in charge of the city government. They have made huge improvements.

Rotary has a permanent main hacienda there with housing for Rotary work groups , administrative office, kitchen and eating facilities along with classrooms for the children’s “homework club”. Over the years so many Rotary clubs have wanted to do a work week in Cofradia (particularly in the winter) that more hacienda’s have been added around town to provide housing.

The last time we were there in early 2020 was just before the world shut down from the covid pandemic. Our Rotary group in Cofradia wondered what was going on when American Airlines sent us a message that our scheduled flight home was canceled. They said: “The last flight out of Manzanillo is Saturday, be there or you’re on your own.” No more international flights into the US after that date. That’s when we found out about Covid.

The Amigo people arranged alternate transport and we made it to a mostly deserted airport to catch that last American flight home. Adventures on a Rotary project!

Uganda Birth

Some members of Southtowne Rotary club, the Briggs and Hutchinsons, joined some members of the Rotary club of Petaluma California and went to work on a water project in Uganda, Africa. In Kampala, at a Rotary meeting our group met a doctor named Connie who had just finished some time with the Doctors without Borders. She asked if she could join us. Anytime you can get a doctor in a project group you take them and we did.

In the years when crazy Idi Amin ruled Uganda, he had many concrete buildings erected in the jungle to be used as medical clinics. The buildings were built but never equipped, no beds , no medicines, no blankets, no bandages , no nothing, just bare concrete walls, cots with bare coils and openings for doorways and windows.

Our group stopped at one of these in the jungle outside of Tororo as a place where we could distribute some mosquito netting. As we went thru the building we heard a woman crying. We found her in the back room where she was on a cot ready to deliver a baby. Connie delivered the baby and there is now a Uganda child named Connie living in the jungle.