Steve Salerno, Paul Christiansen, Gary Tree, Susan Smith, Caden Lee, Peggy Zalucha, Bob Johnson, Keith White, Judy Steinhauer, Sarah Straka, Brent Yauchler, Mark Rooney
Guests: Student Rotarian Gwen, Exchange Student Joey with his parents.
Happy Bucks: Dave Reed - $5 happy buck – welcomes a new grandchild – another boy – Roman Harley – Daughter is doing well.
Mark - $5 happy buck – grateful to Susan L Smith. George Hesselberg, a former columnist for the WSJ and a collegue of Susan. George found some of Mark’s mother’s poetry and fell in love with it and will framing it and making the books available. George apparently stood in the aisle at the book store and read an entire volume of her work. Mark and his son will also be visiting caves in Borneo, then fly to Thailand to visit a previous FES, Waan Sunita. They are then planning visit Buddhist temples, hit Hanoi on the way back, etc.
Svetlana - $1 – enjoyed two weeks with her daughter and granddaughter.
Business Items:
Gary Tree and colleagues from the Milwaukee Rotary Club will be speaking to our club in a week. Pat and Jerry were instrumental in developing international projects and grant activity within their club. Gary would like to share his passion around international projects and see how such endeavors might translate to what our club does.
Two weeks from this Wednesday, Clementine Christian and Olivia Rater will be speaking about their experience at the World Affairs Seminar.
Speaker (Joey Sherman):
Joey was our club’s foreign exchange student over the last year, and traveled to town in Brazil with about 25,000 population. The state he was in is known for it’s coffee and soccer players, including Pele. Joey attended church twice a week. Catholicism is the majority faith in Brazil. Joey tried playing some soccer and watched soccer. Soccer is played extensively in school.
Joey showed a large dairy farm and toured many farms while in Brazil. His family has a farm and he said that the farms in Brazil appeared to have some better and more modern equipment and processes. The farmers typically live in town and travel to the farm to work.
He visited a coffee co-op. Apparently beans are still hand-picked to get the highest production, then washed and laid out on a concrete pad to dry for a week. Mechanical harvesters are also used, however a portion of the crop is lost due to the inefficiency of the harvester. It takes about 3yrs for a coffee plant to mature enough to produce coffee. The plants have a lifetime of about 30 years.
Joey visited many waterfalls and did some rock climbing. He visited a city called the “gateway to the Amazon” . He took a boat to see where the Rio Di Janeiro and the Amazon connect – the Rio is the “dirty water” and the Amazon is the “clean water”. Joey also visited a rubber tree plant and visited Rio – home to one of the largest soccer stadium in the world, with a capacity of almost 200,000.
Joey visited some of the famous beaches in Brazil, visiting Copa Cabana, and enjoyed swimming in the ocean for the first time in his live.
Joey enjoyed a dish of cheese bread – his favorite. He also likes coffee a lot, so enjoyed that as well.
Joey had to learn Portuguese – had to learn as he went. He didn’t know any before going.
He missed his family the most while gone. In school, they used traditional pencils/pens and paper – no laptops or phones.
Joey picked Brazil because he wanted to visit a country really different than US.
Joey made a lot of friends – he feels he met some of the friendliest people in Brazil.