 All right, welcome. You may all be seated. We're not going to have any songs today. We're going to have a piano, and I do not think that we are good enough singers to pull this off. A cappella. Welcome, everyone. Today is going to be a little bit different of a meeting. I think we're really interesting speakers. We're going to give them a lot of time, so we'll just do some short business in advance. We do have a number. Sorry. If you can't hear in the back, make some gestures, and we will try and speak louder. I will do my best. Welcome. We have lots of guests today, and we also have lots of birthday names as well. If you are a guest, please give a wave. Welcome. Happy Donald here. Hi, Tammy. And then Susan and Steve, who are guests to our club, but not to Rotary. And we also have folks from Oregon Media who are here recording this today to share after, which is fabulous. So first order of business if your car is parked in the lot behind the fire station, please go move it. We won't judge you too much as you get up to go move your car right now. Okay. We've done that. We have no anniversaries coming up, although we did have Jim's wedding over this past weekend. So Steve will have an anniversary. And then Kevin's birthday is tomorrow. And that weekend thing off the pile. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Kevin. Happy birthday to you. All right. Just a news for the good of a club real quick. Thank you to everybody who volunteered at Waterbird Arts Fest over the weekend. It was lots of fun. We gave away a lot of lollipops and temporary tattoos. And hopefully there are some future Rotarians. Some that might need like a, you know, some time to be adults. We'll see. Coming up our next event is the Hunt for Sunzilla on September 14th. Bring your sunflowers to be the largest. The tallest, the biggest head, the heaviest. And the zucchinis. And the other three concerts. Do you need volunteers or things that you'd like to say? Absolutely. Okay. And we'll also have the sunflower seed spitting contest. Oh, yes. It'll be back this year. Okay. We're going to spitting again. Okay. We'll be managing that carefully. Was that anti-COVID dose spitting? Yes. That's awesome. We'll see how spitting goes. And because we'll have a meeting next week, if you want to recruit some volunteers, if you want to say more things, you can. Also coming up, save the date, September 26th. I promised you all evening meetings. I think that's going to be our first evening meeting. Mark your calendars. We'll talk more next week. And also save the date for November 11th, which is when we're going to have our annual turkey drive. We'll give more info as we get closer. But, you know, you're marking things down on your calendar. And any other news for this? Go to the club real quick. Real quick. There are sleeves of cups. 16 ounce to 18 ounce cups. They're perfect for Labor Day weekend celebrations. I'm sure you'll have family and friends over. And if you don't want to keep them on yourself, you can unroll them on. Keepsakes. Go to the emblem on one side. And trap-hand a lot of brewery on the other side. And as I mentioned before, you can use them for a party. And you'll have to do the trap money. Anyway, take up a sleeve on your way out. I hope to have an empty box. I forgot the reward. We're getting... This is the last of the cups though, right? What's that? This is the last of the cups? I'm not saying. Okay. Fair enough. Any other news for the good of the club? No? All right. Gwena, would you like to join us? Come on up and introduce our very special speakers today. Our speakers today are here from Plymouth, New Hampshire. Ariel and I met them when they were at the district meeting at JP. They have made now six trips to the Ukraine, taking care of orphaned children and their story just speaks for itself. So I would like to welcome Susan Nathanson and Steve Rankin. Thank you. Thank you, Ariel. So, there are four of us in this organization. Two of us are Rotarians. Our two partners are part of this whole proposition. And we have the full brewery run. We would like to present you with our official brewery banner. So that you can obtain that in some place of distinction. Thank you so much. This is a really nice banner. It's a fun design. Yeah, we'd like to keep it a little fun. So, to overcome all of our lack of inertia. So, it's really great to be here. We've been in many Rotary clubs, telling our story about how we've done this. Rotary is a really big part of what we do because our partners are on both sides, both sides of the ocean here and in Poland and Ukraine. Susan is our spokesperson. She will give you a very good overview of what we do and how we do it. So, I'm going to leave it right to her since I've done the official stuff. That's great. You usually have to get the hook out. So that's really good. Nath, I have to do that. Thanks for inviting us. First and foremost, I just want to recognize the catastrophic impacts of the flooding to your community and we reschedule in order to accommodate that immediate recovery. I know it's been ongoing for many of your members and I just want you to know that we in New Hampshire are aware and our support. We made a very small donation to the club and support those efforts. Thank you. I always say at the beginning of these presentations that if you're not a Rotarian by the end of this presentation you should find a way to become one. And if you are a Rotarian it will reinforce for you the importance of all the work you do both locally, nationally and internationally. Your organization is changing the world and we're just a very small part of changing the world for a few people. When the war started in February of 2022 we four people are just friends in New Hampshire. Alex Ray C. Ran, Lisa, Mireille and I we have coffee in the morning, most mornings and like you do in your coffee shots just talk about well what are we going to do for the Christmas parade and what about the dentury on Main Street but this day it was have you heard the news about your parade and what are we going to do? And we didn't know what to do. How many of you know Alex Ray, common man family of restaurants in New Hampshire? No one? Yes. He owns 20 restaurants he started 50 years ago just one guy and he's very creative and very crazy he's a great humanitarian he's traveled around the world responding to different natural disasters and has worked with World Central Kitchen and other organizations has a permanent project in Honduras which he's the main funder of to help kids down there so what he said was sorry I forgot to tell you that we are a non-profit arm of the Plymouth Rotary Foundation so what Alex said is Alex is on the far right there he knew that everyone wanted to help that people in America had seen the news just like us and thought we need to do something we need to do something but we don't know how and to the four of us writing a check to some giant organization and not really knowing how much went to administrative costs how much went to mailers and advertising and how much actually went to the ground didn't feel so impactful that we wanted to give people a chance to really know that they're helping people in Ukraine and so Alex said we should go to Ukraine now I'm just a regular mom never been in a war zone and that idea was absolutely preposterous to me but the more we talk the more we realize that's the best way for us to understand how to help well Alex and Steve are libertarians and Steve said well I know we'll contact the district governor in Poland and Ukraine and that's what he did so he called the district governor we met over Zoom his name is Peter Junkowski and he speaks English and we were able to say hey we're four Americans Alex is willing to donate the first one million dollars and we're going to raise a million dollar match so we'd like to come and give two million dollars worth of support for your projects please and we arrived and when we arrived the very first that you can't fly into Ukraine of course we flew into Warsaw in a nutshell you fly into Warsaw or Krakow then you take the train down the Lublin then you take a van private car into Zamosh, Poland and then it's another four minutes to the border and that's the trip so when we arrived in Warsaw the district governor from Ukraine himself and 16 club presidents this was the very earliest days of the war this is late April and we asked them to give us an overview of their projects that they had started and we all thought the war would be short so these projects were small and short in duration and very affordable what we know now is that wasn't going to be enough we listened to the presentations and we thought well these these projects look good these sing to us and this is something we can support but we want to go see them so the next day this is a dear friend now this is Richard you can't see because the lights are on which would be great see if you could turn those lights off this is Richard and he runs our food program at that time we've just met him he's the first he's a rotary at the zamash rotary club and we are plotting out our route into Ukraine next day we're very nervous we've never been to Ukraine it's an active war zone Lviv had been bombed within the last week and he just looked at us and said do you really want to do this and I just had to say that we're doing it every day we're waking up every day in these conditions and if we have to do it for a week or two weeks while we learn how to help them we could be great like Ukrainians and so indeed the next day we found ourselves at the border so yeah it's more than sometimes scary it's very often scary we speak English and the US courts and main pool of volunteers and the Ukrainians don't speak Polish generally so every communication has to go from Polish to Ukrainian and Ukrainian back to Polish so it's a it's a trick sometimes it gets us into trouble and sometimes it's hilarious to go through those three so this is us crossing a common checkpoint this is not the border I take pictures of either of these places but we did sneak this one out of the van so we had to figure out our lane like the humanitarian aid is fix up blown up cars long underwear for the military everything in between housing adorable medical equipment consumables everything in between we had to figure out what we could do well and what sung to us was the children so these are the statistics right now about 1.8 million of cross-ended kids have gone into neighboring countries are still there right now many more left and then return to Ukraine right now there's 2.5 million children in Ukraine are not sleeping in their own beds tonight they're either hiding at a relatives or they're in safe houses and that's where we're going to focus is the safe houses in western Ukraine and then we know that keep in mind that the Russians are kidnapping children particularly in eastern Ukraine bringing them to Russia and re-educating them and they're lost to their parents this was going to be our focus these kids 24% of Ukrainian kids have had shelling in the past year we'll talk more about that so how do we do it well what we did was we learned that although the Ukraine had a very robust social services system for kids before the war they've been inundated with need they just haven't been able their budgets going to the war and so there was a lane for us to help support these children in the safe houses we rented 2 warehouses in Zemosh and Chelm, Poland which are very close to Ukraine and border and in it we accumulated 3 pallets of groat which is a carbohydrate boxes of sleeping bags and eventually we'll incorporate generators and other support systems as the seasons change and the war change and we started with these 2 warehouses and mostly food and we also provide canned meat and some fresh vegetables are fruit to not very much so we accumulate all these goods in the 2 warehouses in Poland, Ukraine or the EU as needed because shipping anything from the United States is expensive it takes 6 to 8 weeks we're not nimble, we can't respond to one safe house who suddenly needs something new right away and there's lots of opportunity for terrorist taxation and so we don't ship anything that girl is standing in front of her home and the little bag that's by her foot has and some canned food are cut off is groat and I just think it's miraculous that people in the United States giving us 5 or 10 dollars in increments mostly very small donors she's holding a sign that says thanks to the Rotary Club of Poland New Hampshire it's unbelievable to me what has happened and that girl and her family will eat today for next few days thanks to people here in the United States and their generosity and the Rotary Club volunteers so so far we've shipped 10,000 sleeping bags hundreds of generators which is a great story because you can't find generators in Ukraine anymore or Poland and about 800 tons of food this is a video that was made by Richard remember Richard looking at the map he's in charge of our food program come on there we go we've lost our we too the speaker's worst nightmare okay so this is what we're doing there is we have arrived at an orphanage in the countryside around the city of Lviv this is Lviv these are safe houses all around Lviv the first town deported on December 17th 2022 so this is a convoy we've reached 32 orphanages where a total of about 1,300 turban were housed that's how it's right let's go this is downtown Lviv delivered about 20 tons of food 22 power generators 1,000 sleeping bags and 1,350 Christmas presents it was Christmas we did great Christmas presents junk food the aid that the Ontarians provided to Ukraine was made possible by significant financial support from Alex Ray and common man from Ukraine Rotary Club, Lviv district 7850 New Hampshire 22,314 1,000 power generators Christmas presents for the children for Christmas presents back in April 1st we found that we could not figure out people from the United States how to help over here in Ukraine and so we figured out a way to raise money our company put up 2 million dollars and they will double that and we came up with 2.4 million dollars in the six months and that money comes over here when we worked with the local Rotary to receive our money and we came here this is our third trip so we came here to say what do you need and how can we help so we had six projects orphanages, a blood mobile food is the big one that was each week $20,000 per week for both Poland and Ukraine and the people here distributed it from Rotary and we just gained the funds in the United States and run it here continuation of this aid will depend on the funds we received from our partners in the U.S. and Donors we are convinced that our aid must reach as many of the Ukraine as possible this is the mayor of the office this is unloading food in the basement of their safe house there is a storage area there is the syrup and it's snowing outside the kids are all bundled up as caregivers about 8 of them for 130 kids dinner was full potato so you can see that there is a full range of safe houses from some that have full facilities like that last where they are sitting and others the thing about the safe houses is because the Russians are kidnapping the kids all the safe houses are closely kept secrets they are scattered throughout the landscape they are not published addresses there is no sign but the great advantage we have is that because of our rotary connection and because we have been doing this now for pretty much the duration of the war we have a close relationship with the military the military is running the government now and the safe houses so they provide us with the address and the census of all the safe houses on the landscape they also have a couple we also support a couple of what we would think of as senior refugee centers these are this particular one is in an abandoned Russian military barracks in the Carpathian mountains it's not a place you want to put your parents it's pretty rough there wasn't enough food and this gentleman is unloading his food into the kitchen of this senior center it's a picture that breaks my heart it's like the girl in the apartment building it's like it's tough it's a tough spot but we're able to walk away knowing that they have food for about 40 days and we have delivered two generators and sleeping bags okay, so we picked our lane which was kids and we decided the three pronged effort would be food, warmth and love so you've heard about our food distribution system all done by rotary volunteers 20,000 pounds a week goes into Ukraine into various safe houses all throughout from Zaporizhia to the west we have food going into a little bit of the Nipro region after the the dam was burst but pretty much we focused on Zaporizhia west so we had food then as the season had changed at the beginning of the war it turned into fall and we faced our first winter then we turned to sleeping bags and generators but the last of our three prongs was love and what we noticed was these kids were suffering horrific trauma of course and so how could we help so the first thing was the gentleman on the far left is named as Michael Scoot and if you think about how your rotary funding has far reaching effects this gentleman had been a student exchange, rotary student exchange in San Monica California when he was a high school student he came to us and said my dream is a trauma counseling center outside of Warsaw for the children of Polish refugees residing in Poland and sure enough we have created this facility now for 50 children at a time and provides trauma counseling in a day care facility so we teach the kids coping mechanisms to deal with their trauma of being refugees in a country where they can't speak the language give them a little bit of Polish lessons yoga, meditation and that kind of thing and then in the evening we provide free legal support and coping mechanisms for the parents so the legal support is I fled my home without my passport my marriage license the title to my bank account and we provide attorneys to help these Ukrainians in Poland resolve some of those complex issues we work with the grandmas and the moms so that they cannot integrate in a way that we expect them to become Polish citizens but we like them to feel more comfortable we want the kids to feel comfortable in the schools in Poland and so we do offer an exchange of cultural traditions between Polish and Ukraine and also Polish lessons have you anybody here speak Polish or Ukrainian it's an unbelievably complex we've been there both on my languages and of course Ukraine is in Cyrillic so we're hopeless without okay so 50 kids in the suburb of Warsaw is a drop in the bucket we knew we had to do more so we expanded a previous existing rotary program that had been very small that had risen after the war in Crimea and we blown it up and what we do is we take the rotary clubs in Ukraine find for us 30 to 33 kids per month that have lost at least one parent and very often a parent and an older sibling in the war we work with their guardians mothers, grandmothers, aunts whoever is there taking care of these kids we bring the kids to Lviv we put the kids on a bus and we take them into the Tatra Mountains of Poland so that's a map and inside each of the little districts is a dot where that kid lives and so we try to blanket the entire country of Ukraine with kids and we're creating a network of kids that have had some trauma counseling and we're also growing young Rotarians just to tell everybody that these kids come the reason they come is for trauma counseling what they get besides that is hiking they get to play, they go to water parks they go to Krakow, they get tours they go to the Ukrainian embassy while they're in Krakow, meets the ambassador wonderful experiences but they also create networks with their peers they also get to talk to another child who lost their dad in the war they get to compare notes, they connect these kids all have smartphones they now have a network of 33 friends that know what they're going through as they face the future we see these kids also as the kids that will be rebuilding Ukraine someday and we want them to understand not only that they will survive and their life will be good just different from what they anticipated that Americans care about them and that they're loved and supported and that's the third reason we run these camps so three weeks on, the staff gets a week off we switch up the staff three weeks on so kids come for three weeks and go home and we start again we've been doing this for ten months now the trauma counseling is horrific we listen to stories that just rip your heart out of kids who've lost everything kids whose dads we haven't heard from him since May he was in Bach mood she knows she knows but she can't face it yet we have kids who have come and during art therapy the first painting is black it's a picture of black and working with the therapist and creating friendships we can't fix the loss we can help them through it and so when that kid comes two weeks later with a picture of his pet rabbit Sonja we know we've made some progress and that's where we do it Alex is a restaurateur so everything he does is through the lens of food so of course we brought all the kids aprons have come in Ukraine logos and we asked them what they wanted to cook that night the boy on the left had lost his dad and his father within the last two months previous two months we get them out into nature when we were hiking with this group there's a wide, as you can see it's a wide like road gravel road and all of a sudden I'm in the back and I can hear the kids spontaneously singing the Ukrainian national anthem as they're hiking up this road it's pretty one of those moments you want to freeze in time this boy had his 16th birthday while he was with us and I'm a mom and I just thought you're almost 18 and how sad that was to think what happens if this war continues to this young man and every safe house that we visit everything is about food and Alex of course we've managed all worlds with a broad smile and another serving of borscht we've eaten a lot of borscht this is rotary at work this whole thing depends on Rotarian volunteers in Poland going into Ukraine meeting Rotarian volunteers in Ukraine week after week after week taking their personal time for days it's many days to go all the way to Zaporizhia driving from Poland and these rotary volunteers take time away from their families to feed children they'll never know I'm so moved by their generosity and I also feel such a responsibility to continue the work here fundraising to help them provide the food into Ukraine the far left is Viktor he's our Ukrainian contact to find the kids who have lost a parent residential trauma counseling program we call him King Richard the lion hearted we've met before Richard runs our food program and that's Arthur he's our procurement officer when summer turns to fall and it's a war and you know you've got cold kids with no heat we said we need 10,000 sleeping bags go find them and that's what Arthur does he finds whatever we need in the EU usually that's Alex Ray and of course Steve this is real rotary work start to finish and I just, I'm not a Rykarian and I just have to say thank you for your network of humanitarian heroes we're working on that part so how do we do it with gifts, large and small mostly very small $3, $5 bills from a convent in New Hampshire this is Robbie Robbie went viral in the Boston TV circuit because he sold these cardboard pieces of art around his school and he sent us a check for $48 but the great thing is when that story ran in Boston how many donations we got from people who said I saw Robbie here's my 200 bucks it was amazing so Robbie is changing the world we turned him into a minor celebrity leading the governor and all that in New Hampshire and he's a he's a future leader the little yellow duck story is one I have to tell every time because what we say to people I get emails every day I've got clothes, I've got sleeping bags and you just can't ship them across the ocean you just can't get them to Ukraine to a place they're needed you've got to be on the ground buy it locally, get it fast but Alex has all these restaurants and in one restaurant a box arrives and inside this box there's 20 animals like that duck there was a dog, there was an elephant there was a dinosaur and in it was a note written in the handwriting of a person who I think will be quite elderly very shaky handwriting and it said my heart hurts for the kids in Ukraine I don't have enough money to pay for my utilities but I do have yard and I know how to crochet will you make sure that these hugs make it to the kids in Ukraine it was the first thing I packed and sure enough here we are in a safe house with a kid who doesn't know if dad's alive doesn't know if mom's okay doesn't know if she has a house to go home to, a school still standing or however community he is but in this moment Alex is sitting there giving her a stuffed animal a broad smile and some love we can't fix it all but for this moment for this girl we made a difference it's not easy it's very bombs, arids, irons, all that and when you're in a war you don't cloud the roads this was during the Christmas Con where you saw the video now remember we're going to a safe house that's not identified on a map, right? you have to find it it's not got a sign to it all, we're in Ukraine they moved the road signs like they did in World War II so it's very complex well we also fell into the ditch two trucks in the ditch perfectly dark landscape because there's no electricity can't see are there any houses out there is there any place to go to get help no but they could see our headlights and magically from somewhere people came cars and trucks and ropes and pulled us out so is it easy? No but what Alex says is the kids need us this is what we've done with your contributions Rotary's contributions contributions from over 3,000 Americans who care about kids in Ukraine we've made some mistakes we're not experienced doing this in a war zone and so we funded a project or two that we might not have had the hindsight that we have now but generally the big thing we do is food into safe houses and orphanages trauma counseling outside of Warsaw and our residential trauma counseling we also bought early on a blood mobile this is before we kind of had known where our lane was what we were going to do well that was $200,000 you'll see at the very bottom a big number generators and sleeping bags half a million $355 for the residential trauma counseling then a big number $350,000 in discretionary fund remember Peter Junkowski the first Rotary we met by zoom and said he'll be there in 3 days he's now not the district governor the murder year has changed but he's still in charge of interacting with our program the current district governor has said you're expert at this you know Alex and Steve, Susan and Lisa you should continue managing this program we give him $350,000 a year to change people's lives instantly when the need arises a kid needs dental work don't call us get the kid what he needs a kid needs a ride to a doctor a family needs suitcases because they finally found a relative they can live with in France get it to them, don't talk to us get it done, make it work and that's what that money's for he's very careful with it he's saying I have this request but it's $5,000 are you okay with it we trust him implicitly it's important that this money is fast and available and so it is I hope I've communicated that we're responsive to the kid's needs that we're trying to do everything we can to have the goods ready and available as soon as they need it the partnership with Rotary is the core of this whole project a single truck would move without a Rotarian at the wheel and finally we have the receipts CVS are Treasurer and and it's bring the box and he's the Treasurer of the Little Foundation Plymouth Birdie Foundation has been for years he's been the Treasurer of the club but all of a sudden he's a Treasurer of $2.8 million going to an international project it's no small feat we're all volunteers I just got to give a shout out to the guy who does have receipts you can see we've been the media has been very kind to us we're trying to bust out of New England and reach out to other places around the United States CVS Evening News did a piece with us this is outside Heath and Little Town College Jitomir we've been in some other great places so our food program costs about $100,000 a month and our two trauma counseling programs cost about $40,000 a month so together just to keep doing what we're doing $140,000 a month we're not quite keeping pace with that we're struggling but we're going to keep doing it because of our volunteer network it turns out we can feed a kid for $44 a month so when we ask people to help us we say even a small donation $44 is going to feed a kid or $1,000 for three weeks for us to take a kid from Neeprow or Kyrsan all the way to Lviv into the Carpathians in Poland our top is in Poland and keep them for three weeks and deliver them safe from home $1,000 I didn't mention that at the trauma counseling centers we have a medical doctor certified psychologist and three teachers everybody's Ukrainian of course because we're very certain to communicate to these kids we're honoring their status as Ukrainian citizens everything is spoken in Ukrainian the food is also Ukrainian that's the budget unfortunately just this week more kids are coming out of Zakharozia Linsky has asked all the kids from the Zakharozia region to go to get out and so we're getting extra pressure to provide more goods to Western Ukraine so can you help us yeah you can you can have five bucks other thing you can do is think about who's single fundraiser the important thing is you guys are each and every single one of you is a network every one of you has a brother in law or a sister or my niece or whatever because you might care about these kids in Ukraine and if you can help, can they and can you just spread the word and say hey, I listened to these people today at Rotary they're doing great things in Ukraine right now or I helped a little bit can you help too and just forward our website forward our QR code forward any of the 30 or 40 articles that are on our website about what we're doing and how we're doing it do you have a Rotarian friend in another community we will come speak if we're going to carry stuffed animals to Ukraine we'll go speak anywhere if somebody wants to hear a story I know by the way business card is on your desk the QR code is there it also tells you what our URL the URL is it's a pretty understandable common man for you krain.org tells our story it's an easy way for you to explain it to other people and also of course there's an opportunity to donate on that website so one last thing I wanted to say about this last we just got back four days ago from visiting our trauma counseling center in Zakopane, Poland one of the things we did is ask the kids to write a letter to Zalinski so each of these 30 kids who lost a dad or more in the war wrote a letter to Zalinski about their dad about the war and they were amazing heart-wrenching letters and some very funny I can't wait to get an iPhone 22 I want a Lamborghini their kids that's the crazy thing they're carrying this amazing weight this weight that would crush any of us and yet they're eight years old they have an app on their phone that tells them where the act of bombing is every single day real time they click on it they get lists of who's been killed their dad showed up on that list once it's unbelievable what these kids are carrying around at 8, 10 and 12 years old these letters were compiled into a book they were presented to the ambassador from Ukraine they are headed to Zalinski the rotary emblem is all over this book rotary signature your generosity and these kids' dreams will be on Zalinski's desk pretty exciting any questions? generally if you have little kids and they need a t-shirt they're not for sale but by donation it's got our logo on the back it says team up together we took a little theater group over from the US from Plymouth State University and did a little production of our trauma counseling center this artwork was done by kids in our trauma counseling center you saw the aprons and the pizza there's an apron and Fisher Cats minor league baseball team in New Hampshire donated two games to us so far and we've got some packs let's go on but mostly we share our story and just be grateful for rotary and the things that's going to change the world yes first of all I've been a rotary now for over 40 years and this this has moved me this presentation rotary international how does rotary international fit in either financing or assisting you in contacts we we got a $25,000 grant from Rotary the Rotary grant process is arduous and swell we have not gotten any other financial assistance we were in the rotary magazine in the March issue this year they did a great spread on our work and we're very grateful we have everything else I don't know a more graceful way to say it's arduous and long and those kids need the money today we can't wait so there are as you may know there are special rotary foundation funds for there are two and one for Ukraine and there's another one for the Turkey in certain situations so what happens is they collect the money they have $13 million donated for for Ukraine and then there's politics including rotary we have 220 different countries that are represented in rotary every one of them has a project that they think is really important and so what rotary has done is they hold out $25,000 for every district I don't know how many districts are in Rotary but a lot of districts and that actually sucked up all the money just at $25,000 district I'm sure our district your district oh you're in ours well our district we got $25,000 to help with our program and some of the districts that are in the area of Ukraine and the countries around it got $200,000 each so that's a little better we went all over the world we didn't go into Ukraine the $13 million that they raised all of the $13 million that actually went into the soil of Ukraine went into Ukraine the rest of it went to clubs that were helping Ukrainians outside of Ukraine which is very good, that's wonderful but it's not the little we wanted to do which was get to those places so you mentioned that you have cities that are up to age 16 what's the total age ring how young? birth to 18 some of our safe houses have safe houses in them and here's a crazy story our Peter John Kraske approached us remember I said he said he's exploring he doesn't know this yet he wants us to support this project but evidently the stress of the war is impeding the lactation of moms who have just given birth and that there's some research that's showing and some project application that he has asked us to start a milk bag for new moms wow wow any other, yes you're in a war zone do you have any situations where you're going to fight? yes, absolutely yep, air raid sirens, people scattering yes, absolutely we're in town all the time we're all the public artwork it's a sand bag and covered up and they're anticipating bombing at any moment this next trip that Stephen and I are going to go on will be in the Zaperoja we personally haven't been that far but we feel super committed that it's important for us to be there be there, look people in the eye and feel it ourselves and we'll take all the identification off the bands as you saw there we have our convent refrain and we're going to stop all over it we'll be incognito for that trip but yeah, that's half over anybody else? yes, two years ago we did make the two thousand dollars to shelter box and they were put in to Poland because they couldn't go directly into the Ukraine we did try to they're a great program, good for you thank you, that's awesome these shelter homes when you go into Ukraine are you bringing kids back to Poland actually there doing what you need to do there and then leave? the only kids we bring out of Ukraine is for the drama counseling sessions to three weeks in a batch safe houses, we're talking like thousands and thousands we feed like a hundred thousand kids so we can't there's no bringing them out of Ukraine plus they don't want to leave Ukraine is, they want their kids they want to keep their kids so some of the kids in these orphanages have no parents the plan that they have for those kids after the war is they're going to try to put them back with their closest relatives if those closest relatives have schools available if they don't have schools available they're going to foster two other Oak Creek program they said the waiting list for Ukrainian adoption is longer than the potential supply of kids they want to keep Ukrainian kids being kids I can't tell you how moved we've been with the Ukrainian children they're so positive they're so strong when Pergosium was allegedly shot down out of the sky we were with these kids there was a big uproar in the dining room you thought maybe they were going to go to Disneyland but no Pergosium was shot and these 8, 12, 10 year olds are celebrating it's amazing thank you so much for inviting us we know that one of the best ways to help is with donations oh my god how? oh my gosh oh yes that's a little wow this is amazing that's true all you have better ones Bill, we do up here, you're the treasurer I just write the checks that's a big checkbook jeez you have to deal with checks this size all the time thank you so much for everything and we also always give our speakers just a little thank you head about how thank you they're very nice thank you both so much for joining us I really love it truly we're very proud to bring it again cheers I think every time we hear that we'll shed a few tears I think we'll understand about these after and we are going to close the meeting right now we will be closing also without son but we will be closing with the 5 way test and for any non-rotarians this is the 4 way test or the 5 way test of the things that we think they work you out so if everyone knows it please write it number 1, is it the truth number 2, is it the hair to all concerned number 3, will it build goodwill and other friendships number 4, will it be beneficial to all concerned and number 5, is it the fun oh I love that thank you all enjoy the rest of your Tuesdays you'll notice this beautiful while she's wearing and when I talked to her she told a story there's a levee who watches women in an open air market and you just have to get this picture in your head of sandbag artwork sandbag windows airway sirens and a woman stitching shirts in the open air market hand stitched it's called a visubanka this my grandparents are from levee or levee and I wanted to say something I'll try to do it I'm very moved by you um thank you you're welcome, it's a privilege we get to do it because people care and we just get to be there and we're very grateful for the opportunity thank you so much yeah it's wonderful oh definitely Jonesville that I opened it's a sustainability boutique I opened it with the you know my motivation was to redirect people's ideas about their consumer habits with respect to the environment and that kind of thing but when the invasion happened I my modus operandi changed I suddenly said we have to do something um we in the first weekend after the invasion raised $2,000 from the merchandise in the boutique people from the community were literally coming in and saying I don't want to buy anything I just want to put this money toward Ukraine since March of last year we've raised 34,000 wow so we've been at people care but they're not sure how to help so I have a good friend in in Kyiv who has been looking she's Ukrainian like me she's been living there for 21 years and um so through her I was able to figure out how to get the money to the military so we've been directly sending the money to the Ukrainian armed forces penny for penny um and we're going to continue doing that I wanted to speak but I was so afraid I would start crying anyway it's wonderful what you're doing and um yeah it's really hard to witness that I can only imagine how terrified you have to be um and I say speak up because there's a lot of people now that are personalities big personalities with a lot of resources who are going around uh saying no the funding has to stop Medea and Benjamin being one of them a very very well known peace activist uh Ben Cohen Ben and Jerry's no more money to Ukraine that's it trying to convince the American public I'm going to tell you something my parents I grew up watching witnessing the trauma that my family suffered grandparents had to go to Canada running from the Russians we have experienced trauma of this type of genocide this is ongoing this has been happening for centuries this is not since 2014 with Crimea this has been happening holodomar is something you should look up holodomar it was the Ukrainian genocide in the 1930s under Joseph Stalin the Russians have been trying to annihilate Ukrainians and their culture and their history and their heritage and their language their music, their traditions their religion their intellectualism everything for centuries this isn't new so speak up when Medea Benjamin and Ben Cohen say these things they don't know their history they don't know anything about Ukraine they just have this political ideology oh it's imperialism you know the United States shouldn't get involved this kind of thing if Ukraine loses this war then every single one of the 15 former Soviet republics will get picked off and there will be a new world order it's as simple as that that's the way the world is moving right now we have to defend democracy and sovereignty in Ukraine so thank you