The Gainesville-Haymarket Rotary meets every Wednesday at 7:30 am at the Piedmont Country Club. Here's the address:

14675 Piedmont Vista Drive, Haymarket, Va 20169

Please sign on to the District Club Database and review/update your membership information.

This is just a reminder that our meeting is CANCELLED if Prince William County Schools have a cancellation or delayed opening.

This is Rotary World Understanding Month. As we cast our thoughts abroad, it may be useful for us first to better understand our own hemisphere. This month I write to offer some things I’ve learned about the lands we love and call home, our Americas.

North first. The United States now hosts the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking population, behind Mexico. The five States along our southern edge – California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida have populations in excess of 45% Spanish. Seven of our ten largest cities are now in the Great American Southwest. There exists a phenomenon of geography that has historically been problematic, called borderlands – where ethnic peoples either move freely back and forth from one country to another, or spill across a border from one to the other. Borderlands are problematic in the sense that administering appropriately to their peoples, including assisting them, in the face of shifting demographics and indeterminate citizenship is difficult. Consider the Kurds in Northern Iraq and Turkey: they are a nation-state, but to which country do they belong? Some of them would say, neither. The United States now has Spanish borderlands.

Fortunately, wiser heads than ours determine how to apportion RI resources against their needs.

More in our next newsletter…

A big congratulations and thank you go out to our Public Relations expert Amelia Stansell and her PR team - we are the only club in the district to win a public relations grant! This awards us over $300 to spend on our display table for the district conference! Way to go!

Here's an update on our Earth Day 2009 Project. Our plan for this Rotary Environmental Service Project is to also incorporate fund raising by selling booths and food at the Rotary Booth. This willl be the first time we'll sell food. Funds raised will go to Gainesville-Haymarket Rotary Foundation and will be used to support projects such as the Children's Wellness Festival and a food bank that the town of Haymarket has set up.

A team has been formed and is meeting every Thursday at 4:00 pm at Exit Realty in Haymarket and all club members are invited to join the team. If you'd like to join please contact Marilyn Karp or any of the team members listed below.

• Doug Obetz
• Bryan Gracia
• Mark Cooke
• Amelia Stansell
• Gene Swearengen
• Marilyn Karp
• Jen Robinson - Leader Rotary Community Corp
• Interact Club
• Prem Grewal

What makes this year exciting is that a long stretch of Washington Street will be shut down. We've already got several sponsors for the event:

• Prince William Hospital
• NOVEC
• BB&T
• Haymarket-Gainesville Business Association

We planning lots of activities geared toward children. We're reaching out to other organizations to help us. Events will include:

• Recycling Fair
• Kids bicycle parade
• Town sponsored Bicycle Rodeo
Live performances
• Haymarket Beautification
• Kids Fun Plaza
• Treasure Hunt
• Local Schools Environmental Contest
• Green Car Show
• Environmental Workshops
• Vendors with an environment story

As you can see this is a big event and we'll need all the help we can get. Click here to download the sponsor promotional material. Perhaps you'd like to be a sponsor or know of a business that would be interested.

Jim Miller, DOD/Navy Humanitarians --Diplomacy at it's best.

Member Jim Miller will be talking about "soft power", the application of diplomacy by our military through humanitarian efforts. While it will be a general discussion, he will focus on the Hospital ships USNS Mercy and Comfort, and their deployments in Southeast Asia and the Western Hemisphere.

Bri West, Piedmont Environmental Council

Bri's focus at Piedmont Environmental Council is energy policy and online advocacy (using the internet to educate and empower). She talked about Virginia's energy policy and the choices we make regarding electricity, from the household level, on up to the state and national level. Bri explained where our electricity currently comes from and some of the ways that we can conserve energy in our homes. She talked about options for generating energy in the future and the status of the power line project that is impacting the Piedmont area. She gave an interesting account of how a bill that they supported and were trying to get passed ended up getting watered down at the last minute and their role in letting the legislature know of the changes while they were in session discussing the bill.

We did it! We made out monetary goal of $3300 raised for the current Rotary Year! Congratulations to everyone but especially to Russ Tuck for leading our efforts in Rotary Foundation Giving.

Our goal is EVERY MEMBER EVERY YEAR. FAIR We hope that every member will make some contribution to the Rotary Foundation this year. Perhaps you can join this group with a ten or twenty dollar gift.

There is still district money available - Rotary district will still match each gift for $100 or more.

Bring checks to Russell Tuck

Date	Speaker	Description	Guest Of
February 25	David Crandall & Dick McCord	Shriners & CWF	member
March 4	Cindy Seidel	Life Long Fitness	Dennis Fargo
March 11	John Stirrup & Sam Alattar	Prince William Update	Linda Marlow
March 18	Zed Wondemu	Zed's Restaurant	Linda Marlow
March 25	Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt	News Messenger	Linda Marlow
April 22	Michael Kleffer	Bull Run Mountain Conservancy	Linda Marlow
April 29	Timothy Burtch	National Transportation Safety Board	Linda Marlow

Date	Event	Time
Saturday, Septmeber 26	Childrens Wellness Festival

2008-2009 Board of Directors

Officers	Name	Directors	Name
President	Dennis Fargo	The Rotary Foundation	Russ Tuck
President Elect	Charlie Mills	Club Administration	Lori Power
Vice President	Alan Myers	Membership	Linda Marlow
Secretary	Don Rusch	Service Projects	Marilyn Karp
Treasurer	John Grzejka	Club Public Relations	Amelia Stansell
Sergeant-at-Arms	Ali Sayed	Rotary Community Corp	George Layne
Interact Club	George Layne	Past President	John Grzejka

Places to make up a meeting

If you would like to make up a meeting online, you can click here.

Excellence is the result of:

• caring more than others think wise
• risking more than others think is safe
• dreaming more than others think is practical
• and expecting more than others think is possible

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