Most of us would remember past Interactor Michael Yan, Charter President of Interact Club of King’s College. Since matriculating at HKU’s Faculty of Medicine, Michael has continued to involve himself in our Club activities, including Walk for Living Water 2020 (read here), in which he was one of the top runners, and hot meal distribution to the elderly at Holy Cafe (read here). He was recently awarded For Our Future Scholarship 2021 (read here and here), and was featured in an article in Hong Kong Economic Times (read here). Congratulations to Michael for his exemplary achievements! We wish him all the best in his future endeavors.
On February 22, our service partner Amity Foundation hosted a townhall featuring representatives from two NGOs in Nepal and Myanmar, school students in Hong Kong, and donors. Our Club also joined to learn about water resource scarcity in poor rural areas in Nepal and Myanmar. President Mark, President Elect Sam, Rotarians Jason and Eliza joined as a group. Past President Lily joined remotely. Rotaractors Gabin Kee and Anuj Bhatia also joined remotely as guests. The townhall featured sharing by villagers who benefited from water infrastructure and systems funded partially by our Club’s fundraising efforts last year during Walk for Living Water 2020. In many parts of the world, villagers still have to walk for hours to reach water resources and bring back water for their daily use. A lot of these resources, heavily polluted and infested with bacteria, are marginally suitable for bathing, let alone drinking and cooking. Our Club will continue to work with Amity to raise awareness of global potable water shortage, inform our youth about the importance of water preservation, and support projects that bring clean water to communities around the world.
On August 10, President Mark visited our service partner, Amity Foundation, to wrap up the “Walk for Living Water 2020” project, of which our Club was an event partner. The event was a success, with hundreds of participants and hundreds of thousands of dollars raised. Our Club received a certificate of appreciation for recruiting the most number of event participants. Several Club members and our Interactors also received medals for achieving superior exercise levels, all the while staying healthy and fundraising for Amity. The funds raised from the event are scheduled to be deployed in the coming months in various projects in Southeast Asia. Mr. Anthony Tong, Executive Director, gave updates of our sponsored water projects in Myanmar. The projects are ongoing; project progress shall be shared with members later during Club meetings.
On May 28, our Club met at Regal Hongkong Hotel for the first time after two months of meetings on Zoom. Thanks to Regal, special arrangements were made whereby all attendees were required to get their temperature checked and their hands alcohol-wiped before entering the venue. The large venue enabled tables to be placed far away from each other – all tables were placed well over 2 meters apart, and our Club enforced that no more than 8 members were to sit together. During the meeting, our members reported to the rest of the Club the various activities that occurred in the past few weeks: Past President Grace spoke at length about her experience distributing hot meals at Holy Cafe; Past President Samuel gave a summary of Rotarian Kelvin’s virtual fireside chat on the topic of Covid-19; and President Mark gave an update of Amity Foundation Walk for Living Water, for which our Club helped to raise more than 140,000 HKD as of May 28. Past President Peter announced that he would donate 5,000 HKD, already budgeted for PP Peter Show, back to our Club. Past President Dora also spent time to thank our good friends at our sister clubs…
Our Club conducted our first-ever online meeting on Zoom on April 9. This is in part a response to government’s social distancing guidelines and recommendations on avoiding large group meetings, and in part a response to Rotary International’s recommendation on moving all physical meetings to online platforms. It turns out that many of our members are already quite familiar with the platform, and most had no issues logging on and joining the meeting. After the meeting room opened at noon, members started trickling in. Some arrived early to make sure that audio and video issues were addressed before the official start of the meeting at 1pm. Others just joined early to chat, just like our fellowship time before our physical lunch meetings. The Zoom meeting followed our usual agenda items, with members taking turns to report items of which they are in charge and/or managing. President Mark reported on the statuses of various District and Club events. Past President Grace explained and reported on the treatment of Annual Dinner Gathering Fund already received from members. Past President Webster explained the mechanics of Amity’s Walk for Living Water 2020, and reported that he already started to engage our youth to participate.…