Rotary News

This week Pam Tunnicliffe, our Vice President inducted Sam Parkin into our club.

Sam is a former air traffic controller.

We’d like to welcome Sam….

Sam is a former RAF pilot officer.

He lives in Farnborough, is married to Christine and has 3 sons and 2 daughters.

In the RAF he belonged to the Air Traffic Control branch and served in the UK, on the island of Gan in the Indian ocean and also Singapore and Germany.

He retired from the RAF as a squadron leader in 1993, before going on to EUROCONTROL, an international air traffic control organisation based in Brussels, to provide operational advice to the Air Traffic Control authorities in the east European States on the implementation of new Air traffic management system.

Sam became full time retired in 2008, but is very much involved locally as a Committee Member of the ‘Friends of Farnborough Abbey, Member of the Catenians (West Surrey Circle) – an Association which provides practising Catholic laymen and their families with friendship, social activities and support.

He is also a Classic car owner – 1963 Rover – attending car rallies in summer months.

Farnborough Rotary club has recruited another member..

Well, that’s not quite true.

Local estate agent, Andrew Warren was a member of the club until 3 years ago. He left for businesses reasons, or maybe he just wanted to play golf every Thursday lunch-time.

It was my pleasure to welcome him back last Thursday and to “induct” him back into the club.

Although Andrew left the club, he was still involved in the background, by helping other club members on street collections at Christmas and at other events that the club organised.

Our current membership of the club is around 50.

‘Thanks for Life’, is a project involving the clubs and members of Rotary International in Great Britain & Ireland, aimed at helping to eradicate polio throughout the world.

Thanks For Life is a purpose-built initiative, specifically designed to combine the talents and efforts of every Rotary club in RIBI with these main aims…

• To raise £1m for Polio Eradication through the Thanks for Life initiative.
• To maximise public awareness of the Rotary Polio campaign, the Gates Challenge and Rotary in general.
• To increase membership.

Farnborough Rotary Club will join other clubs throughout the UK in helping to raise awareness about ending polio in the third world.

We will be organising a number of initiatives locally and hope to involve the public in our efforts.

There is a great site which details a lot of information about polio and how rotary clubs have been involved in helping to eradicate this disease.  You can click here to go to the dedicated site http://www.ribi.org/thanks-for-life

Farnborough Rotary Club will join forces with our other local clubs to visit schools to help educate local children.

If you want to understand the story of Polio and how it affected children in the western world, there is a great cartoon on the story of polio on the site I mentioned above. Or you can click on the picture for polio on the top right corner.