International Service
Back2Back ministries. Back2Back ministries helps to address the needs of abandoned children age 2 to 14 in Monterey, Mexico. Service organizations there provide housing, adult supervision and nourishment for as many as 40 children in each home. Through a West Seneca Rotary investment, reading libraries are being established in several of these homes to assist in developing literacy for these children and improving their opportunity to grow out of the poverty of their youth.
Ghana Safe Water Project. Since 2006, the West Seneca Rotary Club has financially supported a project in Ghana to install new water wells and specialized filtration equipment. Water in that area has, in the past, typically been infested with the Guinea Worm, a parasite which can imbed itself in a host (human) body and grow to three feet in length before beginning the painful (to the human host) process of extracting itself. Thanks to the Safe Water Project, incidences of this infestation have dropped over the last twenty years from 180,000 per year to 350 per year, with hope of eradicating the problem totally in the year 2010.
PolioPlus. PolioPlus, the most ambitious program in Rotary International’s history, is the volunteer arm of the global partnership dedicated to eradicating polio. For more than 20 years, Rotary has led the private sector in the global effort to rid the world of this crippling disease. Today, PolioPlus and its role in the initiative is recognized worldwide as a model of public-private cooperation in pursuit of a humanitarian goal. The current "end game" drive "End Polio Now" has drawn over two hundred million dollars in matching-grant support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other high-tech charities. Through investments to the Polio Plus campaign over the last thirty years, and through the hands-on work of some of its members (working in third-world countries to distribute polio vaccine), the West Seneca Rotary Club actively supports Rotary International's efforts to make the world polio free.
Raymond Weimer
