Members Christine and Greg recently met Kim Miller from the Blue Dragon Children's Foundation to hand over some of the foreign currencies collected through our Rotary bins located at Sydney Airport before she goes back to Vietnam next week. We could donate the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao money, which amounted to approximately $500 Australian Dollars. Kim has been with the Foundation for ten years, and she talked about the positive changes they are making for the Vietnamese people. She told us about how and why the Vietnamese people are lured into places like Cambodia to work for ‘scam factories’; they are targeted because they are taken away into locations where they do not have contact with people who speak the same language and put into areas that they do not know how to escape from or learn how to return to their own countries. These young people are held under guard, beaten and tortured (and sometimes) have their organs removed if they do not comply with what they are told to do.
Kim said that it costs about $1,000 to rescue one person. The cash we gave will be used to purchase petrol, food, drink and emergency supplies like shoes worn during rescues. (At times, people need to walk out of places like Myanmar through jungles at night and hide during the day to get back to Vietnam, and this can take up to 28 days)
We all meet here today thanks to Alan, he had left it to me to decide - either continuing the Botany club or closing it? With my background in the not-for profit sector, I thought and felt “it was a moral injustice to close a “charity/club” that has a great ability raise funds for good causes. How many organisations are so lucky? It was wrong to close something that can do a lot of good and help many. So I said let’s keep going and try.
The Paul Harris Fellow is named for Paul Harris, who founded Rotary with three business associates in Chicago in 1905. Paul Harris Fellow recognition was established in his honour to express appreciation to those who support the humanitarian and educational programs of the Rotary Foundation. Those programs include an array of projects that save and invigorate the lives of people around the world and enhance international friendship and understanding. 
