New Rotary members inducted

The Eunice Rotary Club grew by five during Wednesday’s meeting.
Rotary District Governor Mark LaCour attended the meeting and inducted new members Dr. John Rainey, Holly Bertrand, state Rep. Phillip DeVillier, Dr. Gregory Richard and Stan Feucht.
LaCour spoke to the group about the organization’s fundraising and aid efforts throughout the world, including polio eradication in India and providing clean water in Belize.
“We have 1.2 million Rotarians in the world, and I would like to grow that number to 2.2 million,” LeCour said. “For eight years in a row, Rotary has been rated a four-star performer by Charity Navigator Rating, and that is the highest rating possible.”
During the 2014-2015 Rotary year, $123 million was raised globally, and $47.6 million of that was raised in the United States. In that same time, Rotary also had 83,118 new donors. The Rotary Foundation’s six areas of focus are promoting peace, fighting disease, providing clean water, saving mothers and children, supporting education and improving local economies.
Lacour said, “These six areas are windows to the world. This is reality. Things are good here in America, but they aren’t always good everywhere else.”
“We need to raise money and keep people aware of what we do and our projects around the world. People need to know where their money is going.”
The district governor has traveled to India to help vaccinate for polio and to Belize to distribute water-filtering buckets.
“There were immunization booths along a highway in India, and I worked at one,” LaCour said. “People came in one after another, and their fingers were marked with a purple dot to show they had been vaccinated. We went door to door to check and vaccinate on the last day. India will never be polio free because of the slums.”
While in Belize, LaCour and other volunteers filled up a van each day with water filtering buckets and drove out into the countryside to hand them out.
“We took water out of the lakes, filtered it through the bucket and then drank it to show the people that we trusted the water was clean,” he said.