Events and Announcements:
All committee chairs (you know who you are) should mark their calendars for the "All Committee Chairs Meeting" at 11AM, Tuesday, June 2nd.  This meeting is extremely important as we plan our work for the coming year.  We'll meet in the conference room adjacent to our regular meeting room.
 
Don't forget that our outbound exchange student to Italy, Ezra Krohn, is having a graduation party on Saturday, June 6th, form 4-8PM.  We are all invited.  Ezra's mom, Anne, is involved in the District 5960 exchange program and is considering membership in our club.  The invitation is shown below.
The Rotary Rally With The Twins is happening on June 20th.  The deadline to order tickets is June 2nd.  For more information, or to purchase tickets, click here.
 
Our guests today were Jim Kadechka (to be inducted next week), Mary Jo McGuire, and Erica Buckingham (guest of Glenna Dibrell and currently interning at Risdall Marketing)
 
Mark Beisswenger has been unable to attend for a while , so it was great to see him at the meeting.  Mark said that his wife Gail recently had a heart vessel stent placed and is doing very well.
 
Val Johnson introduced our Speaker, Laura Crepeau.  Laura is a senior at St. Kates, with a major's in both biochemistry and biophysics and will pursue a career in trauma medicine.  Laura spoke about her efforts to help the women of Tanzania with problems related to menstruation.  It all started during her freshman year when she traveled to Tanzania with her sister during j-term.  While in Tanzania, she became aware of the cultural taboos surrounding menstruation and the many difficulties faced by menstruating women each month:
-Feminine hygiene products are in very limited supply and cost as much as ten times their cost in the U.S.
-Because of limited supplies and cultural taboos, few women attend school or other normal activities during their periods.
-The use of unsanitary cloths, rags and even dirt, instead of proper products, is a primary cause of infections for women.
Laura came back to the U.S. determined to do something about these problems, so she wrote the manufacturers of feminine hygiene products to see if they could be of help, but got no response.  She reasoned that reusable pads might be a viable solution so she personally sewed 2,000 pads in her "spare time" and distributed them to Tanzanian women.  At some point Laura and our own Val Johnson connected and HER. Empowerment was born.  This initiative empowers the Tanzanian women by providing them with the materials and instructions to make their own reusable pads.  Her. Empowerment's mission is to educate more women and provide them with proper pads which will allow them to fully attend school and other activities.   Val and Laura are pictured below.