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Rotary Clubs on the Sunshine Coast celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Rotary Foundation – the charitable arm of Rotary – on Sunday, Sept. 18 in Sechelt’s Rotary Friendship Park. The event featured a relay race to showcase the effectiveness of the hippo roller, a device that makes it easier to transport water over long distances. “The hippo roller is a way for women in South Africa to get water to their villages easier, quicker and more effectively,” Mike Gojevic, projects director of the Sunshine Coast-Sechelt Rotary Club, said. “So we ran the relay race today to demonstrate that, which I think worked out well because the hippo rollers definitely won, hands down. Less effort and a lot faster.” The race was between teams with hippo rollers and teams with five-gallon buckets. Teams had to manoeuvre around the playground area with seawater and fill a regular-sized garbage bin. Five trips with a five-gallon bucket equalled about one trip with the hippo roller. Hippo rollers hold 24 gallons of water and are also designed to be pulled easily over rough terrain. Luke Vorstermans, the Rotarian coordinator of the Hippo Project, discovered it after a trip to South Africa, then brought the initiative back to the Coast. “We’ve delivered 50 already and we’re right now in the process of getting another 400 from fundraising that we’ve done,” Vorstermans said. “Our goal was 1,000 but 1,000 is still nothing. In the village that we’re working with in South Africa [Kgautswane] – and when you say village, you figure there may be 100 or 200 people – there are 120,000 people living in what they call a village.” The “village” is structured a little like the Sunshine Coast with several smaller villages that make up a greater whole. “But they call it all one village,” Vorstermans said. “These women, some of them are moving water three, four, five kilometres every single day on their heads,” he said. “It’s just astounding to me that world governments haven’t seen this and said, let’s put some money into this.” Through Rotary, a $150 donation pays for a hippo roller and delivers it into the hands of a woman in South Africa. “We have partnered with the Benoni Rotary Club, near Johannesburg,” Vorstermans said. “The hippo rollers are manufactured in Johannesburg and the Benoni Rotary club solicits products from their local businesses to insert in the rollers and then delivers them to the women in the village.” This year Rotary clubs around the world are celebrating 100 years of the Rotary Foundation. “On the Sunshine Coast there are four clubs, which is kind of extraordinary because we don’t work together on a lot of things,” Vorstermans said. “There’s a feeling underneath that it would be nice if we did more together. So this is the first event of this year to say, let’s work together.” Find out more about the hippo rollers at www.hipporoller.org. |
