Hundreds of Rotarian’s from District 5300 gathered for our yearly District Conference on Friday May 17th – 19th at San Diego’s Town and Country Resort.

A few weeks ago our District Assembly focused on all District 5300 Clubs to pledge monies toward the development of a school for Deaf and Hearing-Impaired children.  Many Clubs pledged $500 to $10,000 to make this a reality!  I pledged $3000 on behalf of Arcadia Rotary while Monrovia Rotary Club pledged $5000.  Many thousand of dollars were pledged by all District 5300 Clubs to make this school a reality.  The new school will be built in Las Vegas and mirrors the Los Angeles school already in place.  This was a very moving day for District 5300 Rotary in Victorville!

Our District Conference happened to also be Janice and my wedding anniversary weekend.  Honestly, I was somewhat dreading this three day ordeal but it turned out to be an amazing Conference!

Each plenary session was better than the last!

The first dinner featured the Dan Stover music competition with four fantastic young students.  An extremely talented, minute young lady won the $5000 prize.  The other contestants received $1000 each!

The second dinner contained the Four-Way Test competition.

One lunch had an amazing group of college-aged opera singing young men and women.  I could not believe the voices coming out these these individuals!  It was a fantastic experience!

The final dinner featured the Navy brass band!  Very patriotic!

The first plenary session featured the “One Drop” program which is teamed up with Cirque Du Soleil.  80% of diseases in Third-World countries are caused by contaminated water.  Every 8 seconds, a child dies!  “One Drop” is focused on clean water, clean bathrooms, cleaning stations which employ 88 brick layers to build them.

Another session was about “Open World” teaching the Rule of Law for one week April 20th-27th with US Federal Judge Lloyd D. George with the Estonian delegation in Las Vegas.

Another plenary session concerned the Corizon super build project.  Since 1995, 18,000 volunteers contributed 285,000 hours building housing for 1,000 Mexican families.  This year, in one day, two homes were built and two family’s lives were improved greatly with the help of Rotary!

The last one was focused on Vocational training. The plan is to take on Nigeria State by State and teach its students job creation culminating its completion by 2020.  Rotarian’s are business people so what could be better than to use our knowledge to teach others how to make a life for themselves and their families!

Arcadia Rotary won Best Club for our PR efforts which included our High Gear, Website, story coverage and advertising!  Great Job Steve Pelletier!  We also won Best Club for Foundation where we achieved a matching grant for a water purification system giving 3300 school kids in three schools clean drinking water!

We were also acknowledged for our one entry from Arcadia winning the entire business plan competition…Vicky Yue of Arcadia High!

Thanks also to Andrea Bundesman who again did a fantastic job in decorating our Hospitality Suite, putting to shame all other clubs efforts! We rocked with a Surfin Safari Beach Boys theme, great food and drink!  Members of Sierra Madre and Monrovia clubs were instrumental to our joint effort.  Thanks go to Marilyn Diaz, John & Maria Stubbs of Sierra Madre Club; Cal Magro, Julie Roybal and Karen Lujan of the Monrovia Club; and last but not least to Mike Real, Rob & Kathy Granger of our own club.

I left feeling very lucky to be a Rotarian having attended this District Conference.  I wished everyone in our club would have been as lucky as I was!