By Phillip Ramati, Macon
To celebrate its 100th anniversary, the Rotary Club of Macon wants to help people walk.
L.H. Williams fifth grade student Jerome Griffin looks over his new dictionary he received from the Rotary Club of Macon Tuesday afternoon. JASON VORHEES
Specifically, said club President Don Cornett, the organization is asking its members to each donate $150 to cover the cost of making the artificial legs for Mercer University’s Mercer on Mission program, which has created about 1,000 low-cost, fully functional legs for amputees in Vietnam.
Cornett said his club’s goal is to raise enough funds for 500 legs. A local businessman told Cornett he will match whatever the club raises.
“We adopted a special birthday project, which is to work with Mercer on Mission,” Cornett said. “Rotary’s motto is ‘Service above self.’ … The best birthday present we can give ourselves is to do something with someone else. It’s our signature project for our 100th birthday.”
Cornett said the response was enthusiastic when the idea was pitched to Ha Van Vo and Craig McMahan, who run the Mercer on Mission program for Vietnam.
“It’s a new partnership for future work,” said Vo, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Mercer. “We’ve given 1,000 of these legs over the last five years, and we’ll be provided 500 (by Rotary).”
Currently only a part of Vietnam is served by clinics with access to the legs, Vo said. He wants the program to expand across the entire country and eventually throughout southeast Asia. He said artificial legs also were given to victims of the Haitian earthquake that devastated the country in 2010.
Cornett said it’s just one service project tackled by the local Rotary Club. Over the past couple of weeks, the club also continued its longstanding project of giving every fifth-grader in Bibb County his or her own dictionary. Members of the club were at L.H. Williams Elementary School on Tuesday to hand out dictionaries to students there.
“We’re engaged in servicing the needs of the community,” said Albert Reichert, a member for 48 years. “We let the community say what is needed, and they let us fill their needs.”
Read the full article by Phillip Ramati, Macon.
