Conference

From there we went to St. Joseph for the annual District Conference. We booked into the Holiday Inn on Friday (24th of April) and there was no time for a nap:)
We started having lunch with a fairly large group of Rotarians and also the GSE-team from this district going to South-Africa to our district.

We were introduced to the conference by DG Elizabeth Usovics and again......we felt like VIP's.
In the evening we had a light dinner at the Kemper Art Museum and went back to the hotel for
Martini's. We also got to meet and get to know the International President for 2009/2010, Mr. Ray Kliningsmith. What a wonderful person. He has a soft spot for South-Africa and Southern Africa as he goes there often after he studied at UCT in the 60's. I am sure that we'll see him in our part of the world soon.

Saturday we gave our presentation to the conference after we had breakfast. We got really good feedback afterwards, and even hear some saying it was the best they ever had from a GSE team!!! How's that! We did make a lot of changes since our first presentation...and I am proud of our end product. Although we start to sound boring to ourselves, is seems that the audience always enjoy it.

The district here participate in a program called "Shoes for Orphan Souls". Clubs collect shoes and socks to be send all over the world to children in need. This was really touching for us and we could see that a lot of passion, time and energy is going into this. This district collected over 12000 pairs of shoes!

The evening was a formal dinner with a great speech by Ray Kliningsmith.
Some of us also went to a real Country Bar/Club after the formalities.....we needed to see some young people too! haha!! (This was the real thing...cowboy hats, boots, jeans and slow dancing on the tunes of a fantastic band!)

Well...so here we are. Live and kicking in St. Joseph...home of the Pony Express! Today is Sunday and we all went to our new host families for the next four days.
I just had a fantastic Sunday lunch with my hosts, Ken and Sandy. And you know whats next.....yeah, the Sunday afternoon nap!!!
I'll have a talk with my Chinese Tourist team mates to not let this happen again...to forget about our followers and not updating our blog regularly!! (I call them that because when a picture is taken it has to be on all three their cameras.....we can't just download each other's pictures..haha!!)