We changed our meeting venue because Nett was able to get Penny Vine as a guest speaker, so we thought it a better idea to invite others to come and hear her as well.

Penny spoke about her work with ODASOV – Organisation for the Development of the Socially Vulnerable, which is an organisation recognised by the United Nations as an educational group working to re-establish the social function of a community that has been devasted by war. They have set up a school in the Congo Republic for homeless and disadvantaged children and seeing the slides of how primitive their buildings and classrooms are, made us very aware of just how lucky we are to be living in our free country. It is rather sad to hear about the terrible circumstances in which so many people in the world live. Penny also showed several slides of the progress they are making.

We had a nice crowd attend, and we served a light luncheon, also having a raffle, which enabled us to give Penny $370. Considering that $250 enables one child to be educated for a term, we almost paid for 1.5 children’s education for a term. Thank you to all our members who put on such a lovely spread with very short notice.

Branch Business

In our brief meeting beforehand, Nett told us that anyone who still has some Discovery Vouchers and isn’t likely to use them can exchange them for $25 Cinema Gift Cards at the Cinema Centre, then they can be used later to go to the movies.

The International Group Library Day which was to have been held at the Wagga Library, as well as the State International Seminar which was to have been held in Dubbo have both now been cancelled due to the current Covid restrictions. However, they are hoping to do a Zoom Meeting at some stage.

International Study — Malaysia

Since it is now looking extremely unlikely that we would be able to go to the Pleasant Hills School for our International Meeting, our next meeting will be at the Commercial Club in Albury, and we’ll have our own International Meeting among ourselves, so I’m asking everyone to find out something about Malaysia to share, and then either Marie or myself will give us a broad overall talk about Malaysia. This will also mean that we won’t be cooking any of the Malaysian dishes that we’d organised.

Upcoming Events and Cookery

Collingullie Branch are organising their Annual overnight Shopping Bus Trip on November 12 & 13th. This is a fun thing, and anyone is welcome to come along – see Lyn for details.

Next month we do the Allocation of our Funds, and as we went through some ideas briefly at the meeting, I ask that you give some thoughts to these prior to our meeting.

The Land Cookery results were:

  1. Chocolate cake: Margaret Hasler 1st (very nicely decorated), Lyn Jacobsen 2nd & Lyn Lieschke 3rd.
  2. Collection of 6 different sorts of biscuits: 1st Nett Maloney, 2nd Margaret Hasler.

For our August meeting, we will have the Plain Butter Cake, iced on top, and in the Children’s Cookery, Class A (18 yrs & under), a Simply iced Orange Cake, and Class B (12yrs and under), Cooked Coconut Ice, presented in a box 20cm x 13cm x 2.5cm.

The next meeting is Wednesday August 11th at 10:30am, at the Commercial Club Albury.

Lyn Jacobsen