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photos for Tropical Breeze courtesy of Vickie Helbing
Safety Harbor Rotarians Paul and Vickie Helbing, left, and Keith Vincent, right, spent eight days in Brazil on an international exchange trip that resulted in a donation of $12,000 through the International Rotary Foundation to assist a school for developmentally disabled children.
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Rotarians from Safety Harbor recently traveled to southern Brazil for eight days on an international exchange mission that included the delivery of $12,000 in financial assistance to the Association of Parents and Friends of Disability People of Gaspar (APAE), an organization that operates a school for developmentally challenged persons.
The funds will help provide items such as special chairs for children who otherwise cannot sit up, said Rotarian Keith Vincent. The Brazilian government assists the school by paying staff salaries and provides fuel for buses, but the institution raises funds for equipment and supplies on its own.
Safety Harbor Rotary was seeking an international project in this Hemisphere, “something we could have personal involvement with and could have a cultural exchange,” Vincent said. The club found APAE through Rotary International, where the Brazilian school project had been approved for assistance by U.S. clubs.
Vincent and fellow Rotarians Paul and Vickie Helbing traveled to Brazil, where Vincent said the donation was front page news in the local daily newspaper. The equipment purchased all is manufactured in Brazil and had been identified for purchase before the club provided its funds.
The Rotarians also found the cultural experience they were seeking, he added. “We tend to think of Brazil as the Amazon. That’s not what this (area) is like,” Vincent said.
A Rotary Club in Gaspar, Brazil was their contact. The Florida visitors were hosted by a person who had been an exchange student in Iowa and now is an executive with a Brazilian company. Another, who also served as the group’s interpreter, was a high school exchange student in Ohio and is now in college in Brazil studying international finance.
“Southern Brazil has a European heritage. From the late 1800s, it was settled by Germans and Italians. The architecture is like small German towns,” he said. “There were Italian and German restaurants everywhere.
“They are the same distance south of the Equator as Florida is north, so the weather was fall-like when we were there this spring. (Seasons are switched in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.) Temperatures were 50-degree lows and 80-degree highs.”
The town is in the foothills of mountains and the main industries are agricultural and small manufacturing, particularly growing rice and soybeans and making textiles.
“The homes are not as big as Florida homes,” Vincent said. “They have more of a ’50s-’60s feel. Off the main roads there was not a lot of infrastructure.”
The school the club assisted is near downtown Gaspar, Brazil. It was founded in 1983 and originally had only three classrooms, two bathrooms, a dining-room, a secretary room and a technician room. Today the school has three buildings with 15 classrooms, a director/secretary room, a dining-room, kitchen, larder, 14 bathrooms, a laundry, a meeting room, four technicians rooms, a covered courtyard and a playground.
Vincent said it has 260 students enrolled ranging in age from infants to age 63.
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