Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Donna Ulep received the Rotary Club’s Paul Harris award on March 4, during the Sweet Home Rotary Club’s annual auction.
The Paul Harris Fellowship is for Rotarians or Rotarian spouses and supporters who “exceeded the spirit of volunteerism expected out of a normal person,” said Juan Ulep, Donna’s husband. “Paul Harris is a huge award for Rotarians (who) serve above themselves.”
Juan received the Paul Harris award last year.
“Donna helps me no matter what I do,” Juan said. That includes work details, cooking, communication and being a hostess on different Rotary projects. The Uleps have been involved in two projects to send books and supplies to the Philippines, and now they are working on a project to supply potable water to schools in the province of Ilocos Norte, Philippines.
Juan joined the Rotary Club in Sweet Home in 1999 and started helping. He was first involved in Rotary in 1957 and has been ever since then except while serving in the military.
Juan got involved in a project to ship textbooks to San Miguel, Philippines, and he went across 11 states delivering speeches about the Rotary Club’s scholarship programs.
Juan and Donna married in 1986. They served in the Oregon State Defense Force and did not get involved in Rotary until they retired from the Defense Force.
While in the Defense Force, they put together a project to ship textbooks to the Philippines. They had believed the military would ship them, but that fell through. They turned to the Rotary Club, at local, regional and international level to complete the project.
“I decided I wanted to do something else,” Donna said. “And I ended up doing this anyway.”
They shipped 16 tons of English textbooks to benefit 50 schools and three public libraries in 1999. Last year, they headed a project to ship medical supplies to hospitals and more textbooks and supplies to schools.
They said they’ve gotten so many donations that they are now working on a third shipment project, including books and computers.
Donna has been involved in all of this and more. She joins Juan cooking for events such as the Rotary auction, which has provided cash for Rotary International’s effort to eradicate polio and the last two years has provided funding for local scholarships and other Rotary projects.
To say Donna was surprised by receiving the award is “putting it mildly,” she said. “It seems like, why should you get an award when you’re having a good time?”
The Uleps’ most recent project is an effort to provide water to schools in the Philippines. They were in the Philippines for several weeks recently, touring several areas to survey available clean drinking water.
Many wells in the Philippines have run dry or are just not deep and clean enough to be used for drinking water, Juan said.
“We didn’t realize the lack of clean drinking water,” Donna said. Providing clean drinking water around the world has gone to the top of the Rotary International agenda last year and this year.
The Uleps traveled mostly through the outskirts of the city of Laoag in Norte Ilocos on the north end of the island of Luzon.
“We wanted to find out where the need was the most,” she said. “See what their needs were and what we could do to get clean water for them. What we found is kids were having to bring their own drinking water to school.”
Also, the communities do not always have the water they need. New wells at local schools will provide a ready source to the community as well.
Drinking water typically comes from a community well.
“Some of them have wells at home, but they’re not drinking water,” Donna said. They are mainly for washing clothes or watering plants. “What we’re looking at is drinking water.”
The solution is to drill deeper wells and hit lower aquifers, Donna said. Wells in the area are dug by hand and not deep enough.
It will take money or time to get the job done, Juan said. The best time to dig the well is during the dry season, from January to April.
“If you find water during those months, there’s been water throughout the year,” he said.
The Uleps hope to receive grants from the local club, district and Rotary Foundation for the project. The foundation paid much of the expense of their tour to the Philippines.
They visited 13 sites, and of those, only one was a drinking well, Donna said. The rest were dry or did not have good water.
The local Rotary Club in the Philippines is gathering more information right now, including how many people a project would impact, the cost and how to do the project. The club will send the information to Juan who will present it to the Sweet Home club.
The 13 areas the Uleps visited had 775 families of five to six people each — approximately 1,800 students.
“It’ll take quite a few wells to do that,” Donna said.
When complete, locals will be trained to maintain the wells and what to do if parts quit working.