Lucky for us we only have one more Friday 13^th in May 2022! That gives us plenty of time to make sure we are back at Crowne and not relying on international Zoom calls. Our first major technical hitch, but understandable. Hard to avoid.

As we now read and see video footage in the news coming out of Afghanistan, in hindsight we asked a lot of our Guest Speaker, Mr Omid Wali to talk to us via Zoom from his home town. More on this later.

Thank you very much to our History Committee who have worked really hard to finalise the RCBS 60^th Anniversary publication. It has been quite a task to bring it to fruition and it is going to be in our hands as soon as is practicable given the circumstances we are all are facing today. The Committee has in reality been working on it since January 2019.

Thank you to our 60^th Anniversary History Committee:

PP Nigel          Chair

PP Tim             Editor

PE Patrick        Publisher

PP Dean

PP Don

PP Dougie

PP Maarten

PP Mark

PP Niti

Hence is was tremendous that PP Nigel gave us some background on a couple of key events in our six decade old Club.

Our soon to be published 60^th Anniversary History Book is in fact our fourth edition. The first was  for our 25^th Anniversary, then a in-cycle 36^th Anniversary edition followed by a 50^th Anniversary edition. The 50^th Anniversary edition incorporates all three editions. The 60^th Anniversary History Book will only be for the past ten years.

PP Nigel also told us the story about a past fundraising project of our Club that entailed 50 elephants trekking 500km from Surin to Bangkok. It was to be
a re-enactment of a battle between Burma and Thailand. The managing and logistics of the trek was a huge undertaking with the elephants consuming ten tonnes of vegetation a day! Thirty to fourty days later the elephants arrived at the outskirts of Bangkok where they were supposed to re-enact the battles at the Military Stadium at Rangsit. But unfortunately, powers-to-be stopped that occurring. Fortunately one of our Members had a large parcel of land and
a stadium was quickly erected.

So with 3-400 actors and 50 elephants the re-enactment of the battles went ahead and the Club raised over THB 800k. A lot of money back in 1972 when you consider that the average wage was THB 25  per day!

Finally, the plan was to have as our Guest Speaker Mr Omid Wali calling in from Afghanistan. Omid is a Peace Fellow who in 2018 studied Conflict Analysis at Chulalongkorn University whilst he travelled Laos, Myanmar and Indonesia for case studies. His topic was “Working with the Youth of Afghanistan at this Critical Time of the Peace Process”.

Well as we now know, it was very difficult to get a quality connection out of Afghanistan and as much patience as we had, we ultimately were unable to hear from Omid. PP Andrew has been in touch with Omid who has had to leave his city to get to Kabul as it had fallen to the Taliban. There is a lot of pressure from home countries to extract non-Afghanistan citizens but this is mainly focussed on those who work ‘behind’ the Embassy walls. Omid’s work is largely with the youth out in the provinces. Hence he is still on the ground. Given the obvious state of the nation right now, we won’t be be able to reconnect with Omid any time soon. If there are any updates I am sure we will hear from
PP Andrew.

See you all online on Friday 20^th August.

Finbarr O'Connor
President 2021-22

Thank you to all of our Members who joined us from overseas:

•   Rtn Arie Bloed (The Netherlands)

•   Rtn Elmar Lins (Austria)

•   Rtn Joe Ravenscroft (UK)

•   Rtn John Fotiadis (USA)

•   PP John Quarmby (UK)