The Swan City Rotary Club held its annual kick-off ahead of its Highway to Mexico project on October 9th.
A group of 16 local Rotarians will make the pilgrimage to Mazatlan to deliver eight vehicles including school busses, a fire truck, and an ambulance, and project Co-leader Mark Marcotte says the eight-day trip marks the culmination of weeks of gathering donations to make it possible.
“All across the province, we get different people donating from all over the place, AHS, different fire departments, they give us fire gear, medical supplies, I think in our ambulance this year, we have an x-ray machine that was donated going down,” he says. “Not only are we taking the vehicles, but we take them loaded up with other necessities that they could really use.”
Marcotte says he was sold on the project after seeing the effects of it during his first trip down in 2014. The Rotarian describes driving a fire truck that year to what he was told would be a small town’s “first fire truck,” before discovering what he was doing would affect a population the size of Grande Prairie.
“The town was 70,000 people, it was Grande Prairie, and it was their first firetruck and they still didn’t even have an ambulance,” he says. “Up until then, they were using a Dodge Ram, so a little quarter-ton pickup truck with a 200-gallon water tank and a garden hose hooked up to a little Honda water pump where they ran into fires wearing sandals, shorts, and t-shirts.”
“Now, some years later, they have full-fledged fire departments.”
He says while Mexico largely remains a developing country outside the resorts, the annual event seems to be driving investment into public service in Mexican towns.
“Their fire departments are still all volunteer, but the government is finally putting money into the fire departments where they now can hire a fire chief, but it’s all because of this project that they’re doing this,” he says. “It’s more than just giving the buses, giving the fire trucks, we are helping their infrastructure, we’re helping save lives.”
The group of 16 is scheduled to begin their trip at 6:00 a.m. on October 11th, covering around 650 kilometres per day before reaching their destination more than 5,000 kilometres away from home.
