Rotary sends Watershed worker to India

An annual Rotary Club International trip has put one local professional in India for a month to exchange business and cultural experiences.

On Jan. 2, a team of four young professionals and a team leader from Missouri left for the four-week trip to west-central India, and Stacey Armstrong, a project manager for the Watershed Committee of the Ozarks, was among them. During their time in India, the group participated in a variety of Rotary Club presentations, roughly a dozen social events, three to four hours a day of cultural and site tours, and spent time with their host families. The tour culminated with a Rotary district conference.

Armstrong, who returned to the Watershed office Feb. 4, teamed up with several water-resources professionals in India.

“Throughout my visit there, in every city that I stopped at, I had the opportunity to learn about the water and sanitation for that community,” Armstrong said.

Dotting the landscape from rural to urban areas in west-central India, she saw a range of approaches to water treatment and conservation.

“We are so fortunate to have good water quality. Living in the United States, we turn on the tap and it’s there, it’s clean and it’s plentiful,” Armstrong said.

“People in India don’t have that luxury.”

Armstrong said she visited one of the more advanced drinking-water treatment plants in the region, which only has been treating water for four years.

Local officials are recognizing the connection between clean water and health and reported less strain on hospitals. She said there also is a socioeconomic reality related to water in India.

“The communities that were closer to the water had less poverty, more farming and more successful businesses,” Armstrong said. “Water truly is connected to everything.”

Brad Bodenhausen, director of MSU’s International Leadership and Training Center, helped arrange the trip through Missouri Rotary District 6080’s Group Study Exchange. He currently is chairman for the district group-study exchange committee and has been involved in the program for nearly two decades.

Bodenhausen said a group from India is expected to visit Missouri with a stop in Springfield in October when the local district holds its annual conference.

“When the in-bound team comes here, they are typically here for a month and the first thing we do at the district level is decide their travel pattern around the state. We try to get them to six or seven different communities,” he said. “What we generally do is look at the professions of the inbound teams and figure out where they can get the best professional development experience.”

Bodenhausen, a 21-year veteran with the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, left the chamber last year to lead MSU’s international initiative. He’s been involved with the Rotary exchange for nearly 20 years and took his first trip with the group to Sweden.

“I was 29 at the time and it kind of changed the trajectory of my career,” Bodenhausen said.

Armstrong said she is anxious to share her experiences with local water-resource and utilities professionals.

“Seeing some of the more technically advanced things they were doing, I can apply and research more of what we’re doing here, so I can definitely use a lot of what I learned,” Armstrong said, pointing to GPS metering of water resources as something done in India that she isn’t sure is being done locally.   

Others with Armstrong on the trip were team leader Melvin Platt, art department chair at University of Missouri; Anne Case-Halferty, MU’s assistant director of alumni relations; and Kathleen Henschel, communicable disease epidemiologist for Missouri’s Health and Senior Services.[[In-content Ad]]