Great Scot September 2018 Gt Scot_154_September_online | Page 75

GLENFERRIE
PROBUS WALKERS
TOUR SCOTCH
Fourteen sprightly members of the Glenferrie Probus Club’s walking
group thoroughly enjoyed a tour of Scotch’s Senior School on 19 July,
which was well guided by OSCA Executive Director, Scott Montgomery
(‘85). Meeting the group at a Kooyong coffee shop, Scott conducted
the walkers on an informative tour up Glenferrie Road to the Monash
Gates, and on through the School to the riverbank raingarden at the end
of Hambledon Road, which filters and purifies stormwater before it is
discharged into the Yarra.
Features the group noted during their walk included the historic John
Monash memorial stone, the John Gardiner commemorative cairn near
the Monash Gates, the Glen House site, plaques honouring early settlers
William and Sarah Head, the Littlejohn Memorial Chapel, the Main Oval,
the James Forbes Academy, and Memorial Hall. All 14 Probus club
members participating in the visit greatly enjoyed the walk, and they
thanked Scott for his help and guidance.
For information regarding Glenferrie Probus Club, contact Celia
Cornick, Membership Secretary, on 0403 208 940.
STANDING LEFT TO RIGHT: SUE, MIKE MACROW, GARY EDWARDS (‘60),
JOCK MCKINLAY (‘66), WILLIAM WINFORD, DAVID FERGUSON (‘56) AND ERIC BATES.
SEATED, LEFT TO RIGHT: PAUL WRIGHT, JOHN MACROW, DAVID TENNENT (‘59),
KAY EDWARDS, YVONNE CROSS, BARRY MAWBY AND CELIA CORNICK.
OSCA Chaplain
THE THAI CAVE MODEL
Helping those who are 'doing it tough'
A senior Old Boy – an East Melbourne Glen Chapter member
— related to me how he’d seen people ‘doing it tough’ in the Great
Depression. The father of a local Gippsland family, living in impoverished
circumstances, had to trap and sell rabbits to eke out extra income.
I used to wonder about the NRL Club with the name Rabbitohs;
strange name. But then the idea of someone in the street shouting ‘Rabbit
Oh!’ is curious today. It seems to go back to even earlier times when men
caught and sold rabbits round the neighbourhood to provide for their
families.
There are still many ‘doing it tough’, from the homeless in our own
streets, to the great global movement of displaced, stateless and refugee
people we see on our screens.
In her New York Times article on the Thai cave rescue (10 July),
Hannah Beech observed the cave site, which is in the Golden Triangle, an
area renowned for drugs and warring ethnic militias and into which young
men are easily dragooned, is home to hundreds of thousand of stateless
people. With little legal protection, undocumented workers in Thailand can
be at the mercy of human traffickers or unscrupulous employers.
Three of the rescued boys, and their coach, are ‘stateless’. One of
those stateless boys, Adul Sam-on, is a 14 year old who has experienced
tough circumstances. When he was six his ‘parents slipped him into
Thailand, and left him in the care of the Baptist church in the hope that
care there, and proper schooling, would provide him with a better life than
his illiterate, impoverished, family could provide’. The International Christian
Charity, Compassion, supports 1.8 million children globally. Adul is one of
those children.
The top student in his class, Adul speaks English, Thai, Burmese,
Mandarin and Wa. It was he who as Beech puts it, ‘politely communicated
to the British divers his squad’s greatest needs: food and clarity on just
how long they had stayed alive’.
The editor of CASE Magazine posed the challenging question: ‘What
would make you pack everything you could carry and flee your home?’
The Bible says the God of Israel, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, wants his people to care for ‘the widow, the orphan and the
refugee’. We have made lots of progress since setting the Millennium
Development Goals, as Hans Roslings’ book Factfulness makes clear, but
there is still much to achieve. Can we lift our game here?
The ABC’s Four Corners program on the Thai cave rescue will rate with
me as the best program of the year. Massive international cooperation, no
grandstanding, rescuers each applauding the specific skill and efforts of
others, and all deeply happy at the outcome. We shared their joy.
What is our responsibility? How can we help those doing it tough
locally and internationally? Perhaps the Thai cave rescue, so well
documented in Four Corners, could serve as a model. Our roles will be
less dramatic but no less important, as the outcome for one Compassion
child shows.
GRAHAM BRADBEER — OSCA CHAPLAIN