Cover Story

Lethbridge seniors aren’t standing on the shoulders of the information superhighway. They’re sharpening their tech-savvy skills and running right alongside the younger Internet users.
The Lethbridge Seniors Centre Organization helps by offering a computer club, which has been operating since the early ’90s. Closely related to it is a newer club dedicated to digital photography.
Between 120 and 200 members meet every month to learn about computers and again for specific two-hour workshop seminars on all aspects of the digital world from how to use a mouse and send an email to the intricacies of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While not all of the members attend all of the events, they meet once a week every month except July and August. They meet on the last Monday of the month from 9 a.m. onwards, while the two-hour workshops, led by everybody from LSCO executive director Rob Miyashiro  to club president Ione Dergousoff, take place on the last Wednesday of the month. There are also three-week classes, which take place twice a week on computer basics.
While learning new skills is a big draw, the opportunity to socialize is also appealing.

It isn’t easy for a travelling musician.
   In a country as vast as Canada, it can be a challenge to get gigs, and in a crowded bar, surrounded by a room full of people more interested in drinking and visiting, it can be difficult to get anyone to actually listening to your music.
Fortunately, there is Home Routes, a nationwide concert series that take place in people’s homes — an intimate atmosphere that includes the host’s closest friends. Home Routes not only features up-and-coming talent such as Meghan Blanchard, but big names including Valdy, Ken Hamm, Ian Tamblyn and Rita Chiarrelli, who have won critical acclaim and awards.
The host advertises the show to friends plus puts musicians up for the night and feeds them on a day that might otherwise be wasted and thus costing the musician money.
In return, the musician plays a private concert.

When Anthony Makwach made a trip to his hometown in South Sudan to visit his family, he saw school-age children taking their classes in the shade of the trees.
“There is a school there but it is too far away for little kids to walk to. It is about 20 km,” he said.
So the third-year accounting student at the University of Lethbridge decided to do something with some help from the university’s Rotaract Club.

Family Literacy Day is Jan. 27, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore books the rest of the year. If you don’t know where to start, two book clubs based out of the Lethbridge Public Library’s downtown and Crossings branches are happy to point you in the right direction.
“We’re all readers, so reading a book a month isn’t a problem,” said Sheila Braund, a long-standing member of the Definitely Not Plato reading group. For the past dozen years, the group has met on the fourth Monday of every month in the library’s Community Meeting Room to discuss favourite books. The committee meets in June to determine the books that will be read in the next year. All of the members get to submit their favourites, both new and classic releases, though the library must ensure it has enough copies of the book for everyone to read.
“We don‘t read a lot of pop fiction like Danielle Steele, but we read a lot of award-winning books,” she emphasized.
This month the group is reading Calgary-based author Betty Jane Hegerat’s latest creative non-fiction story “The Boy.” Hegerat has released several others including “Delivery,” which was shortlisted for the 2010 Alberta Literary Awards George Bugnet prize.
She will be in Lethbridge to speak with the group when it meets Jan. 25, though this is a special event.