I hope you like the new format. All comments are very welcome, even if you hate it.... and you can always revert to the way it was done previously, if you so wish.
Side Bar
In the Side Bar you will find such things as future speakers, future events, birthdays etc. I have added "Our Links to the Rotary World" with the District & RI websites as well as that of the Rotary Club of Hatfield UK. If you click on that you will see what they have to say about our joint Palliative Care Project. If there are other Rotary links that should be included just let me know.
Pages
There will be separate pages for different projects with links at the top of this page. I have established one temporarily for the Discon Reports rather than put them in the main body of the text. There is another for Region 2 to which we belong. Ideally we should have one for Community Service, for Youth, Rotary Anns etc. When you have something for your page just send it to me, plus photos or whatever and we will establish the page. The page is there for ever so it will provide a useful source of reference and an archive.
Jokes
The last thing in The Ramble is the Joke of the Week.....and that, I'm afraid, is somewhat subjective.
Contributions to The Ramble
For the time being they can be sent to me by clicking HERE!
How to Propose a Potential New Member
I will be sending out later in the week the guidelines for proposing a potential new member. One is a pamphlet from RI describing the process and the other is the Rosebank Form to be completed. Any questions please refer to me.
This Week
Our speaker is Danny Myburgh who is "Artist in Residence" at The Bag Factory. I'm not sure what that means but no doubt she will explain it. She's an old girl of St Mary's Waverley and took a BA in Law at Stellenbosch and then studied History of Art through UNISA.She took this one step further by studying Art Therapy at the Art Therapy Centre - Lefika la Phodisa in Rosebank Johannesburg where she stayed on as Project Manager for 2 years.
From 2004 -to 2007 she was an art therapist at the Johannesburg Parent and Child Counselling Centre, in Berea until becoming Head of the Art Department at The Ridge School where she stayed for 5 years.
From 2012 she has been Artist in Residence at the Bag Factory in Fordsburg.
She is still involved at The Ridge School as she is producing 'Oliver' with the whole school involved.
Children and Art is something that she feels very strongly about and sees a knowledge of art as an important aspect of training for life.
Last Week
Our speaker was David Scholtz who talked about his fascination with the minor skirmishes of the Anglo-Boer War and his search for the sites of these little battles and the graves of those killed in these small conflicts. he also talked about the memorials that he has been instrumental in having erected at various sites and passed round albums of many of these. It was an interesting talk that meant that he only left half an hour after the end of the meeting!
Attendance:
22 Rotarians and visitors were Helen Aron (Marian Laserson's guest), Merle
Langenegger, Morake Mokgosi and Nicole Nsegbene.
The Club DirectoryJean Bernardo produced the 2015/16 Club Directory that she had been working on for ages. I think it must be the least rewarding job of anything in the club because no matter what, there will always be mistakes and complaints. Somehow Jean manages to survive this and appear relatively unruffled.
As you can see the directory is compulsive reading!
Rotary History
Here's an interesting video of the first Rotarians of Club No 1 Chicago. I'll put on a video each week but it won't always be something relating to Rotary.
THE LOST GIRLS OF SOUTH SUDAN AND THE ROTARIAN WHO FOUND THEM
From the August 2015 issue of The Rotarian
The girls were alone. Their families were dead, or gone, or lost in the broken landscape of southern Sudan. They had nowhere to turn, and no one to turn to. Some lived in the market, others in the cemetery. When Cathy Groenendijk saw them, she couldn’t help herself. She offered them tea, then some food, then a place to sleep in her guesthouse.
“In the morning, we would sit together and talk about what had happened the night before,” Groenendijk remembers. “And what I heard I could not believe. I could not believe it.”
One girl’s father had died, and after the funeral, she never saw her mother again. She was living on the streets with some other kids when four men started chasing them. The other girls were faster. She fell behind and was caught and raped by all four men. Groenendijk knew a doctor who repaired the physical damage, saving her life.
Another three girls, ages eight, six, and one, lived with their mother, but they all slept in the open. Groenendijk helped them build a tarped shelter, but the hot sun ate it away. One night, a man snuck in and tried to assault one of the girls. After that, Groenendijk let them sleep on her veranda. This was in 2006.
Groenendijk was born in eastern Uganda, where her father grew coffee and bananas on the family farm. She had three brothers and seven sisters, so when she was three years old, she was sent to the capital, Kampala, to live with an aunt. After secondary school, she went on to study nursing.
“When I was in Kampala,” she says, “I used to take the food that was left from our kitchen in the training school and give it to the children who were without food. It was a very, very bad time under Idi Amin, and after.”
It was a time of war, suspicion, and fighting. Between 1971 and 1979, about half a million people died under Amin’s dictatorship. Another 300,000 died under Milton Obote before he was deposed in 1985.
When she finished nursing school, Groenendijk got a job at a hospital in the north of Uganda. “There were so many militias and armed groups, especially among the northern tribes,” she says. “Even after the war, there were militias who were never fully disarmed. They were always fighting.”
Not long after she arrived, she met a young Dutch missionary named Wim, who worked with a relief organization called ZOA that aids people trapped in conflict and disaster zones. The two fell in love, got married, and for 10 years remained in Uganda, mostly in Karamoja, the remote northeast corner of the country.
In 1993, the couple went to the Netherlands. Shortly after they moved, the genocide in Rwanda began to unfold. An estimated 800,000 to 1 million people were killed in 100 days. When the violence subsided, a colleague at ZOA asked if Wim and Cathy would be willing to go to the country. Groenendijk would run a health program, and Wim would do agriculture and food security work in the town of Nyamata, south of Kigali. One of the most devastated areas, it’s now the site of a genocide memorial, at a church where 10,000 people who had gathered for protection were murdered.
In 1998, ZOA asked Groenendijk if she would help establish a health program in Sudan, which, on the map, was the largest country in Africa. In reality, though, it had never been much of a country at all. The south and the north were very different, and since 1955, animist and Christian groups in the south had been fighting for independence from the primarily Muslim north.
When Groenendijk and her husband arrived in 1999, the fighting was still intense. They lived in rebel territory, in a village called Katigiri. “There were areas with no medical care at all,” she remembers. “Many people were dying.” They’d lived in conflict zones before, but this time was different. Planes bombed areas that had relief operations. “When we first arrived,” Groenendijk says, “we were bombed as were driving. Every house had foxholes, and when you heard planes flying over, you got out of the house and into the foxholes. We also had one large bomb shelter for everybody, but if a bomb landed on that one, there would be many casualties. So we used several foxholes to spread the risk.”
For nearly five years, she ran the ZOA health program in Katigiri. She made sure health workers were trained, medicines delivered, new health units opened, and transportation arranged for patients. All the while, the bombs kept coming as the war dragged on. When the danger and stress grew unbearable, the couple went back to Rwanda.
In 2005, a peace accord was signed and the fighting stopped. A date was set for a vote on independence. Groenendijk thought of the people she knew there, especially the children who’d lost so much. In 2006, she and Wim decided to return.
Now people were flooding into Juba. In the future capital of the world’s newest country, everything had to be built from scratch, including Rotary clubs. Michael Elmquist had been a Rotarian in Kastrup, Denmark, for more than 20 years when he arrived in Juba in 2008 to work for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He could see that the area could benefit from Rotary’s work. The country had only 200 miles of paved road. Barely 2 percent of children completed primary school. Infant and child mortality rates were among the highest on every ranking. Everything needed to be restored: families, villages, lives.
“Once in Juba, I realized that the whole country of Sudan [before South Sudan became independent] had only one Rotary club, and that was in Khartoum, over 700 miles away,” Elmquist recalls. “I felt I could not live for three years without access to a Rotary club.”
He started to round up prospective candidates. But because few people in Juba knew much about Rotary, most of the initial recruits were expatriates. And because the streets didn’t have names, people listed their addresses as “the big house with the yellow roof opposite Equatoria Hotel.” Nonetheless, Elmquist soon found the required 20 people. TheRotary Club of Juba was chartered in 2010, bringing the number of Rotary clubs in a country almost twice the size of Alaska, to two.
After she and her husband moved to Juba, Groenendijk started working for an NGO called War Child, but grew frustrated with the slowness of a big organization. She needed to keep pace with the brothel owners who were recruiting girls. So she started her own organization, offering what she had. First, she gave the girls tea, then one meal. Friends would help out.
“For two years,” she says, “I was providing tea and one meal, which was better than nothing. Some of the kids had never had a meal apart from scavenging and eating leftovers from restaurants. Once a week, I would buy a proper meal for all of them.”
She started going door to door, asking for funding. Help started to trickle in. As volunteers and donors appeared, her organization started to take shape. She called it Confident Children out of Conflict (CCC).
Elmquist heard about her work and invited her to join the Rotary Club of Juba. She accepted. “When they saw what I was doing,” Groenendijk says, “they used every opportunity to support us. A lot of credit goes to Michael. I went there and showed pictures of a girl who had been raped, to show what was happening in Juba. After that, a lot of people started paying attention to what we were doing.”
“The job she’s done looking after these children has just been amazing,” Elmquist says. “You can’t believe the difference in the young girls who come in. They don’t talk, they don’t know how to hold a knife or fork or anything. And she trains them and gets them to school. She gets them dressed. She saves them from prostitution, which would be their only source of income.”
Soon Groenendijk started looking for a piece of land. Eventually, she bought some property and built a dormitory that could house about 40 girls. She hired a small staff.
The Juba club continued to support her work, along with other rebuilding projects in South Sudan – which became an independent nation in 2011. At one fundraising dinner, the club auctioned drawings done by the girls at Groenendijk’s center and raised $3,000 for CCC, as well as an orphanage in Juba.
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