Discon, the Induction Dinner and a Rotary Refugee Initiative in Wales

Discon
It was a really enjoyable conference this year probably because it was smaller, all the regulars were there so it was easier to spot them and it just seemed more relaxed.  Congratulations to the organising committee.

At the International Evening on the Friday Night

I am not going to put lots of pictures of Discon on The Ramble because you will see hundreds of them on the District Website and also in the DG's Newsletter but you will see us!

Patrick Ache won a prize for Best Dressed Man.  I don't know what is in the parcel!  It must have taken him hours to do all that embroidery!












Kevin Wolhuter danced the night away at the Gala Banquet on the Saturday evening.

The rest of us just looked smart.

This Week
It's Lyn Collocott's Induction as President on Friday evening so obviously there is no Friday lunchtime meeting.  There was a request for 'vegetables' to go with the dishes.  It was decided at Discon that we would bring our own just in case and we also decided which ones we would each bring.  I opted for potatoes and for health reasons all our vegetables will be raw.

Sadly my first Rotary Club in Johannesburg, the Rotary Club of Parktown Excalibur, is closing down on Friday night with what they are calling 'The Last Supper' at the same venue as our Induction Dinner but obviously not in the same room.  Don't be confused on the night!

When I have a chance I am going to pop in and say hello....maybe a couple of them may join us.


Statistics
As we are coming up to the end of the Rotary Year I thought you might be interested in the statistics for The Ramble this month bearing in mind that we have a week to go and there was no Ramble last week.

Here are the number of pageviews per country:

Entry Pageviews

South Africa             455

United States            120
Germany                     29
Chile                          19
United Kingdom        18
France                         12
Ukraine                       11
Ireland                         10
Russia                           9
Poland                           6

There have been a total of 57 522 pageviews in all.

Rotary Club of Cardiff Bay, Wales

Alison Sutherland

If I report a crime, can the police officer deport me? When I get a cold, should I go to the hospital? Is it all right to spit in the street? For many refugees in a new country, the answers to those and many other questions aren’t obvious.

Abbie Tr

That’s why Alison Sutherland has been helping asylum seekers learn the customs of their new nation. “We want to set them up for integration rather than isolation,” Sutherland says. 

Wales is home to several thousand displaced people from Eritrea, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Uganda, and other countries. Upon seeking asylum, they must wait as long as a year for a hearing to determine if they qualify for official refugee status. 

Life during that time is extremely frustrating for them, Sutherland says: “They’re not allowed to work. Meanwhile, of course, they are very afraid. Their journeys have been horrendous.” 

Sutherland, assisted by two members of the City of Cardiff Rotaract Club, regularly meets with asylum seekers to discuss topics such as the role of women in Welsh society, the justice system, and local customs.

 “Some of them have started volunteering with Rotary and Rotaract also,” she says. “They’ve helped us with street cleaning, blood pressure events, face painting, tree planting. They say that we’ve given them welcome and respect.”

Louis Nigrini, the Arts Festival comes to an end and $450 million more to the Rotary Polio Plus Programme

Last Week

Our guest speaker, Louis Nigrini, really made us think about why we were sitting there and what we do.  It really made me wonder about The Ramble and if it was really the answer!  I spoke to him afterwards and asked him for the answers but there aren't any.  He said he was there to ask questions.
The example he gave of volunteers to New Orleans giving $250 service yet costing $1 000 to do that is certainly not equivalent to the time we give.  For example, mentoring a student cost the mentor time but that is all and I really do not think that Firlands Fete loses money because we run the bookstall!
Still it was an interesting series of questions and volunteer stereotypes.

Eric Hackett

Esther Okehi

It was a very depleted meeting because of the Rotary Arts Festival but we do keep up our reputation as a club that always seems to have visitors.  We were delighted to welcome Esther Okehi from Texas and Eric Hackett from the Rotary Club of Bedfordview.  He was seen chatting to the speaker subsequently, obviously feeling that he should give
Bedfordview a blast too!

Sunday 

It was the close of the Rotary Arts Festival which has been a resounding success.  Here are the deskwallers at the end.

Mark Franklin, Jean Bernardo, Thembi Ndlovu, Lyn Collocott and Neville Howes

This Week.
We will be celebrating our Eternal Youth on Youth Day so t here will be no Ramble next week so after Discon will be the next one.

ATLANTA, Ga. (June 12, 2017) – Today in Atlanta Rotary President John Germ and Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced a commitment of up to $450 million to support the eradication of polio.

To an audience of nearly 40,000 Rotary members attending the humanitarian organization’s annual convention, Rotary and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation renewed their longstanding support for ending polio – a paralyzing, life-altering scourge on the verge of becoming the second human disease ever to be eliminated. Rotary committed to raise $50 million per year over the next three years, with every dollar to be matched with two additional dollars from the Gates Foundation. This expanded agreement will translate into $450 million for polio eradication activities, including immunization and surveillance over the next three years. This critical funding helps ensure countries around the world remain polio-free and that polio is ended in the remaining three endemic countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan.

“In 2016, fewer children were paralyzed by polio than ever before, thanks to the dedication of Rotary members and our partners,” said Germ. “The paralysis of even one child by a preventable disease is unacceptable, and I'm proud to see our members redoubling their commitment to ensure we reach every single child with the polio vaccine.”

In a partnership spanning a decade, Rotary and the Gates Foundation, along with the other Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) partners, have led the effort to end polio worldwide. This funding extension reaffirms a commitment established at the 2013 Rotary Convention in Lisbon, Portugal, when the Gates Foundation pledged to match Rotary contributions two-to-one, up to $35 million per year through 2018. Rotary, including matching funds from the Gates Foundation, has donated more than $1.6 billion to polio eradication. 

“The vision of eradicating polio began with Rotary, and its support of that effort has been unwavering for more than 35 years,” said Gates. “Rotary’s commitment to raise $150 million over the next three years to end polio forever is a testament to the compassion, generosity, and kindness of more than a million Rotarians around the world.”

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of the news that world governments and other donors have pledged to contribute US$1.2 billion total to the GPEI for polio eradication efforts. The government funding—also announced today at the Rotary Convention—will substantially help to close the US$1.5 billion funding gap, allowing partners to immunize 450 million children every year and support rigorous disease surveillance in both endemic and at-risk polio-free countries. While the government funding announced today makes considerable headway in the fight to end polio, continued support from donors remains vital to achieve a polio-free world.

The global eradication of polio has been Rotary’s top priority since 1985. Through the Global Polio Eradication Initiative – a public-private partnership that includes Rotary, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF – the incidence of polio has plummeted by more than 99.9 percent, from about 350,000 cases a year at the start of the initiative to just 37 cases in 2016.

RLI, Rotary Arts Festival, Frank Taylor, Louis Nigrini & Rotary Convention 1917.

Last Week

I was on the Rotary Leadership Institute Course last Friday so I can't comment on the meeting though I can show you some of the people attending the various courses on the Saturday.

It was also the week of the start of the Rotary Arts Festival so let's just have a number of photographs.  On our Facebook Page I will put a slide show of lots of them so click on https://www.facebook.com/rosebankrotary/?ref=bookmarks

We presented Nombulelo Yena and Michelle Brook of Omnicom with Certificates of  Merit for all their help.

 Frank Taylor
Frank is a member of the Rotary Club of Hatfield, our major partners in the Baragwanath Palliative Care Project and who approached us in the first place.

At the recent District Conference in the UK Frank Taylor received A Citation for Meritorious Service from Rotary International.

This is a rare event, not being a District award, or even a RIBI award, but one from “head office”, i.e. received out of the 1.2m Rotarians…

Many congratulations to Frank, being seen here with The Rotary International Representative Sean Doyle. 

This Week

Our Speaker is Louis Nigrini, a motivational speaker...hence the joke about motivational speakers.  He is going to talk to us about Volunteerism.

Public Speaking is not for the faint hearted. It takes a good mix of skill, courage and sheer stupidity to get on a stage and tell people all about your greatest moments of joy, pain and sometimes embarrassment. Louis Nigrini is a uniquely talented and budding speaker who has won the Afrikaans, Humourist, Impromptu Speaking and Evaluator’s categories in the Toastmasters Speaking competitions in Southern Africa. 

He has spoken at ministry events, corporate functions, schools and community projects all over the country, performing in the capacity of Guest Speaker, Trainer or MC, before audiences ranging from 10’s to thousands. He is also an ATKV accredited judge for both Public Speaking and Debating and served as the chief judge in several School Public Speaking Competitions. 

With his background of full time Ministry, being a parent, stage performances, broadcast television and Corporate Communication, Louis is sculpting the art of inspirational storytelling…with a few stories of his own. With the unique brand of “coming of age stories” and tales that shaped his life, Louis has left many a crowd laughing…sometimes at themselves, but mostly at him. He has the ability to capture the crowd in a unique way and leave them with such a powerful message that they will still be pondering about in the days to come.

Louis and his wife also enjoy writing school shows and have seen these creations come to life on several school stages. He is the Production Manager at a video production company in Johannesburg focussing on career advice. He currently lives in Randburg with his wife, Pauli and their two little boys, Luan and Reinhardt.

If you are attending the 2017 Rotary International Convention from 10 to 14 June, you should take time to reflect on the historic convention of 1917, also in Atlanta. There, Arch Klumph gave a speech calling for an endowment, a key moment in the origin of The Rotary Foundation.

Most sessions of the 1917 convention were held atthe Baptist Tabernacle on Luckie Street. The building, now known simply as the Tabernacle, is just a few blocks from this year’s convention home, the Georgia World Congress Center, so stroll across Centennial Olympic Park to Luckie Street and imagine what the convention was like 100 years ago.

Some of the speakers covered topics that were very much of the moment in 1917 (“The Creation of Public Sentiment to Demand and Construct Public Highways”) while others tackled subjects that would not be out of place today (“The Establishment of Vacant Lot Gardening”). There was a Special Assembly on the “Enlightenment of Non-Rotarians as to Rotary,” a subject of perennial concern.

Returning to Atlanta is an apt way to mark the centennial of The Rotary Foundation. It’s a powerful reminder of how far Rotary has come, and how important our core values and mission remain as we look to the next 100 years.