I had .....and still have...flu so I was unable to attend the meeting. One advantage is that I can write the Ramble in bed. This has made me think about the future of Rotary and the eClub, at least, could have an in bed meeting. It's a thought.
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| Tim Truluck flanked by James Croswell & Obakeng Moloko |
Tim Truluck, the current Councillor for Rosebank gave an interesting
and informative talk to the Club last Friday.
He told of some of the challenges of an almost overnight transition
from opposition to being the majority in the Council.
He advised members on how to log water and electricity faults with the
Council.
He also suggested that people log on to Twitter, as this is one of
the the best ways of communicating with the Council re faults.
Mike Lamb presented a banner from the Rotary Club of Schaffhausen in
Switzerland.
He entertained us with some of the background to the banner.
This Week
Our speaker is another motivational speaker, Annette Jahnel. I doubt whether flu will allow me not to be motivated again The puffing below will show you what I mean. A quick dip into Plato's Republic would be a good antidote.
Annette is a new age nomad, a pusher of boundaries, a catalyst, a destroyer of boxes, a peaceful anarchist and a questioner of every thing. Annette would like live in a world where borders and boundaries were only figments of the imagination, language was a universal think tank and shiny small things were exciting only to magpies. Annette would like to live in a world where the mind advanced faster than the computer and the only thing that governed us was our own self-control. Annette does not care for fashion or shoes she does not know the latest fancy restaurants or hip words, although she knows a lot of words and uses them in a variety of interesting and exciting ways. Annette doesn’t believe that all is right with the world. Or that technology is the answer to everything. Annette thinks bunny huggers are as dangerous as dolphin hunters and that the only way forward is to evolve and the only way to evolve is to pay as much attention to our brains as we do to our biceps. She believes human evolution can only take place in the human mind and that humans should pay more attention to thinking than shopping. Annette thinks, a good think is a great way to pass the time and that having a truly original thought is as good as it gets. When she leaves people happier and more inspired than when she found them she believes she has done well. Annette sees rainbows in dews drops and value in a carpenters hand made chair but none in a banker’s lair. She knows to step lightly in deserts and other people’s lives and beliefs. She knows she knows nothing and is quite happy to admit it, having discovered that it is the best way to learn something new everyday. And despite not having many pairs of shoes or in fact much stuff at all she doesn’t feel in the least deprived as she believes the pursuit of wisdom is far more exciting than the pursuit of stuff. Join her on a little trip around the planet and experience the world through her eyes because above all, Annette sees thing differently.
Rotary member and author Marilyn Fitzgerald stresses the importance of community involvement for sustainable service projects.
Rotary members, volunteers, and donors are usually excited to talk about successful projects. Marilyn Fitzgerald, a member of the Rotary Club of Traverse City, Michigan, USA, draws inspiration from a far less popular topic: failure.
A clinical psychologist and author, Fitzgerald has spent years studying economic development projects in poor countries, where well-intentioned efforts to improve lives sometimes backfire. Now she travels the world to consult on projects and speak to Rotary clubs about sustainability and lessons from her fieldwork. We caught up with her at One Rotary Center, where she had addressed Rotary staff.
Q: How did you come to focus on sustainability in projects?
A: Looking back on international projects I’ve been involved with, I realized that they often created a dependency on the Rotarians, outsiders coming into a community with money and good intentions. I asked myself why projects no longer existed, why the people we wanted to help weren’t carrying on like we planned. I started to realize that those people were not included in project planning, and that’s not sustainable.
What does it take for people to sustain a project themselves, and go on without our help? It’s about getting away from the charity model, where we give things away, and getting into the opportunity model, where we empower people to carve their own paths out of poverty.
Q: How does that work?
A: I work with microloan programs that provide entrepreneurs with capital to start or invest in a business, and the programs I work with always incorporate an educational component. People sometimes don’t know how to count or even the cost of the goods they’re selling. They can get themselves into terrible financial trouble.
It’s amazing to watch in the field: You teach financial literacy, and the people that will listen and learn are the youth and the mothers and grandmothers, the core of the community. In the past we’ve given loans mostly to men and learned when we give a loan to a man, he gets some money, develops a business, and often leaves his family. Women tend to take better care of the money and share their skills with the community.
Q: How do we define sustainability with respect to humanitarian work?
A: There are two main areas of humanitarian aid. One is relief aid, and we don’t expect for that to be sustainable; we expect to take people out of dire straits and help them get back on their feet. Development aid has to do with people being able to do something for themselves, so they’re not dependent on us. It’s a simple litmus test: What will happen to these people if you walk away today?
I was involved in a scholarship program in Indonesia where I was raising $72,000 a year for 1,200 kids to go to school. I didn’t think too much about what would happen if I didn’t show up [with the money] one year, because I planned to keep showing up. You know who thought about it?
The mothers and the children — every year they worried if I was going to be there or not. That wasn’t a sustainable source of income for tuition and we had to change our approach. Income from livestock eventually helped that community become more self-sufficient.
Q: What steps can Rotary clubs take to make their projects more sustainable?
A: The first step is to involve the community you want to help; talk to the people who live there about their priorities.
In Guatemala, I worked with women who lived and worked on a city dump. A group of Rotarians came in with the goal of providing shelter for these women and their children. But the houses they built were four miles from the dump, and it wasn’t practical for the women to stay there during the workweek.
One woman later told me she had never asked for a house, that she was used to living outside, and what she really wanted was an education for her children. Do you know how much cheaper that would have been than building houses?
As Westerners, we often think we know the answers, we know people need clean water. What we forget to ask is whether they think they need clean water. Does what you’re offering matter to them? If not, you have to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that will matter.
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