A Social Dinner, Human Evolution, a Business Meeting and Rotoract.

The Week before Last

We didn't have enough space last week to put in this picture of our Social Dinner at Dolci Cafe on Tuesday 6th March....here we are!

























Last Week

Eric Dabbs showed a very interesting presentation on Human Evolution.  Time wise our species, Homo Sapiens, has only been around in the twinkling of an eye.  What I found particularly interesting was that there was another group competing with Homo Sapiens in Asia known as Denisovans who were quite distinct from the Neanderthals around the Northern Mediterranean and as with Neanderthals there was degree of interbreeding and Denisovan DNA is found in Australian Aborigines.
Just for your entertainment, red hair is part of our Neanderthal heritage.........
The talk was so interesting that I forgot to take any photographs.  I hope we have Eric back again at some stage.
I was looking at a book in Exclusive Books which is a diary of a second hand bookshop owner in Wigtown.  He seems to have a very annoying shop assistant who is a Christian fundamentalist who always harangues customers on evolution.  She is always putting Darwin's Origin of Species under Fiction and the owner gets his revenge by putting the Bible under Novels.

This Week
As President Lyn says in her letter, it's a Business Meeting.

Blanket Drive
Steel yourselves.....it's that time of year again.  David Bradshaw is organising it as usual and is waiting for confirmation that we can be outside the Nicol Highway Pick 'n Pay from the 20th - 22nd April.  That's just round the corner so make a note.

The Ramble
I am away for two weeks from this coming Saturday and there will not be a meeting next week as it's Good Friday but the following week I will not be back so there will be a missing Ramble.
It is still not clear who the speaker will be on the 6th April so I can't give you a preview.

I thought it would be interesting to hear about a couple of Rotoractors for a change.

Joan Nairuba 26, a member of the Rotaract Club of Kololo, Uganda, and a lawyer specializing in mediation

I work at a commercial law firm, but I do more mediation than litigation. My law firm advocates for the use of alternative dispute resolution, and in Uganda, it’s also a requirement by law that parties undergo mediation. There are many cases where there’s lots of screaming. Part of the job is that you have to let both parties make some noise at first.

Then you begin to use the tools of mediation. The first thing you must do is explain to both parties that they have to meet each other halfway. They have to understand, from the start, that both sides will have to lose something to get somewhere.

The next thing you have to do is explain what happens if the mediation doesn’t work. We have a huge backlog of legal cases in Uganda, anywhere from five to 10 years, so if people can’t work together, they are going to have to wait a long time and pay a lot of money to their lawyers and to the court.

Then you ask each side to come up with a representative. This is very important, because when it’s a big group of people on each side, nobody wants to back down. It’s a lot easier to deal with individuals than with a group.

This is what I had to do with my most difficult case. It was a dispute about a local marketplace. A group of investors wanted to build a structure to house the market, and the local residents didn’t want it.

It was a tough case because it was a land issue, and land is sacred in Uganda. It’s something people kill for. So the only way to resolve this was to get two individuals who were committed to the process. You have to be patient, especially when the parties get impatient.

For me, there’s an extra challenge. I’m a young woman, and I may walk into a room where it’s all older men. So how do you get past that? The way you do it is you make clear that you understand the facts of the case and the legal issues, perhaps better than they do. You say, “I may look young, but I have the experience.”

There’s also a lot of suspicion based on tribal affiliation, so we have to reassure the parties right at the beginning that we are getting nothing from this process – no land, no money. We just want to help them come to a solution.

I’m in my second year of practice, so I have my whole career before me. I’m interested in working in the energy sector someday. But I know I’ll always be working in mediation, because people will never stop getting into disputes. This is just how life is, in Uganda and everywhere else.

Nichole Haynes, 23, a member of the Rotaract Club of Georgetown Central, Guyana, and an economist at Guyana’s Ministry of Business

When I started this job, I was 21. The first project I undertook was to make it easier to do business in Guyana. That has resulted in several collaborations and support from external bodies such as the World Bank. I’m very proud of that.

Guyana is located in South America. We are not a country in Africa, as some think. We are a very small country – the population is approximately 740,000 – and we are largely agricultural. We have recently been classed as upper middle income.

Guyana has discovered oil, and the government hopes to use the returns for infrastructure and education. So we are excited about that. It means that there is a lot of attention on the department in which I work.

My work is largely structured around policy development. I work directly with the minister of business to assess critical factors influencing the business environment. One project that we’ve been working on is improving transparency and access to information within Guyana – information on how to start your business, how to register the forms you need, how to access your forms online. It’s a small step, but it’s a big step for Guyana. We are moving into the digital age.

Access to electricity is one of the biggest constraints to doing business in Guyana. We want to go green, so we are about to pursue hydropower and solar. Oil is another opportunity for us to reduce our energy costs. Access to credit is another issue, especially for small businesses. We have introduced a credit bureau, and at the Ministry of Business, we are leading the development of a secure system to allow assets such as cattle to be used as collateral for borrowing. In addition, we  provide grants to small businesses that are in keeping with the intentions of Guyana going green and supporting a sustainable economy.

I appreciate that I get to be so directly involved in transforming our economy and in making the lives of the citizens of Guyana easier. Anyone in the public sector needs to put their country first. You must be invested in making your country better, especially if you are directly involved in policymaking. Guyana has solutions. It has natural resources; it has talented people. I want to play a part in organizing those players and those resources for Guyana’s real development – that’s why I do this. You see the potential, and you want to help.