A Champagne of a Business Meeting, Skittles and Mike Honnett to come and a Rotary Club in the Basque District of Spain

Sybille Essman

Last Week

Joan Sainsbury

It was a Business Meeting with very little business as half the Business People had given their apologies.  We had fun instead as Joan Sainsbury had brought several bottles of Pongratz to celebrate her special birthday and there was more than enough food for everybody.
The other advantage was the chances of winning the draw were increased and at the third attempt Joan drew her self and went home with the bottle of wine so honour was more than satisfied.

Sybille Essmann was an enthusiastic visitor so we hope to see her this week as well.

This Week

Thursday night is Skittles Night with Kyalami Rotary Club at the Swiss Club.  If you haven't already let him know that you are going just make sure you tell David Bradshaw.

At our Friday meeting Mike Honnett is going to talk about himself.  Is this picture really the same person?

Mike was born in Johannesburg in 1947 and brought up in Johannesburg and Bulawayo. He attended the University of Natal, Durban, where he obtained a BA degree in 1969 and an Honours degree in Psychology, in 1972. He is registered with the SA Board for Personnel Practice as a Chartered HR Practitioner, in the Generalist category and is a member of the IPM (SA).

He spent 12 years in corporate roles in HR and other disciplines in the Barlow Rand and Huletts groups, before embarking on a career in HR consulting. He was a partner and shareholder in FSA Contact, International Compensation (subsequently PSG International Compensation and then Channel Consulting) and a divisional director in Aon Consulting's HR Consulting Division.

Aon Consulting decided, after restructuring in 2004/05, to outsource the business of its HR Consulting Division and Mike set up an independent company, Mike Honnet Consulting (Pty) Limited, which is now Aon SA’s preferred supplier of these services to its clients.

This looks absolutely terrifying though it is probably only a board game I haven't come across before.  I wonder if this is what he's going to talk about?  With my luck I will keep being sent back to 'Start'.

Rotary Club of San Sebastián, Spain

María Tomé, from left, President Gabi Sola, and Vice President Eduardo Sancho of the Rotary Club of San Sebastián.    

You won’t find many Rotary clubs in the Basque region of northern Spain. This fact is shared casually by Iñaki Alava, a member of the Rotary Club of San Sebastián, as he sips his tea at a café in the upscale Gros neighborhood of this coastal city. Then he explains why. 

Today San Sebastián is known for its vibrant beach scene and daily celebrations of gastronomy. But not so long ago, the mood here, and across Spain, was much less festive. 

For almost four decades, Francisco Franco’s dictatorship persecuted communists, intellectuals, and other supposed enemies of the state — including Rotarians. The regime killed tens of thousands of political opponents, some of them by garrote, an iron collar that is tightened around the victim’s neck. It proved a successful deterrent to civic engagement. 

“They did a very effective marketing plan to eliminate the Rotarians,” says Alava, a professor at Mondragon University who teaches chemistry to culinary science and gastronomic arts students and has been a Rotarian since 2012. The regime’s anti-Rotary rhetoric was pervasive and fierce, and in 1936, Rotary was banned altogether. For four decades, Rotary in this country went silent. 

Though Alava’s club dates back to 1926, when it was chartered as the fourth Rotary club in Spain (the Rotary Club of Madrid, founded in 1921, was the first in continental Europe), its members were forced to put their activities on hold during the Franco era. When the country fully embraced democracy in the late 1970s, Rotary clubs began to re-emerge throughout Spain. The San Sebastián club started up again in 1979, but in the Basque region in general, clubs have been slow to rebound. Many people in the area, Alava says, still have a negative impression of Rotary or simply “don’t know what Rotary is.”

San Sebastián Rotarians are working hard to change that. They still meet at their original location, the elegant Hotel Londres, which has looked out over the La Concha beachfront promenade for more than a century. The members get together weekly to discuss their ongoing projects — except in August, that is, when they take a break because so many people in Spain, as in the rest of Europe, are vacationing. They have a monthly social event as well, an opportunity, Alava says, to celebrate their accomplishments. 

Three years ago, they created a strategic plan with ideas for projects that were important to their mission and involved an element of community outreach. These include several projects to benefit children with cancer and their families; raising funds for a companion dog for a child with severe autism; and working to help people living in poverty. 

They also sponsor a Rotaract club, which launched in 2016 with Alava’s daughter Joanne as president. In its first year, the club began a program to take elderly residents out for rides in pedicab-style bicycles. Adorned with a Rotary flag, the bikes attract attention as the Rotaractors pedal around town. 

To visitors (and there are plenty of them — the city’s population doubles in the summer), San Sebastián seems like a place of never-ending revelry. At peak tourist season, towels and umbrellas practically overlap on the soft sand of La Concha beach along the crescent-shaped bay. Swimmers bob elbow-to-elbow in the gentle waves, and surfers paddle out at the livelier break around the bend. 

Visitors also come for the food. San Sebastián is known for its bars and Basque restaurants, several of which have earned international fame for their stellar Michelin ratings. The city has more than 100 gastronomic societies, invitation-only clubs where members take turns cooking for one another. Preparing exquisite food is an act of civic pride here. 

In the narrow streets of the city’s old quarter, tapas bars serve beer, hard cider, and pintxos — small snacks sometimes served on bread — late into the night. Near midnight during the summer, children are still playing in the playgrounds, buskers are performing in the streets, and hungry diners are snacking on beef cheeks, pig ears, squid tentacles, and other Basque delights. 

In keeping with this tradition, the San Sebastián Rotary club hosts gastronomic events to raise funds — always a safe bet in this city of epicures. The club also puts on conferences for community groups to attract new members and to “show that Rotary is not the devil,” Alava says. In fact, it was at one such conference, a nano-biotechnology event six years ago, that Alava first heard about Rotary. He has been a member ever since.

The club now has 23 members, and public perception of the organization is taking a noticeable turn. “People thought of Rotarians as rebels,” he says. “Now I think that is changing.” 

Last Week/This Week, a Raid on Kyalami & Skittles, Friendship Exchange to Brazil and a Means of Helping Small Farmers.

Last Week

                                                              Speaker Alta McMaster

A regular visitor, Stuart, presented
 President Jean with his Club banner

James Croswell with visitor Sonja Hood

I again wasn't at the meeting but I am sure President Jean will talk about the guest speaker in her Words of Wisdom.  But here are some pictures!







This Week
It's a Business Meeting so there's not much to say about that either!

Raid on Rotary Club of Kyalami.

It's 6:30 for 7:00pm at The Swiss Club, 31 Moerdyk Street, Vorna Valley. 

 If you intend playing Skittles or Nine Pins it will cost you R50... Ten Pin Bowling is much more expensive!

To cheer or jeer is free.

There is a small menu card for people to chose from....and naturally there is a bar.

 Incidentally, Skittles was a well known Victorian Courtesan....see below.

Catherine Walters was born the third of five children at 1 Henderson Street, Toxteth, Liverpool, grew up in the Liverpool area and moved to London before her twentieth birthday. 

Her father was Edward Walters, a customs official, who died in 1864. Her mother was Mary Ann Fowler.

Her nickname is thought to have originated from her working at a skittle alley in Chesterfield Street near Park Lane.

Her classical beauty was matched by her skill as a horsewoman, for which she was almost equally renowned. In the 1860s the fascinating sight of Catherine riding on Rotten Row in Hyde Park drew huge crowds of sightseers. Aristocratic ladies copied the cut of her perfectly fitting "Princess" riding habit, and she was well known as a trendsetter.

Rotary Friendship Exchange

If you are interested in going to Brazil just have a chat with David Bradshaw.

In 2011, Hong Kong native Spencer Leung moved to Thailand to launch the organic operation of a Thai agricultural seed company. He believed that demand for organic food would continue to expand, but he didn’t simply want to make money. He wanted to do something good.

Songpot OonCham, Spencer Leung, and Saguntala Vijit discuss ways Songpot can use product traceability labels to enhance his business.

So Leung applied to become a Rotary Peace Fellow. He became the first peace fellow to be sponsored by District 3450 (Hong Kong, Macao, Mongolia, and China), attending the Rotary Peace Center at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok in 2013. The Chulalongkorn fellowship is a three-month certificate program for professionals who are already working in their field. “The more I looked into it, the more I believed organic agriculture could be a powerful peacebuilding platform,” Leung says. “So I finished the course, quit my job, and used my own savings to start Go Organics.”

Go Organics aims to improve productivity and sustainability for farmers who cultivate less than 2 hectares (about 5 acres) of crops, based on the belief that creating economic stability for small farmers will help cultivate peace.

Leung knew that in many parts of the world, small farmers lack the technical knowledge to connect with the global market for organics. So the team at Go Organics is working on initiatives to improve the marketplace for small farmers and to provide simple and cost-effective technologies that will help them improve operations, such as labels with digitally encoded data including production and expiration dates. The labels will make the supply chain more transparent, Leung says; consumers will be able to scan them with their phones to receive detailed information about the food that they are buying and the farmers who grew it.

“We want to bring customers closer to the producer,” Leung says. “We want them to know and appreciate where the food comes from and to support the hard work of the farmers.”

Go Organics also offers farmers an affordable cold storage unit that will keep crops fresh up to 10 days longer, opening up more market opportunities. The farmers can use microfinancing to purchase the unit, and Go Organics guarantees the sale of a certain amount of produce. 

These labels use easy-to-understand icons to identify duck and chicken eggs, and the scannable QR code gives detailed information that helps track the eggs from farm to consumer.

Go Organics has been working with the University of California, Davis, to introduce technologies to dry produce, such as a chimney solar dryer that is constructed from locally available items. A table covered in black cloth and a chimney wrapped in plastic create an air tunnel that can be used to dry agricultural products including fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, and coffee beans. 

Another innovation is an inexpensive test called a DryCard that farmers can use to check moisture levels in their products. Knowing those levels can help the farmers prevent the growth of mold.

“Right now there’s a big issue with food safety and food security, and reports say up to one-third of food produced is wasted,” says Anthony Phan, a project analyst at the Horticulture Innovation Lab at UC Davis. 

At the same time, global food production needs to increase dramatically to feed a growing population. Go Organics’ projects are supporting the “dry chain,” ensuring that foods can be dried properly and packaged safely.

“What Spencer is doing is really important, because these farmers don’t have the support, education, or even awareness of this problem,” Phan says. “Go Organics provides the expertise, technologies, and supplies needed to support that process.”

The DryCards are credit card-size laminated papers with cobalt chloride humidity indicator strips to measure moisture in products. The farmer puts the card, along with the produce, in a sealed storage container such as a jar or plastic bag; an hour later, the indicator strip will have changed color to indicate the moisture level. Pink means the product is too wet, while blue means it is safe to package.

 

“Right now, the way most farmers test for dryness is to either bite their product or squeeze it in their hands and listen to it,” Phan says. “And that’s not an accurate way to determine whether your foods are safe enough to store.”

The traditional alternative to the DryCard is a digital moisture meter, but that requires electricity or batteries, which are not always available to small farmers. The cards can be manufactured for 10 to 25 cents, Phan says, and can be reused many times. In addition to testing produce and other foods, they can also be used to monitor the moisture level of seeds in storage to ensure healthy germination, improving yields. 

To manufacture the cards, Go Organics is working with St. James’ Settlement, a Hong Kong nonprofit for people with disabilities. “I could make the card in China or have a factory make it for a lower cost,” Leung says. “But this is not the mission of Go Organics. Our job is to channel the work to those who are in need and to bring these people into the workforce. So this is a win-win situation.”

It’s a challenging effort, he notes, made more challenging by larger competitors with more resources. “But we want to do something different. We want a distribution network that lets local people eat local food that they can get directly from the farms nearby.”

Small farms produce around 80 percent of the world’s food and make up 90 percent of the world’s 570 million farms.

“If we can raise this group of people’s standard of living — sustainably — we’re going to make a lot of changes to the whole world,” Leung says. “It’s going to be amazing.”

PDG Annie Steijn. Careers Day, Alta McMaster & the Epic Foundation and Starting a Rotaract Club

Last Week



Unfortunately I wasn't there for Annie Steijn's talk as I had agreed to talk to the Sandton Satellite

Club about Rotary Peace Fellowships which is a pity as she is always good value for money.

I probably won't be there this week either......







By the way, if you haven't received a calendar for this year just hook out this old one as all the dates are the same.

Careers Day 9th March



I have sent out an email to all former base leaders and helpers participants but it will take a while for people to wake up as schools have only just opened and the universities are only functioning from 16th January.  It will be at Holy Family College as usual between 9:00 and 12:30 for Grade 12's.







The existing bases are:

• Medicine/Nursing
• Law
• Accountancy/Bookkeeping
• Marketing/Entrepreneurship/Retail
• Catering/Chef/Baking/Hospitality
• IT
• Building Industry/Plumbing/Tiling/Electrical
• Journalism/PR/Advertising
• Fashion
• Speech Pathology and Audiology
• Physiotherapy
• Teaching/Education
• Architecture
• Travel
• Aviation
• Social Work
• Engineering
• Logistics
• 4 x Tertiary Institutions

This is not exhaustive and I am sure that you may have ideas of additional bases, if so please email me with the suggestion, who would be manning the base and their email address and cell number.

This Week

Our speaker this week is Alta McMaster of the Epic Foundation.  There's a lot about her traumatic life on the website but what the foundation does is not so clear.  I am ensure she will enlighten us.

The Foundation was established in 2013 to supply Comfort Packs to rape survivors but subsequently other projects have been established.

Rhett Martin, Founding President, Rotaract Club of Silverton, Oregon

When I was 25 years old, I was appointed to the city council in my hometown. The mayor of our town is a very active Rotarian, and he got me involved with a weeklong Rotary Youth Leadership Awards here in Oregon. It lit the fire in me. When I got back, the mayor told me about Rotaract. It immediately clicked. We have a pretty great Rotary club here in Silverton, and there’s an Interact club at Silverton High School, but there was nothing for that age range from post-high school to 30. It was a perfect opportunity to start a community-based Rotaract club.

What steps did you take to start the club?

I started discussing it with the mayor and a friend of mine in August 2017. It took a couple of months of planning and studying the Rotaract handbook. Then we had to find people to show up and learn about it. We used word-of-mouth, talking to the like-minded people that we knew. We also reached out to local businesses, asking if they had young employees who would benefit. We had about nine or 10 people at our first informational meeting in December 2017. We were officially inaugurated in March 2018 with 14 members. 

The thing about community-based clubs is that although it’s tough to get people in the door, once you get them in, you retain them. That’s different from a college-based club, where it’s easy to get them in but you have a continuous turnover. The original 14 of us have stuck with it and are loving it.

Why did you start a Rotaract club rather than joining your local Rotary club?

I’d say half of our members are not established professionals — they’re in school or fresh out and just getting their first jobs. Our guest speakers are talking about first-time homebuying and health insurance, things that are geared toward youth.

The biggest gap between Rotary and Rotaract is financial. Every Rotary club is different in what it charges in membership dues, but most Rotaract clubs will be significantly lower or not charge at all. That’s important for young people who may not have a full-time job or an employer who pays their dues.

I know dual memberships are becoming a new thing, where you are a member of both Rotary and Rotaract. I think that’s fantastic. It allows those of us who may be reaching 30 years old to put our feet in both and get used to Rotary while still being active in Rotaract.

I see Rotaract as an investment for your Rotary club. It’s an opportunity to get them on board with Rotary ideals. Think of it as your club’s farm team, not its competitor. When Rotaractors reach a stage in life when they’re ready for the full commitment of a Rotary club, they’re all in.

What is your club working on?

We are starting a scholarship specifically for young adults ages 22 to 30 who are returning to continue their education, whether it’s a bachelor’s or associate degree, or tech or trade school. Most scholarships for college are for high school seniors. So many of those opportunities aren’t available for people who don’t go to college right away or who went to school and didn’t know what they wanted to do and dropped out but are now ready to go back.

Christmas Past & A Happy New Year, Spar Collection, Informal Meetings, a Talk by PDG Annie Steijn and More Help from Rotary for Africa.

Christmas Past and a Happy New Year!
If this was The Beano it would say "Signed:  The Editor".

First of all the Christmas Lunch!

I enjoyed it and I hope you all did as well.  Any comments on the food etc please let me know.





And next the Spar Norwood Collection.  It was very successful thanks to Costa Qually and the support he had from the Club.
President Jean sent me two photographs of one of our charities, Linda Twala of Phuthaditshaba, Alexandra, cashing in his Spar Vouchers.











Over the holiday period we always have informal meetings for lunch in Chariots Bar at Wanderers.  I was away for the whole period and again President Jean has leaped into the breech and sent me a picture of last Friday's get together.

This Week
Past District Governor Annie Steijn will be talking to us about Membership and Marketing.  This is very important as there have been a lot of changes in Rotary's strategy and we must keep up to date with new ideas.  Our membership is relatively static but none of us are getting any younger and if we are not careful the fortunes of the club could change almost over night. 
It will be interesting to hear what Annie has to say.

Former RI president helps send hundreds of volunteers around the world to perform 67,000 surgeries, examine 250,000 patients

During a 2016 mission to Kigali, Rwanda, Saboo demonstrated that he had overcome his discomfort with blood to become an effective member of the medical team.

When Rajendra Saboo finished his term as president of Rotary International in 1992, he started thinking about how he could continue to help people. And by 1998, after serving as Rotary Foundation trustee chair, he knew he wanted to do something hands-on. 

“When I was Rotary president, my theme was Look Beyond Yourself,” says Saboo, a member of the Rotary Club of Chandigarh, India. “I was thinking about service beyond borders. So I thought, ‘Is there anything that India can give?’ I realized that medical science in India is fairly advanced, and there are doctors — Rotarian doctors — who could give something to Africa, where the medical needs are tremendous.”

Saboo talked to Nandlal Parekh, a fellow Rotarian and a physician who had worked in Uganda before being forced out by dictator Idi Amin. Parekh thought Uganda, even though it was still in the midst of a civil war, would be an excellent place for a medical mission. The trip that Saboo organized in 1998 was the start of 20 years of medical missions and over 67,000 surgeries.

To accompany him on that first trip, Saboo assembled a team of surgeons with experience performing corrective surgery on patients with polio, as well as a team of ophthalmologists. Then, a few days before they were scheduled to depart, terrorists bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing hundreds of people. A third attack, in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, was foiled.

“We were terrified,” he says. “The doctors were also saying, ‘Should we go? Will we be safe?’” 

Then Saboo’s wife, Usha, talked to a woman who had returned from volunteering to help people wounded in the war in the former Yugoslavia. Usha asked her if she had been afraid.

“You die only once,” the woman replied. “And it is the way you die that matters. I did not find any fear at the time, because I was serving humanity.”

“That answer hit Usha,” recalls Saboo. “She told me about it. Then we called a meeting where she recounted her conversation. The doctors and the volunteers said, ‘We are ready to go.’”

They arrived three days after the bombings. From Kampala, one team took a bus four hours east to Masaka, while another went north to Gulu to perform eye surgery. The local hospital hadn’t seen an ophthalmologist in seven years. Some of the old women danced after their eye surgery because they had never seen their grandchildren.

Saboo, who has no medical training himself, got squeamish when he saw blood. But the team needed all the volunteers to pitch in — by washing the dirty feet of children in preparation for surgery, loading patients on stretchers, helping to start the IV drips, and doing anything else that needed to be done.

“Madhav Borate, who was the leader of our medical mission, said, ‘Raja, change your clothes and come to the operating theater. You have to hold the patient’s wrist while we are operating and monitor the pulse,’ ” Saboo recalls. “I said, ‘Madhav, are you mad? I can’t even stand seeing someone receiving an injection. I can’t stand the sight of blood. I would faint.’ ”

Borate recalls that day too. “The operating rooms were lacking in monitoring equipment, including a device called a pulse oximeter,” he says. “So we decided to train three Rotarians to feel the pulse of the patients and inform the anesthetist if it became too fast or too slow. We started referring to the volunteers as our pulse meters.” 

“I saw blood,” says Saboo. “I saw everything, and nothing happened to me. That changed me totally.”

Immediately upon their return to India, the team members started planning their next trip, this time to Ethiopia, with additional specialists. The third year they went to Nigeria. In the 20 years since that first trip to Uganda, they’ve sent more than 500 volunteers to 43 countries, performed 67,000 surgeries, examined 250,000 patients, and received $2.4 million in grants from The Rotary Foundation and from districts in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other countries. They’ve arranged for patients in Africa with complicated medical problems to be flown to India for treatment, and have conducted missions within India itself.

Last year, for the mission’s 20th anniversary, the team returned to Uganda. The country is wealthier and more peaceful now but still has many needs.

“The infrastructure and facilities at the hospital were much better, and the nursing staff was cooperative and helpful,” says Borate. “But there was still a severe shortage of supplies, instruments, and equipment even for routine operations.”

Nonetheless, with the help of Rotarians and doctors from Uganda, the team performed 1,100 surgeries, including 440 eye operations, 452 dental procedures, 25 reconstructive surgeries, and 84 general surgeries. 

“It is the greatest impact I have seen in my 22 years as a Rotarian,” says Emmanuel Katongole, past governor of District 9211 (Tanzania and Uganda). “To see so many people with such complex problems, queuing for days for operations, and to see the happiness on their faces. We’re still getting calls asking, ‘Where are the Indian doctors? Can they come back?’ ”

For 2019, Saboo has an even bigger goal. “Sam Owori, who was selected to be the 2018-19 RI president but who passed away in 2017, said to me, ‘Raja, during my year as president, I would like you to arrange a team of medical doctors to go to every district of Africa.’ I said, ‘I’ll try,’ ” he says.

“After Sam died, President Barry Rassin said to me, ‘Raja, let us see if we can fulfill the dream that Sam had.’ So now we are planning on that.”