A Springbok/Italy Meeting, Rotary Family Health Days, a Couple of Vegetables, Hearing Loss & Coping with it, and an Innovative Approach to Membership

Last Week
Our speaker cancelled at the last minute.  It seems that when ever I say quite a lot about our future speaker they always seem to cancel at the last minute.  Maybe I should say nothing about this week's speaker.

Some members of the club were delighted because it meant that the meeting could be suspended until the second half was completed.





And we had a visitor, Michael Mtenga.

What he thought of us I don't really know.  I have a feeling that he might think we are a sports club that disguises itself as a Rotary Club...



Rotary Family Health Days
We were able to help Kyalami and also Morningside at their venues.  I don't have any pictures of Morningside but here's Kyalami with David Bradshaw and President Jean on the right.

Jean waxed lyrical about spring onions and spinach/Swiss chard...don't forget you can eat the stalks separately, just braise them in chicken stock.

This Week
  Varsha Sewpersad returns to talk to us about Hearing Loss- a Practical Hands-on Training.

Varsha Sewpersad is the senior audiologist and practice owner at Speak Today, Hear Forever. Having worked within hospitals, specialised preschools, remedial schools, medico-legal teams and private practices in South Africa and Dubai. She specializes in hearing evaluation, hearing loss, tinnitus, auditory processing disorders and hearing rehabilitation. Varsha has gained extensive and valuable experience within the fields of speech therapy and audiology working from young children to geriatrics. With a great passion and desire to improve the quality of lives of individuals with hearing and/or communication difficulties, Varsha qualified with her Honours Degree in the Bachelor of Communication Pathology at the University of Pretoria and further went on to obtain her Master's Degree in Audiology at the University of Witwaterstrand.

Varsha is a published author and enjoys conducting research to increase her knowledge in the field. She has been awarded membership of the Golden Key International Honour Society and is part of an international guild for auditory processing disorders specialists.  Varsha is fervent in creating awareness on hearing loss and she therefore recommends that any person over the age of 50 should visit an audiologist annually as part of their overall health care plan as research shows that untreated hearing loss in individuals over the age of 60 have a 36% chance of developing Dementia/ Alzheimer’s disease.

'We hear with our brains and not our ears'

Rotary Club of Wiarton, Ontario

Chartered: 1938

Original membership: 18

Membership: 33

Club members at a Canada-themed trivia night.

Building bonds: In Wiarton, gateway to the bucolic Bruce Peninsula between Georgian Bay and Lake Huron in Ontario, a dedicated Rotary club shoulders an outsize responsibility. With fewer than three dozen members, the Rotary Club of Wiarton has installed playground equipment, benches, and a wooden boardwalk, all while supporting a robust Rotary Youth Exchange program, polio eradication, and projects in Africa and Mexico. It also stages several major annual events. How? By summoning the exponential force of friendship.

Club innovation: To involve more people in club meetings and events, the members came up with a creative solution. Wiarton’s Friends initiative, inaugurated in 2016, appeals to people who share Rotary’s values but cannot commit to full membership, allowing them to attend as many as 10 club meetings a year while helping at fundraisers and other projects. The goal of the program, which has nine participants, is to provide a path toward regular membership.

During an event for club presidents-elect at the 2018 Rotary International Convention in Toronto, Mike McMillan, then incoming president of the Wiarton club, stepped up to the microphone to raise the issue of how Rotary could expand its base. “We are in an area of generally blue-collar industries: tourism, retail, a national park,” McMillan recalls saying. “I asked, ‘How do we attract nonprofessionals, or rather professionals of a different sort?’ ” Other presidents-elect from all over the world told him that they faced a similar predicament. McMillan already had one possible solution.

Two years earlier, the Wiarton club had launched the Friends program to engage people in the community with limited time and money. “So many young people, in particular, can’t commit to a full-time membership,” says McMillan. “Particularly in an area like ours, to pay $80 a month for meals is beyond their budgets if they have young kids. It’s important to come up with other ways to keep people involved. Our community is small and not particularly wealthy.”

One go-to volunteer, Jimi Avon, a retired musician who spends winters in Mexico, draws energy from the drive of the Rotarians. “I’m ready to be at all these events. For me, it’s a positive thing,” Avon says of his status as a Friend. “At the level I’m at, I’m happy and I don’t have quite the responsibility.” Also among the Friends are a hospice manager, a woman who operates a landscaping business and garden shop with her Rotarian husband, and four retirees.

And for one Friend, the program has been a pathway back to membership. Richard Bouillon had left the club in 1996 because of demands of business and family life. He tested the waters again as a Friend. “I’m not sure if I should be called an ‘old new member’ or a ‘new old member.’ I spent a year as a Friend before rejoining the club in 2018,” Bouillon says. Now he is fully committed, having worked the Village Fair and traveled to Honduras to help build a school through a Rotary-sponsored project. But it might not have happened without a gentle reintroduction. “The Friends program was one of the things that brought me back,” he says.