A Social Meeting, a Business Meeting, My Rotary Learning Centre and South American Refugees.

Last Week

Howard Johnston regaled us with some entertaining jokes.

It was a Social Meeting which means that we talk about all sorts of things and tell jokes and funny stories.
The position of Assistant Governor came up. Past District Governor Ken Stonestreet really said how their job is to represent the District Governor and report to the DG and also to assist the Rotary Club as much as possible.  He pointed out that not many AG's did their job properly.  I was asked to expand on it and I said what I do as an AG and how it is neither easy nor a sinecure and as clubs are autonomous they don't have to take your advice and can be quite unhelpful.  Fortunately they are in the minority!
 It's a three-year appointment, like all District appointments, and I think that's the right length of time.

Ken Stonestreet's point is an important one because if you belong to any voluntary organisation, whether it's Rotary, the Scout Movement....anything with structure....you agree to follow the rules of that organisation and are responsible for carrying out the functions of any position you may hold within the organisation.  To say you are a volunteer is not an excuse for non performance or to disregard of the ethics of the organisation.

This Week
It's a Business Meeting and it should be quite a full one.

Dorothy Ann Gould a Vocational Service Award a couple of weeks ago.  She is putting on a production with JAM at Foxwood House in Houghton this Saturday 29th. Feb at 2.30 pm.  We would like to try and support her group and if anybody is interested in attending this Saturday, kindly let Pam Donaldson know and sheI shall make a booking.  Payment can be made on Saturday.  Details are as follows:

Where:  Foxwood House, 13 5th Street, Lower Houghton 

When:  2.30 until 4pm on Saturday 29th February and also on Sunday the 1st of March; Dorothy Ann Gould will also be showcasing an award winning  Acapella Group who have had many empty promises and are really struggling to survive; there will be 20 people performing so we need full houses in order for them to take home something meaningful; the tickets are R100 each, Foxwood take R10 on each ticket. We will only be able to take cash on the day at the door but should people wish to enjoy a buffet lunch beforehand, they should book through Foxwood on 011 4860935 - this is a separate charge.

Johannesburg Awakening Minds or JAM are a group of formerly homeless men and women who through Shakespeare and poetry and classes in acting and voice have managed to improve their lives and gain employment. In South Africa as it is in 2020, this is no mean feat – unemployment is at 30% and many live below the poverty line.

At the end of July 2012, Mary Ann Gould began working with 7 homeless men and one woman in Hillbrow every Monday from 10 – 1p.m.  They ranged in age from 18 – 56 years old.

"For 20 years St George’s Anglican Church Parkview and St Michael’s in Bryanston, had provided tea, a sandwich and biscuits for the homeless every Monday, and a hot cooked meal on a Friday. June Jardien kindly welcomed me in to try my hand at skills training in Drama but specifically at uplifting and improving the individuals’ communication  and social skills. I had encountered enough sad people at traffic lights myself to feel their desperation just to be “seen ” instead of ignored or feared. I hoped to hear their stories in order to make sense of my own as a citizen of South Africa.

The intention of the class was to let these individuals feel that they had the right to speak, the right to be seen and the right to tell their stories in a country which has been very cruel to them. They slept on the streets and tried to survive the cold winters and a lack of food each and every day. Tshepo, one of our group, was shot and killed outside the Mimosa Hotel where he had finally managed to rent a room, Charles died of TB related pneumonia and we never found him to lay him to rest, Zinzi arrived at Park Station from Capetown and was gang-raped and contracted HIV, Anda was shot dead in Braamfontein by a security guard and Mtunzi died of a heart attack – the stories of sadness and abuse

Dorothy Ann Gould

could sometimes only be numbed out by drugs and alcohol – no solution at all.

Through voice, breathing, physical  warmups, creative writing exercises, painting sessions and emotional release work, an astonishing thing began to occur, and very quickly too, within weeks - each individual’s  self -  respect, dignity and humanity began to return. Instead of begging at traffic lights they started reciting Shakespeare at traffic lights ; they found that Macbeth, King Lear, Richard the Third and Titus were speaking about THEIR pain and that the plays were huge receptacles that could hold all of the emotions that they needed to release , in a safe context – the rage, the feelings of abandonment;  they began to flex again their intellectual muscle, to debate, have opinions and to become a team that support each other and watch each others’ backs, not only on the streets, but on stage. The numbers soared to 40 people.

In August 2013, they performed for the first time at The Arts Alive Launch Luncheon.

In November 2013, they performed at Space.com at the Johannesburg Theatre and in December, at PopArt, Arts on Main.

In 2014 they performed for the Shakespeare Society of SA, 4 times on Classic FM, again at Space.com and for the Gala Banquet of The Mzanzi  International Culinary Festival at the Civic Centre Mayor’s Banquet.

They performed an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Foxwood House and have continued to perform featured roles on local soap operas and in their own performances of Shakespeare at schools, every month since. Our most recent performances have been at U3A and the Great synagogue in Johannesburg. We have another 6 performances this year.

For some the transition has not been easy and some have spent time in rehabilitation Centres and some in jail for minor offences – it is impossible to get bail when you have no permanent address.

There are new participants every week as well as the core group who still attend classes since 2012.

JAM – Johannesburg Awakening Minds, have now also sold many of their paintings.

 They have performed seven times at Pizza e Vino restaurant in Auckland Park, been recorded twice by the BBC, appeared on Morning Live and Morning Expresso  and  Carte Blanche.

We have no permanent funding and have relied on the kindness of 2 sponsors plus myself and Dale Howell   from St George's  Church. This situation has recently been alleviated by a donation from the members of U3A Johannesburg and by a private individual.

Any donations or shows   of support by asking them to perform,   will help them survive and turn their backs on the burgeoning crime in our country.

A recent film “Crocodile” gave featured roles to 5 of our team and, Sipho worked on” Vaya “  a feature film by Akin Omotoso. Three of the men have recently been involved in a production at William Kentridge’s space, The Less Good Idea and Michael Mazibuko has been asked to be part of William Kentridge’s season 7 in April next year. Michael has also just completed his first dstv commercial.

They are now represented by an agent, Michelle Aldana, and have become professional actors.

New people, in dire straits, join every week and so the journey of skills training continues."

My Rotary Learning Centre
If you go into My Rotary and scroll down you will see a link the My Rotary Learning Centre.  If you click on that you will see that there are a very large number of interactive course presentations that relate to just about every aspect and position in Rotary.  Do bother to have a look at it, particularly if you have an interest in something specific such as Vocational Service, are on a particular committee or hold some function within Rotary.  They are quick and easy to skim through.

Since 2015, more than 4 million people have fled an economically devastated Venezuela.

Héctor Herrera was driving his father to José Tadeo Monagas International Airport in northeastern Venezuela when they approached a government food stand. Even at 5 a.m., the line was long. “I never thought I’d live in this misery,” Herrera’s father said. Suddenly a fight spilled out into the street in front of them as two men wrestled over a frozen chicken. “At that moment, my father said to me: ‘Son, if you have the opportunity to leave, go,’” recalls Herrera. “‘I will miss you, and it will be difficult, but this is already as low as a person can live.’”

That was in the summer of 2015. A teacher, Herrera was 28 years old and a member of the Rotaract Club of Maturín Juanico. A city that boomed in the 1980s as the oil capital of eastern Venezuela, Maturín is now crippled by the country’s collapse — an economic meltdown that, for the people living there, is worse than the Great Depression. According to a survey released in 2018, 9 out of 10 Venezuelans did not earn enough to buy food, and more than 17 million had fallen into extreme poverty. The BBC reported that desperate parents have been giving away their children rather than watch them starve.

Those conditions are fuelling the biggest migration in the history of Latin America as more than 4 million people flee Venezuela. Economists say the country’s collapse is the worst outside of war in at least 45 years, while the Brookings Institution predicts that Venezuela’s refugee crisis will become “the largest and most underfunded in modern history.” From a distance, those facts and statistics can be mind-numbing, obscuring the individuals caught up in this social and economic catastrophe. 

 Taking his father’s advice, Héctor Herrera left for Mexico with only $200 and the promise of a place to stay. Each of them had ties to Rotary, which in the end would be their hope and, to an extent, their salvation.

On 10 November 2015, the day Herrera left Venezuela, he took a photo of himself to remember the moment. “When I look at that picture now, I see fear, uncertainty, and sadness,” he says. Fortunately, he knew Ferdinando Esquivel through Rotaract.

Herrera had met Esquivel, now a member of the Rotary Club of Zinacatepec, on a trip to Mexico in 2013. The two men became close friends, and Esquivel offered to help Herrera if he ever decided to leave Venezuela.

At the time, Herrera thought things would improve in his native country. But two years later, life was much worse. “The stores had nothing,” he says. “Not even toilet paper.” He had a passport, but without access to dollars, he couldn’t buy a plane ticket. So Esquivel bought it for him and invited Herrera to stay with him in a small town near Toluca. After two weeks, Herrera thanked his friend and boarded a bus for the 40-mile ride to Mexico City, where he hoped to find a job that would give him a work visa.

When he got off the bus in Mexico City, Herrera started to panic. “Left? Right? I didn’t know where to go,” he recalls. “It felt like there was no floor beneath my feet.” He found a place to sit and pulled out his cellphone to text Alonso Macedo, a friend he had met at a Rotary event in Mexico. Macedo had agreed to pick him up and let him stay with him for a few days. But what if he didn’t come? Herrera thought. Where will I sleep tonight? And then, Macedo appeared.

 “After that I looked for work every day — anything that would give me papers,” Herrera says. “I couldn’t sleep, so I’d get on the computer at night and search for jobs.” Finally, a school run by Venezuelans that taught English asked him to come in for an interview, but the school was located four hours from Mexico City. Then another problem arose: He had nowhere to stay. His host was leaving on a trip.

 “That night, it was storming,” Herrera says. “I walked to a restaurant, opened my laptop, and started to send messages to people in Rotary and Rotaract whom I didn’t know personally, but whom I had a connection with through Facebook.” He had no choice but to ask strangers if they would be willing to take him in for the night. He finally got a response from Laura Martínez Montiel. They didn’t know each other, but they had several mutual friends on social media through Rotaract. She gave him her address and told him to take a taxi. Herrera wrote back and explained he didn’t have enough money, so they agreed to meet in a closer neighbourhood where Martínez was heading to a Christmas party.

“I was in such a bad state,” Herrera remembers. “I was all wet, and my clothes were dirty.” He worried that Martínez would take one look at him and change her mind about hosting him. Instead, she took him back to her home and introduced him to her mother, who washed his clothes and fixed him something to eat. He explained that he had a job interview the next day, and together they mapped out how to get there on public transportation. At 6 a.m., Martínez gave him a ride to the metro.

When Herrera arrived for the interview, he saw a familiar face. It turned out he had reviewed the interviewer’s thesis a few years earlier. After talking awhile, the interviewer asked if Herrera could start on Monday. “No,” he replied, “I want to start today.”

Herrera’s job was to make hundreds of calls looking for clients for the school; if someone signed up, Herrera was paid a commission. He stayed with Martínez and her mother for another week and commuted four hours each way until he asked for an advance on his salary so he could rent an apartment closer to his job. “On 15 January, I got my first commission,” he says. “It was a relief, because as of the 14th, I only had $2.”

By April, Herrera was promoted to advertising manager, and in July, he finally received a work permit. Two years later, he found a job that better suited his teaching skills, working as a trainer for a company that advises businesses on streamlining their processes.

 “I started giving lectures around this beautiful country,” Herrera says. “But on 3 December 2018, I received an email from the national migration authority saying I had to leave Mexico in 20 days.” A migratory alert had been issued for him after immigration authorities visited his previous employer, the English school. When they rang the bell, no one answered the door, so they flagged it as a fake company. “I could not believe it,” Herrera says. “I was doing well, but now it was worse than the beginning because I no longer had papers. I had to start over.”

For the past year, Herrera has been fighting the alert with the help of a public defender. Each day that it remains unresolved, he’s at risk of being deported. He’s seeking asylum to be able to stay, but with Venezuela’s crisis worsening, his claim is one of thousands. “Mexico is now returning Venezuelans immediately when they arrive at the airport,” Herrera says. Still, he says he will not give up. “Until I have my dream of a visa, I will not rest.”

My father died in August,” says Herrera. “I feel 1 percent pain and 99 percent gratitude. I’m grateful for his love and that he was always there for us.” Herrera was unable to return to Venezuela when his father died; had he traveled there, he would have been denied re-entry into Mexico. He takes solace in knowing that his father would want him to continue trying to build a life in his new home. “My plan is to get my family out,” he says. “I don’t have any hope that things are going to change in Venezuela. The damage to the country has been huge.” The Brookings Institution estimates that the number of Venezuelan migrants could eventually rise to 8 million, even more than the 6 million who have fled Syria — yet Venezuelans have received less than 10 percent of the international aid committed for Syrian refugees.

“The hardest part of migrating is changing your heart,” Herrera says. “When I encounter Venezuelans in Mexico, the first thing they talk about is the bad things happening in Venezuela.” Instead, Herrera has chosen to honour his father by working toward his dream of success. He even started an Instagram page called “Migrating to Success”; he uses it to share inspirational quotes with his 4,000 followers. “Having to start over isn’t all bad,” read a recent post. “It’s shown me that anything is possible.”