Professor Shelley Schmollgruber and the Value of the Lester Connock Awards and a Social Meeting this week. Rotary and COVID-19.

Last Week

Professor Shelley Schmollgruber spoke on what the recipients of the Lester Connock Award had achieved as a result of receiving it.  In other words that we would see the value of what we do as a club in providing this bursary for post graduate nurses at Wits.  So seldom do we really get feed-back so it was a real pleasure to hear what she had to say.  Rather than attempt to summarise it I have created a page.  See Lester Connock Awards above.
I don't think any of us realised the value of our contribution but it's not really about money, working with Shelley has meant that we have ensured that the research has not only contributed in terms of Rotary ideals but that it has been of value for nursing practise and not just a topic that has been chosen by the student just to get a Masters Degree.


Visitors 

 Uma Chandrasekaran of the Rotary Club of Vellore Angels exchanged banners with President Jean.  She was accompanied by her daughter, Mathangi Vellore who is living in Johannesburg.

Vellore is a city and the administrative headquarters of Vellore district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is located on the banks of the Palar River in the northeastern part of Tamil Nadu and is separated into four zones that are further subdivided into 60 wards, covering an area of 87.915 km² and housing a population of 423,425 as reported by the 2001 census.
 It is located about 101 kilometres (63 mi) west of Chennai, and about 200 kilometres (124 mi) east of Bangalore. Vellore is governed under a mayor and the Vellore Municipal Corporation. It is a part of both the Lok Sabha and state assembly constituencies of Vellore.

Vellore is the home to Christian Medical College & Hospital and the Vellore Institute of Technology.

The Vellore area is the largest exporter of finished leather goods in the country. Leather exports from Vellore account for more than 37% of India’s leather exports and leather-related products. 

Chrispin Matthieu, a potential member,
 also visited us.

This Week
It's a social meeting.  Once a month we get the chance to move around and chat to each other as well as tell the most appalling jokes.  It's also gives us the opportunity to chat to any visitors about what our club actually does...... other tan talk to each other and tell appalling jokes!

Progressive Lunch, Saturday.  Twenty of us are going so read all about it next week.



Don't forget our Bric-a-Brac Stall at the Irish Club next month and Support the Anns Bridge Drive with Prizes in May.


COVID-19....Yes Minister:

Rotary is closely monitoring the pandemic of COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, and continuously assessing the potential impact on Rotary operations, events, and members.

Your health and safety are always our top priorities. Look below for information on Rotary activities that may be affected. We will update this announcement when new information becomes available.

Rotary International Convention

The convention is still scheduled for 6-10 June in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. 

We will watch for developments and follow the recommendations and guidance of the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. State Department, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We are prepared to make adjustments and take all precautions necessary to protect convention attendees.

Other major Rotary events

To protect the health of our members, staff, and travelers, Rotary has canceled the presidential conferences scheduled for 28 March at UNESCO in Paris, France, and for 9 May at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, Italy. People who registered will receive an email with additional information and details about refunds. 

Club and district meetings

Rotary International recommends that members and participants follow the guidelines set by the World Health Organization and your national, regional, or local health authorities to protect your health and safety. If authorities recommend it, postpone or cancel in-person meetings, or conduct them online or by phone.

Closely examine your personal circumstances, including any health issues, when you consider travel and participation in events.

Rotary Youth Exchange

Contact your partner district in areas where COVID-19 has been detected to confirm specific precautions that students hosted in their area should take. All districts, as well as students and their parents, should look at the guidelines issued by their embassies or consular offices, international public health agencies like the World Health Organization, and local health authorities for the latest and most relevant information. 

If your district is a host district, consider whether student trips or local activities could expose participants to an increased risk or to challenges returning home. You may consider canceling or postponing nonessential travel.

If a student’s parent or guardian is concerned about their health or safety in any placement, including in those areas affected by an outbreak, work with your partner districts to consider an alternative placement, if possible. Parents may also choose to remove their child from the program. 

Rotary Peace Fellowships and other programmes

 Participants in Rotary Peace Fellowships, Rotary Friendship Exchanges, and Rotary Action Groups and their affiliated chapters should follow recommendations from the World Health Organization and the host region’s national, regional, or local health authorities when considering whether to postpone events, meetings, or activities. 

For peace fellows: Countries listed as Level 3 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been added to Rotary’s travel ban list, and all nonessential travel to, from, or through those countries is restricted for Rotary staff and fellows. Use discretion if you plan to travel to or through Level 2 countries. Fellows currently in a country experiencing the spread of COVID-19 are advised to follow the recommendations of your host university and the country’s national health agencies. 

For first-year fellows preparing for your applied field experience, we recommend you consider options in your study country and have an alternate plan in place in case travel is restricted further. Beyond health and safety concerns, we do not want fellows to be subject to quarantines or have challenges returning to the country where you study because of your field experience travel. You can contact your staff specialist with specific questions about how Rotary’s policy may affect your field experience planning.

For Interact and Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA): Consider whether planned events, trips, or local activities could expose young people to an increased risk, and consider canceling or postponing nonessential travel or large gatherings. 

Follow the guidance of schools for any closures or delayed start times that may affect school-based program participants. Discuss how they can stay engaged and safe until school resumes. Talk with parents or guardians about their child’s health and safety and what Rotary clubs and districts are doing to minimize the exposure and impact for participants in Rotary activities and events. 

Rotary-funded travel

Rotary International recommends that Rotary-funded grant recipients, Rotary Youth Exchange participants, Rotary Peace Fellows, or other Rotary-funded travelers follow the guidelines set by the World Health Organization and your national, regional, or local health authorities to protect your health and safety. 

Review and share the Rotary travel ban list with clubs and districts to confirm whether grant-funded travel is permitted. Direct any additional questions about Rotary-funded travel to your appropriate program officer.

Richard Tonkin, Careers Day, Professor Shelley Schmollgruber & Books

Last Week 

Stewart Mutokonyo of Lambano

Richard Tonkin took us on a journey through part of his life.  I am not going to repeat it here for obvious reasons only to say that he moved 22 times in his first 21 years.  He has turned out remarkably well.

Ellen Spencer of Naledi Projects and
President of the Rotary Club of Luxembourg Hearts

We also had two visitors, Stewart Mutukonyo of Lambano Childs Hospice who brought Ellen Spencer, President of the Rotary Club of Luxembourg Hearts.  She is visting on behalf of Naledi Projects in Luxembourg who have a longstanding relationship with Lambano and are financing the building of the new hospice.

Rotary Careers Day
I really was worried that Careers Day would be a disaster right up until 09:30 on the day.  We were uncertain as to attendance by learners and when I arrived at 08:30 only one tertiary institution had arrived and about the same number of career representatives....and very few learners!  Some didn't turn up in both categories and some were very late but it came right in the end despite us not having the number of learners that have we had in the past.
I will be forming a committee after Easter to look at next year and work out a much bigger spread of vocations.  Contacting the schools has always been done by Holy Family College and I have told them that Rotary will be responsible for that in future.  If you are interested in joining the committee please let me know.  It will include appropriate non Rotarians.

Jean mentioned the hand washing....not of Careers Day, we are not washing our hands of that!
Thank you those who sent photographs.  I will put a few here but will open a Page and put the rest there.

IT

Entrepreneurship

This Week
Professor Shelley Schmollgruber is going to tell us about the value of our Lester Connock Awards to Post Graduate Nurses, the affect it has had, and what they have achieved as a result.

Her main interests are in intensive and critical care nursing.  Her critical care interests encompass the development of evidence-based competencies, and ethical and legal issues in intensive care nursing. The topic of Shelley's master's research was "Support needs of culturally diverse families of adult intensive care patients". She is currently undertaking doctoral research in patient acuity levels in Intensive Care - the title of her doctoral thesis is "Developing and application of competency standards for Intensive Care Nursing practice". Shelley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Nursing Education, and is responsible for the teaching, the clinical accompaniment and research supervision of Intensive Care students in the Masters and Advanced Nursing Diploma programmes. Her extensive experience in the academic setting has afforded her a strong base from which to proceed into nursing education. She is current council member (ex officio) of the Critical Care Society of Southern Africa, and represents the Society on the council of the World Federation of Critical Care Nursing (WFCCN). In 2014 she has been elected as an Honorary World Ambassador of the WFCCN. Shelley is a member of Sigma Theta Tau International for Nurses.

Books are very important in my family's life so this article from The Rotarian is here just for personal reasons.

    While you’re holding a book,

                                        the book is holding you

by David Sarasohn

The image looks like a million other family travel photos: two adults and a 10-year-old at a historic destination — in this case England’s Greenwich Observatory, the place where you could say time starts. But on close examination, the picture has a fourth element: a just-published Harry Potter novel, as big as the 10-year-old is small. Holding his place, the kid’s finger has disappeared into the book, and from the expression on his face, so has he.

We may have been in Greenwich, but my son was at Hogwarts.

A long time before, when I was about his size, I had torn through Treasure Island, dealing with words I didn’t recognize by either skipping over them or trying to sound them out, producing outlandish internal pronunciations that fortunately nobody ever heard. A bit later, I flung myself at James Michener’s Potter-weight Hawaii, with passages I still remember more sharply than things I read last week.

But in the years since Greenwich Mean Time became the standard measure of the moment, technology has surged past the binding together of printed pages. Information now moves with the form and speed of electronic impulses. Yet books persist, much like that kid refusing to be budged from the world his imagination has conjured. “Every time there is a new innovation, they predict the death of the book,” Michael Herrmann, the owner of Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, New Hampshire, said recently. “But the book is a perfect technology. Like the shark, it hasn’t changed and continues to thrive.”

The newest challenges to the printed book range from 500 channels of television and the boundless resources of the internet to the small plastic devices, the weight and thickness of a slice of pizza, that can display multiple volumes. The threats at one time appeared lethal: In the first decade of this century, the number of U.S. bookstores, both chain and independent, dropped sharply. All over America, bookstores were closing down, their spaces turning into nail salons and hot yoga studios.

But over the past decade, the number of independent bookstores across the country has rebounded — shooting up from 1,651 to 2,524, with sales rising steadily. This resurgence is not about “information,” or what the tech folks call “content.” It’s about actual books, ink on paper, that not only send words out but pull people in. Bookstores are drawing people back to the comfort of print.

In 2012, best-selling author Ann Patchett wrote in the Atlantic: “You may have heard the news that the independent bookstore is dead, that books are dead, that maybe even reading is dead — to which I say: Pull up a chair, friend. I have a story to tell.” Her story is that when the last independent new-book store in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, closed, Patchett — explaining that she didn’t want to live in a town without a bookstore — joined with a couple of friends to open her own. With the help of some of her writer friends doing readings, Parnassus Books has been a dramatic success. “People still want books,” she declared. “I’ve got the numbers to prove it.”

In the summer of 2019, Patchett got still more proof of that: Amazon announced that it would open up its own bookstore across the street from Parnassus.

In Portland, Oregon, a place named Powell’s City of Books covers an entire city block and rises three stories; it is not so much a bookstore as a neighborhood. People go to Powell’s for diversion as much as for commerce, stopping in when they have a spare hour downtown or showing it off to out-of-town visitors. Powell’s is a social location, a place of first dates that never have to worry about running out of words.

The lure is not only being surrounded by books, but also being insulated by them. People have a persistent interest in reading books, but they also like to talk about books, and to people who spend a lot of time around books. As Eric Ackland, proprietor of the new and booming Amazing Books and Records in Pittsburgh, told the New York Times last summer, “A bookstore clerk or owner is inevitably something of a therapist.”

Like many people, I often go to Powell’s for no particular reason, only to leave laden with purchases that an hour earlier I didn’t know I needed. That kind of thing happens in bookshops; it’s less frequent (for me, at any rate) in hardware stores.

With a physical book, you can easily leaf back a few chapters to remind yourself who a character is, and didn’t she move to Chicago in Chapter 6? You can peek at the last page to make sure things end happily. You can write nasty comments in the margin, although libraries — and, to some degree, authors — really wish you wouldn’t. Those things can be done on an iPad, but somehow the experience is not the same. “People spend so much time in front of a screen, they want to do something else,” suggests Oren Teicher, recently retired CEO of the American Booksellers Association. “There is a very strong case to be made that reading a physical book is a fundamentally different experience from reading on a screen.”

In 2019, the Hechinger Institute reported that, according to an analysis of 29 studies, students retained more from print than from screens, although the exact reason wasn’t clear. Distraction? Eye movement? Deep brain function? My theory is based on the power of physical connection: While you’re holding a book, the book is also holding you. It’s the same reason that a kiss is better than a romantic movie. (Admittedly, I read about the survey on a screen.)

You can’t exactly say books are beating back technology; people still stare obsessively at their cellphones as well as their 55-inch television screens. But books are holding their own, in bookstores as well as on nightstands. Those may in fact be the strongest redoubts of books, piled there to accompany people into sleep and to be ready when sleepers awake in the darkness from unnerving dreams.

Books are a comfort at such times, but as a perfect (and portable) technology, they also can accompany you into other unsettling circumstances. I once brought a book to a biopsy, focusing on each line as small bits of me were being harvested. The doctor, somewhat taken aback, remarked that it must be quite a book. Actually, it was, but just by being a book, it was providing something I could never get from a podcast. Words on a page, carefully arranged to reach out to you, can distract you more thoroughly than voices in your head. You can listen to a podcast while driving, but it’s a bad idea to try to read a book.

An estimated 5 million Americans meet regularly in book groups, as opposed to gathering for appliance critiques or in vodka tasting clubs, because talking about books is a way to talk about your life, in a sense that talking about Instagram simply isn’t. Books have the power to bring people together.

Recently, dropping off a rental car at the Los Angeles airport, I got into a conversation with the 20-something rental agent about a scratch on the rear bumper — and I want to make this clear, I hit nothing; the scratch must have been there before. It seemed to me that the agent was leaning in a little close to me and my carry-on bag. Not seeking conflict, but feeling that the situation required some assertiveness, I asked her if there was a problem.

“Oh,” she said. “I just wanted to see what you were reading.”

A Business Meeting, Pat Dalziel, Anns' Bridge Drive, a Progressive Lunch, Richard Tonkin bares all and Family Membership of Rotary?

Last Week
It was a Business Meeting but with fewer members than usual owing to three funerals and none of them Rotarians!
There was an interesting  report back on preparations for the Arts Festival.....including a name change to Art Expo and a new logotype which will appear in here in due course.  Congratulations to Roger Lloyd and his committee for reinventing the event and for the success they are having with three months to go.

Rabson Banda

Selwyn Kossuth and Mark Franklin

We welcomed two visitors, Rabson Banda, a Rotaractor from Nairobi, Kenya and Selwyn Kossuth from the Rotary Club of Mississauga, Canada







Rotary Africa - Rotary Ann Pat Dalziel's 100th Birthday
The latest issue of Rotary Africa has a very interesting article about Pat Dalziel.

Rotary Anns' Bridge Drive 13th May.

They have appealed to us to supply prizes for this and I know that some Rotarians also participate in the Bridge Drive.  Wine or chocolates seem to be the most popular prizes. 
The Anns always help us with the Art Expo and we always help out with the Bridge Drive.  Prizes can be given to Les Short at a Rotary Meeting.




Progressive Lunch Saturday 21st March
If you are going just be in touch with Pam Donaldson as soon as possible.

This Week
Richard Tonkin is going to reveal all!.....and we will picture it in The Ramble, a world scoop!

A family affair; Rotary Club of Tagbilaran, Philippines

Chartered: 1970

Original membership: 25

Membership: 44

Share alike: The seaside city of Tagbilaran on the island of Bohol attracts scuba divers entranced by stunning coral reefs; on land, sun-seeking tourists tramp in the shadows of the otherworldly conical humps known as the Chocolate Hills. The Rotary Club of Tagbilaran meets needs in the city and the agricultural and mining-centred areas beyond.

Club innovation: Many residents of Tagbilaran who might want to join Rotary found the cost and time commitment prohibitive. To attract them, the club allowed shared memberships between family members. 

Victor Bantol is a “strong believer in the good works of Rotary,” he says. Yet he was a reluctant joiner, to hear his wife, “Baby” Louella Bantol, tell it. In 1998, she says, Victor was required to join by his then-boss, a member of a club on Mindanao island. Victor’s membership led to Louella’s involvement, because his job as an engineer entailed travel to manage a mine on another island. “In my husband’s absence, he always asked me to represent him at the club meetings and project implementations,” Louella says. “I came to love Rotary.” She joined and eventually served as club president and assistant governor in District 3860.

Victor was impressed — and inspired. “I supported her in all activities,” he says. “I was changed and I became a very active member.” The couple’s example led the club to embrace shared family memberships as a way to involve family members. The cost of Rotary membership is a barrier for many Filipinos, says Irena Heberer, club president. Prospective members whose spouses were already Rotarians often said, “We cannot pay for one more,” Heberer says. Under the club’s new policy, a family pays for only one membership.

The Bantols became active recruiters for the club. “We invited our friends to our club meetings,” Victor says. “We showed them our projects and let them feel the importance of sharing resources with our marginalised brethren. Many became members and later became reliable club officers.”

When a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Bohol in October 2013, Rotarians were on the front lines. Victor Bantol led a team conducting rescue and recovery operations, an arduous and heartbreaking task. The Rotarians also cleared paths and repaired a bridge to allow relief aid to reach those affected.

The English-speaking club maintains a busy schedule of projects, including a symposium to promote Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October. Other continuing efforts include hygiene and sanitation education and road safety tips for schoolchildren. The club partners with the Philippine Gift of Life Foundation on medical missions providing surgeries for people in need.

In an area that has increasingly become dependent on tourism, ecological projects have become a focus of the club. “Our contribution is to help protect and enhance the environment through tree and mangrove planting, coral trans-plantation, coastal and beach cleanups, and promoting a plastic-free Bohol,” says Heberer. The club also planted a friendship garden at a limestone quarry. “We hope that one day it will become a tourist destination in the province.”

The club carries out its activities with joyful vigour. “We try not to stress the members with too many serious meetings,” says Heberer. “Even if we follow rules and regulations in the regular meetings, we try to make them lively and interesting.”