James Croswell, Rotary Arts Festival, Pam Donaldson and Voz Box..We could use it in South Africa.

Last Week
A surprising number of Rotarians present despite some being on duty at the Rotary Arts Festival.
James Croswell gave us an interesting talk about himself.  He really made me think of the luck of youth probably because we were innocent of the consequences or just took more risks.
His visit to Morocco on the spur of the moments on a South African passport sans visa really took the cake and how he managed to get out of the country "Thanks to a girl I met at Club Med..." who chatted up the official at the airport in Marrakesh so that he could just pick up his passport and jump on the plane is typical.

Thank James for such an interesting talk.  You have also done some amazing civil engineering projects but we forgot those!

We also had a couple of visitors who had attended the Arts Festival and decided to come and see what we got up to.  Alice Yang and Mike Maclachlan.

We look forward to seeing them again.








The Rotary Arts Festival Official Opening had taken place the evening before at Rosebank Mall and I have just under 150 photos of the event, many of them pictures of pictures.
I will sift through them in due course and send them to the individuals I recognise!

Because the exhibition is spread over two floors and quite spread out it was difficult to see how many were there.

President Lyn Collocott addresses us at the opening

Jean Bernardo and Joan Sainsbury.  The two Rotarians who have worked very hard at putting the exhibition together.  Jean as chairman of the Arts Festival Committee and Joan organising the artists.
The late change of venue was a huge problem for them and they miraculously pulled it off.

Thembi Ndlovu busy processing a sale

This Week
Pam Donaldson will be the next in our Rotarian chat series.
She is very elusive and I couldn't find a photograph of her anywhere so you will have to put up with Korky the Cat limbering up for the World Cup instead. instead.

We will rectify the omission this Friday.

As a Rotary Youth Exchange student in Ecuador seven years ago, Mary Elizabeth McCulloch volunteered at an orphanage that was home to both adults and children with disabilities. 

She noticed that those who had trouble speaking – mainly because of cerebral palsy – were seated alone by the windows, and for the most part no one communicated with them. 

Today, at age 26, McCulloch is founder and CEO of ProjectVive, a social enterprise company that has developed a low-cost device called the Voz Box, which allows people who have difficulty speaking to express themselves. The product launches this year in the United States and Ecuador.

Q: What did your experience in the orphanage inspire you to do?

A: After I returned to the United States and started at Penn State (graduating in 2016 with a degree in biomedical engineering), I began working on a low-cost speech generation device that would work in low-income and resource-constrained settings. I worked on it all through college, on evenings and weekends. Along the way, people joined my team, ProjectVive, to develop the Voz Box.

Q: How does the technology work? 

A: Our technology is for people with low motor control, who can’t tap a finger on an iPad or keyboard. We have different interfaces: a glove that works when someone flexes a finger; a watch that senses motion so the wearer can raise their arm to click; or glasses that detect blinking. These work with an application called CoughDrop AAC, which has grids of letters, words, and icons the user “points to” with the interface devices. Our devices can also control other applications, so the user can go to YouTube or Facebook, chat with friends, or look for jobs. 

Q: Who will this technology help?

A: Worldwide, there are 4.6 million people who can’t speak because of ALS or cerebral palsy. Too many people think that if they can’t contribute, it’s because they have nothing to contribute. But these disabilities aren’t reflections of cognitive ability or potential. We are empowering people with disabilities by giving them a voice and the ability to live out their life goals. 

Q: What would the world look like if people with disabilities had a bigger role? 

A: There are a lot of big societal problems facing the world today, and this is an untapped population of global problem solvers. Research shows that someone who has experienced adversity is more apt to make decisions to help others, to have empathy and sympathy. They are natural problem solvers. 

Q: When will the product be available?

A: The launches are in May in the United States and in June in Ecuador. We won’t be exporting from the United States; we are helping local people make and maintain the devices, and training users’ family members and caretakers to take care of them. And we’ll make sure the devices are in the users’ indigenous language, as well as Spanish and English. We are looking for our next pilot countries to launch ProjectVive and give more people with disabilities a voice. 

Rotary Arts Festival, James Croswell and an accolade for Polio Plus

Last Week

The Platter that Jean Bernardo specifically requested.

As we are about to enter the last Month of the Rotary Year 'Business' has dwindled on the one hand....on the other hand the Rotary Arts Festival opens this Thursday so there has been much handing out of platters for the opening and Jean Bernardo updated us on what is going on and what we have to do.

The important thing is that we all pull our weight and make this, our major fundraising event, a big success in the new venue.  Good Luck, Joan Sainsbury, Jean Bernardo and all on the committee.





This Week
James Croswell will be talking to us.  During the Arts Festival various long-standing members of the club will be chatting about themselves.  He's also an engineer....there are a lot of them about.

James is a specialist in land development and, with his 40 year background in township, resort and estate development, can assist with the entire life cycle of any development. Services include project identification, concept and preliminary design and cash flow production. James is a pioneer in gated communities and computer aided design and drawing. James has prepared and presented more than 40 technical papers on subjects ranging from township level of service to labour intensive construction.

James has overseen to development of approximately 1200 land conversion projects and thrives on sustainability and resilience planning and delivery.

Despite his expression in this picture he has been known to smile.

June was obviously a bad month for births, only Charlotte Croswell entered the world  and there were no weddings at all.  In desperation some people joined Rotary.



Rotary’s commitment to eradicating polio worldwide won Best Nonprofit Act in the Hero Awards of the One Billion Acts of Peace campaign, an international global citizens’ movement to tackle the world’s most important issues. 

A Rotary Vaccination Team imunises children at a railway station in Karachi, Pakistan

 Rotary vac Karachi, Pakistan. 

Khaula Jamil

Khaula Jamil The campaign is an

The campaign is a 

The campaign is an initiative of PeaceJam Foundation and is led by 14 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum, with the ambitious goal of inspiring a billion acts of peace by 2020. 

Each year, the campaign picks two finalists in each of six categories for their work to make a measurable impact in one of the 10 areas considered most important by the Nobel laureates. Winners are chosen by people from around the world. The campaign is an initiative of PeaceJam Foundation and is led by 14 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum, with the ambitious goal of inspiring a billion acts of peace by 2020. 

Rotary and Mercy Corps were the two finalists in the Best Nonprofit Act category. Rotary and the five other winners will be recognized at a ceremony on  June in Monaco. Betty Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for her advocacy for peace in Northern Ireland, will present the award. 

Brian Leech, a Business Meeting and a LobsterFest

Last Week
Brian Leech gave us talk about his early life and his career.  He is 89 and joined our club in 1977 having been a member for a short while in East London.  He gave the impression that he had drifted into Civil Engineering by accident and I was intrigued that he was responsible for Camps Bay High School as  the playing fields basically stick out of the lower slopes of the Twelve Apostles and Table Mountain Sandstone isn't the most stable foundation!
His exploits in the establishment of Lilongwe as capital of Malawi were also highly entertaining. 

Thank you, Brian, for such an entertaining talk.

As the Arts Festival is upon us the next few weeks will be taken up with members of longstanding chatting about themselves.  This was a very good idea of President Lyn's as new members always have to but newer members never really hear of the exploits of those who have been around for a while.

This Week
It's a Business Meeting but it's very much winding down time for the end of the Rotary Year so I am sure it will be more social than anything else.

Computer Problems
My laptop suddenly decided that it was going to slow down below a crawl and do all sorts of funny things.  I have always used Gmail linked with my domain on Outlook so that I can access my emails anywhere and always had my documents backed up in Dropbox.  If it wasn't for that you wouldn't e receiving The Ramble this week.

For many years, the Rotary Club of Grove met at a beloved greasy spoon 6 miles from the city center. Once a week Rotarians “could either have fried chicken or they could have fried chicken. Either-or,” jokes Ivan Devitt, a club past president and Grove’s vice mayor. In 2011, they decided it was time for a change. That move augured a boom time for the club.

“We bounced around three different places before finding the right venue,” a spacious church recreation center where meals are catered by local restaurateurs, says Don Wasson, a club member and past governor of District 6110. Around the same time, a member recommended the club put on a lobster fundraiser. Skeptics insisted that “people aren’t going to pay $60 to come to a lobster dinner,” says Devitt. “But as it turned out, they did” – in droves". 

That first year, more than 300 people showed up – twice as many as expected, says membership chair Jerry Ruzicka. The $35,000 in net proceeds – for a club that had an annual budget of $20,000 – was donated to the local YMCA. “They were in danger of closing,” Ruzicka says. “Now they have 600 regular members, a new building, and they don’t need our financial help anymore.” 

The entire city gets involved in LobsterFest: Numerous volunteers help cook and serve meals. The event allows the club to disburse about $130,000 a year to about 40 charities. And what attendees learn about the club has paid off in new members. 

The club uses the red badge system to identify new members. Even though it’s a small town, people don’t necessarily know one another, says Ruzicka, who implemented the red badge idea about three years ago. “It lets everybody know you’re a special person who needs to be met and invited to join the different things we’re doing in the club.” The extra attention paid to new members “has pretty much locked our back door” to retain them, says Wasson. 

Club members participate in the community in a number of ways, such as volunteering at the botanical garden, the humane society, and an advocacy group for children. Rotarians have also renovated playgrounds, repaired the concrete steps of a women’s shelter, and filled backpacks with food to be handed out to families in need.

The club abandoned a system of having every Rotarian take a turn lining up speakers for meetings. A committee now handles guest programming, and speakers have included well-known university athletics coaches, state governors, and a former U.S. senator – prime catches for a small-town club. “Those kinds of programs make people want to come to your meeting,” Ruzicka says. When executives of local charities address the gatherings, the edict is “no politics, no religion, no requests for money,” he adds. “They know we’re giving back everywhere, so they’re willing to share their story” with a team that keeps its plate full.

Ronnie Kasrils and the Coronado Seven, Brian Leech as well as the Dreaded Queensland Fruit Fly

Last Week

Ronnie Kasrils, President Lyn and the Coronado Seven

Ronnie Kasrils also had his latest book on sale
and here he is signing a copy for President Lyn,

Ronnie Kasrils gave us a most entertaining chat about his relationship with Jacob Zuma from when he first met him as an enthusiastic Zulu boy in Durban, aged 18 through their relationship in exile in Mozambique to the former President we know today.
He also added quite a number of entertaining anecdotes about himself and life in general.  It was a talk much enjoyed by all as well as our seven guests from the Rotary Club of Coronado, California.
I admire their stamina as they had only got off the plane that morning.




Saturday evening saw a social function with the Coronado Seven, reduced to five by exhaustion!  We met for dinner at Dolci Cafe in Craighall Park and really had a good time.  A big thank you to the Rotarians who acted as  taxi drivers from and to the Sandton Sun....I won't ask you to reveal the tip

.
And a special thank you to Cafe Dolci who have allowed us to pay individually.  This does cause some delay but it does make things easier for us.

As the evening progressed either there was an alcohol effect or the restaurant began to list, I'm not sure which.
We are looking forward to a future relationship with the the Rotary Club of Coronado and hope you will visit again either as part of Rotary or as individuals.

This Week
Brian Leech is the oldest serving member of our club by which I mean that he has been a member the longest.  He's  going to talk about himself and the club over the many years he has been a member.

He likes watching cricket and is the only one who doesn't need dark glasses.


Rotary Art Festival
This is the third week I have put in an appeal for members to put their name on Costa Qually's list for the Art Festival.  I don't know what proportion of the members have done so.  Next week I will give you the percentage.  We have over 40 members which means that we should be able to rely on 160 slots being filled before asking for any help from partners or the Rotary Anns.

ROTARY ERADICATING HORTICULTURAL PEST

THE Queensland fruit fly is the major horticultural pest in the irrigated region of Sunraysia along the MurrayDarling rivers in NSW and Victoria. The damage it does to the economic value of crops, especially to exports, amounts to millions of dollars each year. The Rotary clubs of the Great Sunraysia are working with the horticultural industry and government agencies on a massive trapping program to eradicate the pest. The clubs are concentrating on the residential areas – the area of greatest risk. Household fruit trees, the uncontrolled disposal of domestic fruit and vegetable waste and fruit brought into the region by travellers are the three sources of the pest. Three times a year, club members deliver traps to every household in the region and, in some cases, install them for elderly and disabled residents. Because each trap only catches flies from a radius of 15 metres, it is essential to get blanket coverage. The growers operate a monoculture, so commercially fruit flies are much easier to control. However, households grow and consume a range of fruits ripening throughout the year and each one is a potential fruit fly host. The traps serve two purposes: the trap itself attracts female fruit flies and an associated amulet distracts the male fly from mating. The clubs are rewarded with $2 a trap for each delivery, with 28,000 traps delivered to households each time. Some clubs use it as an opportunity to involve others in the distribution. Under team leader Gary Klippel, the Rotary Club of Mildura Deakin, Vic, manages a team of students from Mildura Senior College for its deliveries. Brian Englefield, of the Rotary Club of Robinvale Euston, Vic, is so committed to the cause he personally delivers traps to households in Merbein, Vic, as well, an hour and half from Robinvale. Other Rotary clubs involved are Irymple, Vic, Mildura, Vic, South Mildura, Vic, Wentworth, NSW, and Swan Hill, Vic. COVE

Frayne Mathijs, Visiting Rotarians, Ronnie Kasrils and New Approach to Membership from New Zealand.

Last Week

 Frayne Mathijs spoke about the plans for Universal Health Coverage and its importance but she didn't mention the financial aspect.
Unlike most Western European countries we do not have an aging population, quite the opposite, so maybe the emphasis is different as the requirements certainly are.  It will be interesting to see what happens long term from a government perspective as a Universal Free Health System has been mooted but not very much seems to have been done to implement or even say how it would be implemented. Perhaps it has gone the same way as the Nuclear Power Stations Plan?

We had two visiting Rotarians, Hideo Kawamato from the Rotary Club of Kobe who not only presented President Lyn with a banner but gave everyone a Baumkuchen, the Cake of Good Hope and a symbol of peace in Japan.

Baumkuchen is one of the most popular pastries in Japan, where it is called baamukūhen (バームクーヘン) or sometimes just keeki (ケーキ). It is a popular return present in Japan for wedding guests because of its typical ring shape.

It was first introduced to Japan by the German Karl Joseph Wilhelm Juchheim. Juchheim was in the Chinese city Tsingtao during World War I when Britain and Japan laid siege to Tsingtao. He and his wife were then interned at Okinawa.  Juchheim started making and selling the traditional confection at a German exhibition in Hiroshima in 1919. After the war, he chose to remain in Japan. Continued success allowed him to move to Yokohama and open a bakery, but its destruction in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake caused him to move his operations to Kobe, where he stayed until the end of World War II. Some years later, his wife returned to help a Japanese company open a chain of bakeries under the Juchheim name that further helped spread baumkuchen's popularity in Japan.

Our other visiting Rotarian was David Craik from the Rotary Club of Sevenoaks, Kent in England.  He visits South Africa regularly and it looks as if he is becoming an occasional visitor to our club when he is here.

This Week

Our speaker is Ronnie Kasrils.

Ronnie Kasrils at the book launch of A Simple Man in Cape Town in 2017.
The book is highly critical of Jacob Zuma.

After the first fully democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, Kasrils became a member of the Transitional Executive Council's (TEC) Sub-Council on Defence. He was appointed as Deputy Minister of Defence on 24 June 1994, a post which he held until 16 June 1999. He was also the Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry from 1999 to 2004 and was appointed as Minister of Intelligence Services in 2004.

Following the resignation of President Thabo Mbeki in September 2008, Kasrils was among those members of the Cabinet who submitted their resignations on 23 September.

Kasrils is known for his strong criticisms of the government of Israel and for his sympathies towards Palestinian political struggles. He rose to international prominence after penning a "Declaration of Conscience by South Africans of Jewish Descent" in 2001 against Israeli policies in the occupied territories. He has participated in events in the Palestinian Territories with all elected Palestinian parties and endorses a two-state solution premised on the 1967 borders.

Kasrils has been strongly critical of the ANC under Jacob Zuma. He is also a noted critic of what he has called the "descent into police state depravity".

 In April 2014 he launched the "Vote No" campaign alongside fellow ANC member and former government minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge. The campaign aims to encourage people to cast protest votes or spoilt ballots in the 2014 general election as a protest against Zuma and the perceived corruption of his government.  In December 2014, Kasrils was elected to the national working committee of the newly created United Front, a workers' party led by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), and also spoke favourably of the Economic Freedom Fighters, a newly formed leftist opposition party.  In April 2016, shortly after the EFF's major court victory over President Zuma, Kasrils joined several other prominent former ANC insiders in calling for Zuma to resign.

Rotary Arts Festival

Or is it the RAF?  I thought that stood for something else.
Do get in touch with Costa Qually who is coordinating the manning or womanning of the Festival as it is imperative that we do fill all  those vacant spaces.

The Rotary Club of Invercargill NRG – the abbreviation stands for Next Rotary Generation – relishes its reputation as a projects-focused, hands-on team. 

A diverse group with members from all over the world – most of them women – the club has restored playgrounds, helped build a house that will be auctioned for charity, and distributed comic books to promote literacy. It has also adjusted some rules to make membership more feasible for younger people.

Rotary Club of Invercargill NRG, New Zealand: Charter date: 7 April 2016; Original membership: 20; Current membership: 28  

When Leon Hartnett, originally from Ireland, moved to Invercargill, New Zealand, he started looking into local service organizations. “I wanted to find something I could do to connect – and to help people.” When a colleague invited him to a Rotary meeting, Hartnett addressed practical concerns upfront. “I asked, ‘How does this work and how much does it cost?’” he recalls. “I had a young family and we had bought our first house. It sounded like a great organization, but I could not afford to be a member.”

Shortly afterward, in May 2015, District 9980 brought Holly Ransom, an Australian who as a 22-year-old had been one of Rotary’s youngest-ever club presidents, to speak at a local community center. Hartnett left that talk inspired – and convinced that Rotary was devoted to new approaches to finding members. He was not mistaken. With the support of the district, he and a small group started doing projects, and soon they had enough people to charter a club. To make the club attractive to younger members, they looked at the costs associated with membership. “We decided no meals. Too expensive. We’ll have nibbles,” he recalls. He estimates that each member saves about NZ$700 a year on restaurant meals.

With an emphasis on service projects, the club made attendance at meetings optional. “But you are required to be active in the club through service,” Hartnett says. “Some of our club’s most involved members rarely attend meetings, but they are always the first to share ideas, give feedback, and then do the actual work. We do still have a good turnout at meetings, with an average of about 70 percent of members attending.”

These changes have attracted younger people. “When our club chartered, we had the youngest average age in Australasia – 28,” says Hartnett. The members now range from 21 to their mid-50s (Hartnett is 43). 

The club often works with other local clubs. “We did a glow-in-the-dark golf event with the Rotary Club of Invercargill South. Their average age is 20 years older than us,” Hartnett says. “They brought logistical skills that we didn’t have, but we had some ways of doing things they hadn’t thought about. They thought we needed to create a website for the tournament. We said, ‘No, we can use Google Docs for people to sign up. Let’s not spend money on a website.’” 

Despite the club’s novel approach, Hartnett says, “as time goes by, we tend to evolve into a more traditional Rotary club. At first we said, ‘Let’s not have a board.’ Now we have a board.” Some things they simply needed to discover for themselves. 

“We are Rotarians in every sense of the word. We’re just doing it our own way.”   

Vegetables, Frayne Mathijs, Coronado Function, Arts Festival, Phishing and a Fire.

Last Meeting
I stepped into the breech to talk about Vegetables I have Known...well, really to chat about where certain vegetables come from and some of the problems people have had with vegetables in the past.

Romain Lettuce

For example, Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the 6^th century tells of a holy nun who swallowed a lettuce leaf without making the Sign of the Cross over it and inadvertently swallowed a small devil along with the leaf.  Apparently small devils like hiding in lettuce leaves.  The resulting stomach ache was eventually relieved by a priest who admonished the small devil.  The devil was quite unrepentant and blamed the nun for her lapse of memory!  
Naturally the Catholic Church through its monasteries cultivated and developed other varieties of lettuce to make them less bitter that resulted in a reduction in the laudanum content and by the early Middle Ages round lettuces with good hearts had been created.  
The papal exile in Avignon was when lettuce was introduced to France hence the name above.

This Week
Frayne Mathijs will be talking to us about the Rotary Humanitarian Centre and Health Service.  I am not sure what that is about but Frayne is a member of the Rotary Club of Johannesburg New Dawn and they man the centre on Saturday mornings.

This is what she has to say about herself: 

Frayne at Rotary Family Health Day

From working in the metal industry and in timber and growing up in a mining town in Zambia, I have an interest in occupational health, safety and employee wellness. I have worked in regional, provincial, tertiary hospitals and district health services. Having been involved in primary health care in cancer, disability, HIV/AIDS and maternal and child health, I have a broad view of the challenges of transformation and service delivery particularly in rural areas. I have been involved in the SADC Health Sector National Integrated Strategy on Disability, National Cancer Control Programme and HIV/AIDS programmes. As an oncology nurse I have been in education, training and examining and at national level and Director Patient Service and Support for the Cancer Association in human resource development, palliative care and community development. As National Training Manager for St John Ambulance I was responsible for manual development, first aid training and community programmes. From experience in KZN, Western Cape and exposure in all provinces, together with my role in the National Progressive Primary Health Care Network and unification of nursing, I have gained enormously from a network of leaders at all levels of South African society. Working in chronic diseases and HIV&AIDS nationally, regionally and with SANAC has reinforced my commitment to health as a universal right and I am a champion for the NHI and willing to speak in the public domain on "Why we need the NHI and what we can do about it"

Social Function Friday 12th May with Rotary Club of Coronado
There are seven of them coming and they will be going to the Cradle of Humankind in teh morning so a lunchtime braai is not an option.  We could have the braai in the evening but it may be a bit cold and they will have been out for most of the day.  We have given them the option of having the braai or just joining them for a meal out somewhere.  They are having a meeting and will let us know what they would like to do.

Rotary Arts Festival

Costa Qually has been sending round the roster for people to make themselves available.  Today's is full of gaps.  It's in our interest to fill them up as quickly as possible because this one big effort is all we really need to make for fund raising.  If it doesn't work then we will have to have a number of fund raising events through-out the year and that's not easy.

Phishing
Lyn Collocott received a phishing email purportedly from me asking for R3 800.  I don't think it went to anyone else but it's obviously not my email address or my standard of English. I have reported it.

On 28 November 2016, high winds blew through the drought-stricken area around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, whipping a few isolated wildfires in Great Smoky Mountains National Park into a massive natural disaster.

“The whole horizon was aglow,” says Roy Helton, a member of the Rotary Club of Pigeon Forge. “My wife and I were taking turns getting up, checking to make sure the fire wasn’t getting close to our home. We have roughly 100,000 people in Sevier County, and I don’t think any of us slept very well that night.”

 The Heltons were lucky, but many others weren’t. The fire raced through the towns around Gatlinburg, destroying more than 2,400 structures. It spread over 17,000 acres so quickly that 14 people were trapped and killed, while others had to flee their homes. Around 14,000 people were evacuated from the area and not allowed to return for a week. Many lost everything, including their jobs. Gatlinburg, which sits on the edge of the national park, is a major tourist destination with millions of visitors each year

, but in the aftermath of the fires, many stayed away. 

“This wasn’t a regular forest fire,” says Jerry Wear, also a member of the Pigeon Forge club. “It was a firestorm.” Most fires, he notes, leave debris such as charred stoves and cars. But the Gatlinburg fire “was so intense, they melted.”

The following day, Helton, Wear, and other members of the five local Rotary clubs began emailing one another. A makeshift distribution center had been set up in Pigeon Forge, but it was not well-organized.

“I called it beautiful chaos,” says Helton. “But it was chaos.”

A few days after the fire, the Rotarians met with city officials. “I opened the meeting,” says Fred Heitman, then governor of District 6780, “and I said, ‘I’m sorry that all this happened. We’re Rotary. What can we do?’”

Helton had been working at the center. “They asked me a bunch of questions, and I kept saying, ‘You know, I really think Rotary would do a great job of managing this.’ And after an hour’s worth of discussion, everyone in the room said, ‘Yes, they would.’”

Roy Helton

Helton and Wear took over running the center, with Helton organizing the inside and Wear managing logistics. Every morning, Wear would email a list of needs to Heitman. Heitman would send the list on to 200 local Rotarians and to other district governors; each email eventually reached tens of thousands of people. The response was overwhelming: Whatever the center needed showed up the next day, in boxes from Amazon, in shipping containers, in people’s cars. Volunteers traveled to the center from across the country. 

“For the first six weeks, we averaged about 35 Rotarians a day,” says Helton. “One day we had four past district governors, plus the current district governor, working in the center.” All told, 24,000 people volunteered, many of them Rotarians, some of whom had lost their own homes and jobs.

The first day, a man limped in on burned feet, wearing bath slippers and the only clothes he could grab as he fled his house. He was one of up to 3,400 people a day who came for help in the first weeks. Because some victims were in shock and didn’t know what they needed, everyone who came in was paired with a volunteer. The center set up a pharmacy, worked with the Lions Club to procure new glasses for people who had lost theirs, and eventually collected some $4.1 million in mostly donated inventory.

Another thing that fire survivors needed, Wear says, was counseling. “We had children who’d been waking up at night crying because they were afraid the house was on fire and they were going to die. So we gave a $35,000 grant to our mental health organization.” 

Rotary Distribution Centre

Helton and Wear organized the center’s inventory into categories: groceries, women’s clothes, men’s clothes, kids’ clothes. Shoes were sorted by size. Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency were impressed. “They marveled at our setup,” Heitman says. “They said, ‘What logistics company did you get to do this for you? Someone with a logistics background obviously did this.’ And Jerry said, ‘No, it was me.’ And they said, ‘What’s your background?’ And he said, ‘I’m a schoolteacher.’”

Says Helton, “People from both FEMA and TEMA told us it was the best-run disaster relief center they had ever seen.” 

After 2½ months, it was time to close the center. Helton and Wear spent two weeks redistributing the remaining goods and began working on long-term recovery with a newly organized nonprofit called the Mountain Tough Recovery Team. 

“Rotarians have the right attitude,” says Wear. “They are willing to put their hands and back into it. That gave people a much better feeling about the situation because there were people here who cared and really worked hard to make life better for people who’d lost everything.”

Jean Bernardo, the Progressive Lunch, Vegetables I have known, Visit by the Rotary Club of Coronado & a Creative Approach to Membership

Last Week



Jean Bernardo talked about herself and said  that she was nervous about doing it!
Whether she was nervous or not it was an interesting talk starting with her birth and ending with the present day.  The most interesting thing was her transition from studying bits of people in a laboratory to becoming a financial advisor at Sanlam.
Judging from the response of some of the Rotarians present you wondered how many of them had been under  her microscope.







Last Saturday's Progressive Lunch was a great success.  We had 5 Rotarians to our house for a starter and the only problem was that we really wanted to keep them but we all had to move on.
We all ended up at Liz and Les Short's for a dessert, coffee etc and as soon as we arrived down came the rain so we had to quickly remove everything from the garden.  It didn't matter as a good time was had by all.  Many thanks, Les, for organising such an entertaining event.  I was too busy enjoying myself to remember to take any photographs....sorry.

This Week

Owing to the hard work that Jean Bernardo and Joan Sainsbury are putting into the Arts Festival with the last minute change of venue I am stepping into the speaker breech and talking about vegetables.  Not how to grow them or even how to eat them but rather how we ended up with the the vegetables we have today.
This weekend is also the Blanket Drive.....don't forget.




Saturday 12th May

Orit Ostrowiak

We will be hosting members of the Rotary Club of Coronado San Francisco at a lunchtime Bring & Braai at the home of Kevin & Liz Wolhuter. Just click on the link to see what they get up to.
Orit Ostowiak who takes over as Director, International on 1st July is former pupil at Greenside High.  It's a very large club, 240 members but not all of them will be here.
I think it will be in the region of a dozen guests but I will confirm that with Orit.
If you will be there please let me know as soon as possible.  I will send round a separate notice.  We will be asking people to bring salads etc nearer the time.
They have already expressed an interest in working on joint projects with us.

When membership dropped below 20, the Rotary Club of Central Ocean Toms River, New Jersey took a leap of faith by offering a radically different membership structure to retain and attract members. The risk has paid off with a membership increase of 61 percent in two years.

The Rotary Club of Central Ocean Toms River, New Jersey, is a diverse club with a nearly equal number of men and women ages 30 to 89. The club has a robust list of projects because members believe it is important to be directly involved in service. Members have tackled nine projects (and counting) during the 2017-18 Rotary year by breaking into smaller groups to work on multiple projects at the same time. Members in 2015: 18; Members in 2017: 29  

When Mike Bucca took over as membership chair of the Rotary Club of Central Ocean in July 2015, he knew the club had a problem. Membership was down to 18 and dwindling. Bucca persuaded club leaders to look seriously at membership. 

The club board held three membership summits where they discussed why people join Rotary and why they stay. The result was a proposal to dramatically alter the club's membership structure to attract new members by lowering the financial commitment. 

“We want members to have a place in this club where they are contributing what they can – in time or finances,” Bucca explains. “It’s really worked.”

The Rotary Club of Central Ocean still has standard and corporate memberships, in which a local corporation or business joins with a specified number of qualified employees serving as its designees. Members in both categories pay $399 in dues every six months. The club also offers three alternative types of membership. The first is an introductory membership. New members can join at the rate of $99 for the first six months and $199 for the second. After the first year of membership, they pay the standard rate.

“When I joined, that was my biggest hesitation – the money,” says Bucca. “For $99 I would have joined the first time I was asked and not three years later.” 

The second membership offering is a discount to family members of existing members paying the standard rate. Family members can join for $199 every six months, and that discount applies as long as another family member is paying the standard rate. 

Again, Bucca drew from experience. “My wife and two other members’ wives wanted to join the club, but the family could not afford it. But half price made sense, so we gained three members.” 

The third type is called a friendship membership. This is designed for members who are interested in helping the club and taking part in projects, but cannot commit to meetings. Friendship members pay $249 every six months.

“People felt guilty about not coming to meetings. This eliminates that,” Bucca says. 

The results are clearly in favor of the new system. Membership climbed from a low of 18 in 2015 to 29 in 2017. Many of the new members are in their 30s and many are women, says Bucca. “In 2013, I was the only member under 40; now we have seven. Our club was No. 1 in the district for the number of women who joined.” 

Most importantly, the new members have invigorated the club. “Our club was dying; we were in trouble,” says Bucca. “We turned it around and are thriving.” –Susie Ma