A Business Meeting,our first Prospective Virtual Member, Lorna Wridgeway of Toastmasters & Rotary and Covid-19 in Kenya.

Last Week

Masego Matiko

It was a Business Meeting but there was little business to discuss, primarily because we are coming to the end of the Rotary Year and owing to lockdown cancellations of our Art Festival and various social functions.  There was discussion on the mask-making project which is turning into entrepreneurship and job creation in Alex. but it will be next year's board that will need to think creatively where projects are concerned as we have no idea what the corona virus situation will be long term.

Lozenzo Locatelli-Rossi a

Given Mahlaba

James Croswell talked about his position as Chairman of the District Health Education & Wellness Committee next Rotary Year and he would be approaching healthy people, presumably, to be on the committee from across the District.

We had three visitors, PP Lozenzo Locatelli-Rossi from Italy, a past member and a prospective Virtual Member, our Rotary Exchange Student, Masego Matiko and a first time visitor, Given Mahlaba.


This Week
Our speaker this week is Lorna Wridgeway who is a socal worker and lectures on social work at UJ.  She joined Toastmasters in 2018  and belongs to the Sages Club in Emmarentia.   As a relatively new member it will be interesting to hear what she has to say.  Rotary and Toastmasters ahave established a working relationship at an international level and, as a club, we are encouraged to establish contact locally.

Rotary clubs in East Africa are forging partnerships to provide hand washing stations and food in areas where social distancing is a luxury that few can afford

Almost 80 percent of the population in Nairobi, Kenya, lives in informal settlements where it’s not unusual for families of day labourers to live together in one house. Surviving day to day on the meager wages they typically earn as shop assistants, construction workers, or domestic employees, as many as eight people cook, do homework, eat, and sleep in these tight quarters.

In short, social distancing is a luxury that many poor Kenyans can’t afford.

“If the [COVID-19] pandemic hits here, like it has in North America and other places, it will be just catastrophic” because of the inability to social distance, says Geeta Manek, a Rotary Foundation trustee-elect and member of the Rotary Club of Muthaiga, Kenya. “We’re working very hard, through preventative measures, desperately trying to keep this thing away from us.”

Shortly after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Joe Otin, governor of Rotary District 9212 (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Sudan), formed a district-wide response team. Chaired by Nairobi-East Rotarian Joe Kamau, the team is working with clubs across the district to provide hand washing stations, deliver food to families who have lost jobs, and raise money for personal protective equipment.

“When [Kamau] asked what we wanted to do first, we said let’s go with hand washing stations,” says Manek, a member of the response team.

Manek led a fundraising effort in Ethiopia and Kenya that raised more than $21,000 within 20 days. Prime Bank in Kenya offered to match all contributions 1-to-1. The team used the money to purchase 100 water tanks and then persuaded the supplier to donate an additional 100. The 100-litre tanks rest on metal stands and have brass taps at the bottom and ledges for soap. The response team has distributed these hand washing stations in Kilifi, Mombasa, and Nairobi and is now working with national health departments to decide who to help next. The tanks are being refilled by trucks, but local authorities are also discussing ways to pipe in water.

The Rotary Community Corps, groups of non-Rotarians who work alongside Rotary members on service projects, are teaching people effective hand washing techniques, counting the number of times people come back to wash their hands, and collecting other data. Clubs are also partnering with Shofco, a grassroots organization that provides critical services, advocacy, and education for girls and women in Kenya’s urban slums, to monitor the stations.

The response team is also using the stations to ask people coming to wash their hands for information about families who are short of food. Manek says work-from-home orders made it impossible for day laborers to earn a living. Clubs have distributed packages of sugar, maize meal, rice, lentils, salt, and soap.

Purchasing personal protective equipment for frontline health care workers has been more difficult. Manek says they’ve been able to negotiate with vendors and donors to get some surgical masks and gowns, but supplies are scarce and much of it is available only by airlift, which makes it too expensive.

If there is a positive side to the crisis, it’s been the way it has energized Rotarians and attracted the attention of partnering organizations.

“We’ve been the first ones on the ground,” Manek says. “We’re getting invitations from corporate partners like banks and insurance companies who are seeing what we’re doing and want to work with us.”

Jerry Selwane, a Business Meeting and Shredding as an Environmentally-Friendly Fund Raiser

Last Week

 Jerry Selwane spoke to us about Soweto Animal Rescue.  There was a lot about it in last week's Ramble so I am not going to repeat it.  Jerry spoke about the problems that they experience in the townships and rural areas and how often there is a degree of intimidation.  He sees his vocation as educative as well as dealing with rescued animals.  Owing to lockdown there are increasing numbers of abandoned animals which increases the demands on such organisations as his and obviously the SPCA.

 We had a very good Zoom turnout with 28 people present including a number of visitors:

Visiting Rotarians:                                            Rotary Anns :

Nigel Bellamy - Selibe Pikwe                            Diana Serrurier                       

Rita Millan - Kyalami                                         Liz Short

Rainer Bertram - Zambia                                    Margie Austin

Ann Townsend - Brisbane                                  Penny Robinson     

I am sure we are going to find that more and more Rotarians and others will join us on line.

This Week

It's a Business Meeting.  I think we will discover that there are other ways of serving the community that we have never thought about before.  Covid-19 provides us with opportunities we haven't really digested yet and others we haven't even thought about.  It's very necessary to discuss the way forward.

Why no items on Covid-19?  I think that you hear so much about it that something different would be a change.....see below.

The Rotary Club of New Milford, Connecticut, has been shredding for over a decade. So has the Rotary Club of Madison, New Jersey, which hosts two events a year. Every summer, the Rotary Club of Grand Island, New York, is out there shredding, and in the spring and fall the Rotary Club of West Seneca, New York, gets to work. You can shred with the Rotary Club of Encinitas, California, or the Rotary Club of Owatonna, Minnesota. The first shredding day held by the Rotary Club of Great Falls, Montana, was so successful that the club added another one four months later.

One problem many people face when they try to declutter and get organized is how to get rid of sensitive documents — old bills, bank statements, and the rest of the detritus that builds up in home filing cabinets. In an era of identity theft, people are cautious about what they throw in their garbage or recycling.

Carmela and Hal Moeller, members of the Rotary Club of Madison and former business owners, were thinking about their customers’ privacy when they came up with the idea of a document shredding fundraiser. “When my husband and I were closing down our bookstore, credit card receipts were still printed with the entire account number. Obviously, the threat of identity theft was great,” Carmela Moeller says. “We were using a home shredder to destroy the receipts. When we learned about commercial shredding companies, we thought of our Rotary club doing this as a fundraiser.” Document shredding events became a fixture on the club’s calendar. “People were invited to watch their documents destroyed. It became like a neighbourhood block party.”

The idea has obvious appeal. When The Rotarian ran a brief item in 2010 about the Rotary Club of New Milford’s document shredding event, the club started hearing from other Rotarians seeking to adopt the idea. “It generated inquiries from Rotary clubs as far away as Australia,” recalls New Milford Rotarian Arthur Klein. Since then, the idea has taken hold in many Rotary clubs.

The events are a hit with the community and an easy way to raise awareness of Rotary. “Cars line up a half-hour before it begins, and it runs like a well-oiled machine for three hours,” says Klein. “People love having a place to bring their documents to be destroyed securely and cost-effectively. They also love the idea of saving trees and landfill space since the shredding is recycled.”                                                             

                                                                            

                                                                            

Isabella Holden of Lifeline, Packing Food Parcels, Soweto Animal Rescue and an Innovative New Rotary Club

The problem with Zoom meetings is that everyone looks as if they are the accused at Nuremberg....count the smiles.

Last Week
Isabella Holden, Executive Director of Lifeline, gave us talk on everything that Lifeline is involved with and, generally speaking, it's anybody that has problems and needs counselling as well as companies and organisations that require assistance with counselling or training internally.

What has made a huge difference is electronic and social media.  I suppose the image of Lifeline tends to be Lifeline at the end of a telephone line without any thought to who is phoning up.  It's pretty obvious that the other person is not phoning from a public call box!  No, so much is done on WhatsApp with the counsellor sitting at home and it's free.

It was a very impressive talk and we were amazed at the variety of the work done and also the lack of geographical boundaries.

Food Parcels

As you read in Jean's column packing of food parcels took place last week and finished during the Rotary meeting.  200 were produced and the beneficiaries were:

• Gracepoint Church
• Rosettenville Baptist Church
• Northcliff High School
• Boeregemeenskap Transvaal

Rotary Exchange Student Masego Matiko in Thailand
Every month Momo has to send in a report.  So far we have received April and a project she has been involved with.  I have set up a page so that you can read and at the same time, see, what she is up to and what a good ambassador she is for the club and Rotary International.

A Word from the Anns
Life under lockdown has highlighted how important a part the whole fellowship aspect of Rotary is.  We have missed two monthly meetings.  But thank goodness for the Rotary Anns’  chat group on WhatsAapp!  We only got it going in 2020 and it has been most useful in this isolated time.  We have exchanged business news, but also shared some inspiring videos and writings.  The next step is to get going with Zoom as Rotary has.

Reluctantly we have cancelled the fundraising Bridge Drive scheduled for 13 May and in the true spirit of Rotary most of the ‘tables’ have opted to donate the money they had paid to book, to charity.  So some of the money will go to the Animal Shelter in Soweto but some will go to hunger relief in this very fraught time among the poor and unemployed.  

To any Rotarians who had planned to donate prizes  for the Bridge Drive, thank you for your generosity.  Perhaps next year.  .. . ..

Liz Short has collected a lot of knitted items from various knitters who support the Anns projects and we have decided that they need to be out the warming people who would otherwise be very cold.  We contacted the Gift of the Givers who will collect and distribute the stuff where it is needed.  

To any who are reading this we send love and best wishes for your safety and good health as we adjust to all the changes that will need to be made to the new ‘normal’.

This Week
Our speaker is Jerry Selwane who started Soweto Animal Rescue

Selwane is a former SPCA inspector who now runs his own animal rehabilitation centre, the Soweto Animal Rescue and Advisory Centre (SARAC), from his Zuurbekom home, South of Johannesburg, which he established in 2011.

He has many kennels full of healthy dogs that he rescued from negligent owners, he has hectares of space he intends to put to good use in the future.

It is all part of his dream to give back through education and prosecute those who disregard animal rights.

His dream is to turn a part of his home into a fully fledged animal clinic, while continuing with his plans to run a mobile clinic so that he can take his work to communities in and around Soweto.

There was the time when Selwane got hold of a YouTube video where a man was beating up his goat for the supposed “crime” of eating his maize crops. Selwane did not see this viral video as just another video. Armed with his best private investigative skills, acquired through years of practice, he went out of his way to find and apprehend the man who had shown terrible cruelty to an animal.

“I could not sit and fold my arms. I drove 600km to Tonga and spoke to the person who had posted the video. After a few phone calls, l finally tracked down the person responsible for the worst form of animal abuse.”

With the help of the police, Selwane was able to apprehend the culprit, who was charged, and later fined and told to apologise for his behaviour.

Not one to wait for hand-outs, Selwane continues educating young people about caring for animals.

He has recruited his wife and three sons to spread the word. But his other soldiers are young people who constantly keep an eye out for lost and neglected animals in their communities. He calls these spirited soldiers Jerry’s Rangers, and says teaching young people about animal care is more immediately effective than rehabilitating older minds about the importance of taking care of animals.

For their efforts in reporting animal neglect and abuse, Jerry’s Rangers are rewarded with colouring books, pens and pencils.

“While it is important to reform old habits through speaking, teaching and motivating older people, there is no greater comfort than teaching young people, as they are the future and receptive to new information – more than old people who are set in their ways.”

His vision is to educate and change people’s attitudes towards animals by teaching the young the value of animal care, and making them aware of how wrong it is to be cruel to those without a voice.

Once a month I try to include a relevant innovative new club hoping that it might strike a chord with someone who receives The Ramble.

Rotary Club of New Voices, District 7780

Chartered: 2019

Original membership: 22

Membership: 37

Camp fires: Every year, dozens of District 7780’s Rotary Youth Leadership Awards alumni ages 17 to 27 return to Camp Hinds near Portland, Maine, to serve as staff. The Rotarians who oversee the program created a Rotary club tailored to these RYLA champions, with the operation of the four-day summer camp as a central part of its mission. Club members get invaluable experience in matters such as applying for grants.

Club innovation: The club, with a widely scattered membership, relies on digital tools to connect. There is a monthly online meeting, and members conduct frequent chats using the Google Hangouts app. The club is tailored to RYLA alumni but is open to all.

Phil Giordano, a member of the Rotary Club of Scarborough, Maine, and the executive director of the Camp Hinds RYLA, noticed the chemistry among program alumni who serve as camp staff. “Instead of just coming together one week out of the year, they started getting together many times during the year,” he says. “They wanted to do more and be more.” So he broached the subject of chartering a Rotary club tailored to them. “I started texting, and within 15 minutes I had 10 to 15 people wanting to start.” He and Marty Helman, a past district governor and member of the Rotary Club of Boothbay Harbor, Maine, saw an opportunity to create a club built around these highly engaged members of the Rotary family.

“Rotary has some absolutely marvelous youth programs,” says Helman, a staunch proponent of Rotary’s evolution. But once the program is over, she says, too often “we say, ‘Have a nice life. Go look for a Rotaract club, if there is one.’ There’s no reason why a young person has to go through Rotaract to become a Rotarian.

“Members are in their first adult experience in a volunteer organization, so they need some guidance,” Helman adds. “Not in how to run a meeting or work with each other. But in expectations, how to communicate with other Rotary clubs, process points. That’s why we’ve got tenured Rotarians helping.”

After attending RYLA camp in high school, Sam Klemarczyk, now the club’s co-president, remained active in Rotary through college but was struggling to stay involved. “I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and I’m transitioning into a new job. The flexibility of New Voices was a big thing. It helps open a lot of doors,” says Klemarczyk, 25.

New Voices requires five hours of service a month, not counting the work overseeing RYLA. “We’ve completely gotten past the obstacle young professionals face, which is the idea that they are not ready for Rotary,” Klemarczyk says. One club initiative is a project to raise awareness of Lyme disease, a potentially debilitating infection transmitted by tick bites. “The focus is on creating a coloring book targeted to elementary school students about when you’re outside in the fields and woods,” says Caitlin Morrison, co-president-elect and a cellular and molecular biology student at the University of Rhode Island. “It also consists of informational posters and cards at RYLA each year. In Maine and New Hampshire, everybody knows five-plus people who have been affected by Lyme disease.”

While the camp “defined the kind of person I wanted to be and my commitment to others, I like how being a Rotarian is a long-term commitment,” says Morrison. “I have something I can stay with for many years to come.

An Unofficial Meeting, Isabella Holden of Lifeline and Plastic

Last Week

It was an unofficial meeting as 1st May is a public holiday.  As the unofficial meeting on Good Friday was a success probably because of the need to chat to other people, President Jean decided to do it again with a purely social meeting and you can see how successful it was with Nigel Bellamy joining us from Botswana.

This Week

Our speaker is Isabella Holden, Executive Director of Lifeline.  Isabella has been with Lifeline for nearly 10 years...it will be a decade in July and she is particularly interested in NPO's. 

"I am interested in sustainable NPO models and social change.  An NPO is a business striving to achieve social impact.  I have experience in taking NPO's from the brink of closure due to financial or management problems back to being sustainable and functioning.''

There is a lot more to Lifeline than counselling potential suicides and it will be interesting to see how 

the organisation has broadened its scope and kept up with change.

We’ve lived in a synthetic world for more than 70 years. How much longer can it last?

by Susan Freinkel

In 1950, a Philadelphia toy company came out with a new accessory for electric-train enthusiasts: snap-together kits of plastic buildings for a place it called Plasticville U.S.A. Sets of plastic people to populate the town were optional.

Today we all live in Plasticville. But when, exactly, did we take our first steps into this synthetic world? Some say it was in 1870, when the inventor John Wesley Hyatt patented a malleable compound that was originally conceived as a substitute for an increasingly scarce commodity: ivory. It was created from a natural polymer — the cellulose in cotton — combined with other ingredients; Hyatt’s brother Isaiah dubbed the new material celluloid, meaning “like cellulose.”

Others fix the date to 1907, when a Belgian émigré named Leo Baekeland cooked up Bakelite; the first fully synthetic polymer, it was made entirely of molecules that couldn’t be found in nature. With the product’s invention, the Bakelite Corporation boasted, humans had transcended the classic taxonomies of the natural world: the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms. Now we had “a fourth kingdom, whose boundaries are unlimited.”

Bakelite was invented to replace another scarce natural substance: shellac, a product of the sticky excretions of the female lac beetle. Demand for shellac began shooting up in the early 20th century because it was an excellent electrical insulator. Yet it took 15,000 beetles six months to make enough of the amber-colored resin needed to produce a pound of shellac. To keep up with the rapid expansion of the electrical industry, something new was needed.

As it turned out, the plastic Leo Baekeland invented by combining formaldehyde with phenol (a waste product of coal) and subjecting the mixture to heat and pressure was infinitely more versatile than shellac. A dark-colored, rugged material with a sleek, machinelike beauty, it could be precisely molded and machined into nearly anything. Contemporaries hailed its “protean adaptability” and marveled at how Baekeland had transformed something as foul-smelling and nasty as coal tar — long a discard in the coking process — into this wondrous new substance.

The 1920s and ’30s saw an outpouring of new materials from labs around the world. One was cellulose acetate, a semisynthetic product (plant cellulose was one of its base ingredients) that had the easy adaptability of celluloid but wasn’t flammable. Another was polystyrene, a hard, shiny plastic that could take on bright colors, remain crystalline clear, or be puffed up with air to become the foamy polymer DuPont later trademarked as Styrofoam.

DuPont also introduced nylon, its answer to the centuries-long search for an artificial silk. When the first nylon stockings were introduced, after a campaign that promoted the material as being as “lustrous as silk” and as “strong as steel,” women went wild. Stores sold out of their stock in hours, and in some cities, the scarce supplies led to nylon riots. Across the ocean, British chemists discovered polyethylene, the strong, moisture- proof polymer that would become the sine qua non of packaging. Eventually, we’d get plastics with features nature had never dreamed of: surfaces to which nothing would stick (Teflon), fabrics that could stop a bullet (Kevlar).

Though fully synthetic like Bakelite, many of these new materials differed in one significant way. Bakelite is a thermoset plastic, meaning that its polymer chains are hooked together through the heat and pressure applied when it is molded. The molecules set the way batter sets in a waffle iron. And once those molecules are linked into a daisy chain, they can’t be unlinked. You can break a piece of Bakelite, but you can’t melt it down to make it into something else.

Polymers such as polystyrene and nylon and polyethylene are thermoplastics; their polymer chains are formed in chemical reactions that take place before the plastic ever gets near a mold. The bonds holding these daisy chains together are looser than those in Bakelite, and as a result these plastics readily respond to heat and cold. Unlike Bakelite, they can be molded and melted and remolded over and over again. Their shape-shifting versatility is one reason thermoplastics quickly eclipsed the thermosets.

Much of the plastic we’ve produced is with us still. Humans could disappear from the earth tomorrow, but many of the plastics we’ve made will last for centuries.

It’s understandable why many at the time saw plastics as the harbinger of a new era of abundance. Plastics, so cheaply and easily produced, offered salvation from the haphazard and uneven distribution of natural resources that had made some nations wealthy, left others impoverished, and triggered countless devastating wars. Plastics promised a material utopia, available to all. At least, that was the hopeful vision of a pair of British chemists in 1941. “Let us try to imagine a dweller in the ‘Plastic Age,’” Victor Yarsley and Edward Couzens wrote. “This ‘Plastic Man’ will come into a world of colour and bright shining surfaces ... a world in which man, like a magician, makes what he wants for almost every need.”

That world was delayed in coming. Most of the new plastics discovered in the 1930s were monopolized by the military over the course of World War II. Production of plastics leaped during the war, nearly quadrupling from 213 million pounds in 1939 to 818 million pounds in 1945. Come V-J Day, all that production potential had to go somewhere, and plastics exploded into consumer markets. Just months after the war’s end, thousands of people lined up to get into the first National Plastics Exposition in New York, a showcase of the new products made possible by the plastics that had proven themselves in the war. For a public weary of two decades of scarcity, the show offered an exciting and glittering preview of the promise of polymers. Here was the era of plenty that the hopeful British chemists had envisioned. “Nothing can stop plastics,” the chairman of the exposition crowed.

Plastics production expanded explosively, with a growth curve that was steeper even than the fast-rising GNP’s. Thanks to plastics, newly flush Americans had a never-ending smorgasbord of affordable goods to choose from. The flow of new products and applications was so constant it was soon the norm. Tupperware had surely always existed, alongside Formica counters, Naugahyde chairs, red acrylic taillights, Saran wrap, vinyl siding, squeeze bottles, push buttons, Barbie dolls, Lycra bras, Wiffle balls, sneakers, sippy cups, and countless more things. The nascent industry partnered with the press to sell consumers on the virtue of plastics. “Plastics are here to free you from drudgery,” House Beautiful promised housewives in a special 50-page issue in October 1947 titled “Plastics ... A Way to a Better, More Carefree Life.”

That proliferation of goods helped engender the rapid social mobility that took place after the war. We were a nation of consumers now, a society increasingly democratized by our shared ability to enjoy the conveniences and comforts of modern life. Through the plastics industry, we had an ever-growing ability to synthesize what we wanted or needed, which made reality seem infinitely more open to possibility, profoundly more malleable. Now full-fledged residents of Plasticville, we began to believe that we too were plastic. As House Beautiful assured readers in 1953: “You will have a greater chance to be yourself than any people in the history of civilization.”

It’s hard to say when the polymer rapture began to fade, but it was gone by 1967 when the movie The Graduate came out. Somewhere along the line, plastic’s penchant for inexpensive imitation came to be seen as cheap ersatz. So audiences knew exactly why Benjamin Braddock (as played by Dustin Hoffman) was so repelled when a family friend took him aside for some helpful career advice: “I just want to say one word to you ... Plastics!” The word no longer conjured an enticing horizon of possibility but rather a bland, airless future, as phony as Mrs. Robinson’s smile.

Today, few other materials we rely on carry such a negative set of associations or stir such visceral disgust. Norman Mailer called it “a malign force loose in the universe ... the social equivalent of cancer.” We may have created plastic, but in some fundamental way it remains essentially alien, ever seen as somehow unnatural — though it’s really no less natural than concrete, paper, steel, or any other manufactured material. One reason may have to do with its preternatural endurance. Unlike traditional materials, plastic won’t dissolve or rust or break down, at least, not in any useful time frame. Those long polymer chains are built to last, which means that much of the plastic we’ve produced is with us still — as litter, layers of landfill, and detritus in the ocean. Humans could disappear from the earth tomorrow, but many of the plastics we’ve made will last for centuries. Each of them offers an object lesson on what it means to live in Plasticville, enmeshed in a web of materials that are rightly considered both the miracle and the menace of modern life.

The story of plastics is riddled with those kinds of paradoxes. We enjoy an unprecedented level of material abundance and yet it often feels impoverishing, like digging through a box packed with Styrofoam peanuts and finding nothing else there. We take natural substances created over millions of years, fashion them into products designed for a few minutes’ use, and then return them to the planet as litter that we’ve engineered to never go away. We enjoy plastics-based technologies that can save lives as never before but that also pose insidious threats to human health. We bury in landfills the same kinds of energy-rich molecules that we’ve scoured the far reaches of the earth to find and excavate. We send plastic waste overseas to become the raw materials for finished products that are sold back to us.

These paradoxes contribute to our growing anguish over plastics. Yet the plastics-related issues that dominate headlines today surfaced in earlier decades. Studies that show traces of plastics in human tissue go back to the 1950s. The first report of plastic trash in the ocean was made in the 1960s. Suffolk County, New York, enacted the first ban on plastic packaging in 1988.

But the stakes are much higher now. As Plasticville sprawls farther across the landscape, we become more thoroughly entrenched in the way of life it imposes. It is increasingly difficult to believe that this pace of plasticisation is sustainable, that the natural world can long endure our ceaseless “improving on nature.” But can we start engaging in the problems plastics pose? Is it possible to enter into a relationship with these materials that is safer for us and more sustainable for our offspring? Is there a future for Plasticville?

Excerpt from Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel. Copyright © 2011 by Susan Freinkel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. All rights reserved.

A Business Meeting, Our Exchange Student, Masks , the Rotary Anns and what Rotary is doing in Great Britain & Ireland

Last Week

It was a Business  Meeting with over 30 on line but I wasn't there!  

Our Exchange Student, Masego Matiku, joined us on line from Thailand where she has been locked up with her family but she has been learning Thai and school opens at the end of the month.  She was upbeat and very happy.






As President Jean mentioned in her column last week, Jeannette Horner has been busy making masks for people in Alexandra.  They were given to Linda Twala for distribution...

I did attempt to straighten this but then half the people were cut out so you can either tilt your head or finish off your dwindling supply of whisky which will have the same affect.






A word from the Anns
Life under lock down has highlighted how important a part the whole fellowship aspect of Rotary is.
We have missed two monthly meetings. But thank goodness for the Rotary Anns’ chat group on
WhatsApp! We only got it going in 2020 and it has been most useful in this isolated time. We have
exchanged business news, but also shared some inspiring videos and writings. The next step is to
get going with Zoom as Rotary has.
Reluctantly we have cancelled the fundraising Bridge Drive scheduled for 13 May and in the true
spirit of Rotary most of the ‘tables’ have opted to donate the money they had paid to book, to
charity. So some of the money will go to the Animal Shelter in Soweto but some will go to hunger
relief in this very fraught time among the poor and unemployed.
To any Rotarians who had planned to donate prizes for the Bridge Drive, thank you for your
generosity. Perhaps next year. .. . ..
To any who are reading this we send love and best wishes for your safety and good health as we
adjust to all the changes that will need to be made to the new ‘normal’.

Discon 2020
As you will all have been informed, Discon will be on line this year and all information for participation will be sent from District in due course.

This Week
It's a Public Holiday so officially we don't have a meeting.  However the Good Friday unofficial meeting was so well attended which shows that continuing contact is important so I am sure President Jean will organise a social meeting again.

Here's an interesting article on what Rotary Clubs in Great Britain and Ireland are doing during the Corona Virus Pandemic

Rotary clubs across Great Britain & Ireland have stepped up to the plate during the current pandemic.

More than 50 different community activities are up and running to support those most vulnerable – and they are the ones which Rotary GB&I knows about.

https://twitter.com/RotaryGBI/status/1245625949795713025

In Hertfordshire, Ware Rotary took just 12 days to set up the Bricket Wood Rotary Community Corps. Immediate Past Rotary GB&I President, Debbie Hodge, has been instrumental in setting up the group.

“We had noticed that there were people asking what could they do to help in light of the Covid-19 pandemic,” explained Debbie. “And this was before the call for volunteers by the NHS and the government.

“In my village, I help run the Mums and Toddler group along with the local vicar Kylie Hodgins. The village has a well-used Facebook page, an active Neighbour Watch and a lively Residents Association.

“In the time before social distancing – although mindful not to get too close – we had a meeting and agreed that we needed a volunteer group, a mechanism for getting the message out that support was there and a way of providing some governance and safe working practices.

“The Facebook page generated the volunteers, a poster and leaflet were agreed giving a dedicated e mail and phone number and a Rotary Community Corps gave us the structure and governance.”

Rotary Ware agreed to become the sponsor club and now, in less than a fortnight, they have 23 volunteers.

They comprise a variety of skills ranging from compliance, financial management, languages other than English, audit and project management, dog walking and boarding, teaching, a police officer and two surveyors.

We had noticed that there were people asking what could they do to help in light of the Covid-19 pandemic,”

Debbie said that the group has sorted out paper delivers to those out of the delivery area, hospital transport, food deliveries, collection and delivery of food orders, collection and posting of parcels, and the collection and delivery of prescriptions form the local pharmacy.

“This safety net for the village is working on many levels,” she explained.

“It is giving those who want to help a platform to do that and helping their sense of worth, for those in need a mechanism to get help and the comfort of knowing that there is help locally, and for the whole village a feeling of being cared for.

“We may not have many calls for our services but we have already to made a difference, and by working together and caring for each other we will continue to support those in the village.”

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In County Kildaire, Ireland, Newbridge Rotary has established a volunteer group within the club to deliver prescription medicine to the elderly and those who cannot visit the pharmacy.

In consultation with the local Gardai, the club has written to all pharmacies in the town letting them know of the group.

Wearing personal protective equipment, the Rotarians collect the medicine from the pharmacy, which they deliver to those in need.

The club has also bought a dedicated mobile phone, whose number has been shared with the Gardai and local authority in case they need the Rotarians’ help urgently.

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Also in Ireland, in Tullamore, County Offaly, President Frank Kelly reports that they are “healthy and in high spirits”.

He said: “We’re in the happy position to have a lot of members who are connected with Tullamore Hospital, Offaly County Council, local radio and many charitable organisations.”

Frank explained that they were working together to provide help in Tullamore through daily updates and appeals via their WhatsApp group.

We’re in the happy position to have a lot of members who are connected with Tullamore Hospital, Offaly County Council, local radio and many charitable organisations.”

They were involved with food collection and delivery for the needy in association with the An Gárda Síochána network.

Using the club’s contacts, they were able to distribute hand sanitiser and protective healthcare gear, while distributing money to an ongoing fund to provide food parcels for needy or isolated families and individuals.

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Richard Hughes from Llandeilo Rotary Club in Carmarthenshire

Elsewhere, scores of Rotary clubs are also making direct donations to food banks, sharing the money they would have paid from their weekly meetings. The Trussell Trust is one of the chief beneficiaries.

Richard Hughes from Llandeilo Rotary Club in Carmarthenshire, West Wales, and who lives in a village called Talley, has set up a community group in his village called Talley United.

The 68-year-old, who retired from working at the Port Talbot Steelworks, admitted a challenge for him during this crisis is to look after his wife, who has had cancer three times, and is currently in remission.

“This damages her immune system, and therefore isolation is important,” he said.

Talley United is a group of people who get out in the community to do the shopping and collect prescriptions for the vulnerable. Richard tends to get to his local shop, which is seven miles away, for just after 7am.

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Also in Wales, Rotarians are the Cardiff East club have stepped up their work with their local foodbank during this crisis.

Club President, Paul Cotter, explained that their partnership with the foodbank stretches back a few years. “I have been a volunteer for a while,” he said.

“We have had the foodbank come to our club to talk about the work they do, and the contribution they make to other people’s lives in the local community.

“Previously, many of us as individuals had been making contributions to the foodbank separately, or through their local churches.

We have had the foodbank come to our club to talk about the work they do, and the contribution they make to other people’s lives in the local community.”

“Last year, Cardiff East Rotary decided to make the foodbank as a club project. The club makes a food donation once a month – we call it ‘Pudding Wednesday’. We make both financial and food donations to the food bank.

“During the recent floods, Cardiff Foodbank helped by taking donations to the valley communities who had been hit hardest by the storms. They will need further donations during the coronavirus outbreak.”

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Rotary clubs assisting with coronavirus outbreak

Silloth – Packing and distributing essential support parcels including food, hygiene items, puzzle books and more. Take a look at the full story here.

Maidenhead Bridge – Launched an appeal for local volunteers willing to collect shopping, prescriptions, walk dogs, post mail and more. Also helping those families on free school meals. So far have supported 54 local people and had support from 61 volunteers. For more information on how to volunteer visit their website.

Sale – Community support scheme is ensuring that elderly residents have been able to get to the shops for shopping as well as essential doctor and hospital appointments. They have been working in collaboration with local taxi operators, Scotts Cars, to subsidise costs so that those in need can travel free of charge.

St Neots St Marys – Sponsored the printing of 10,000 postcards, where people who are able to help those self-isolating can fill in their details and distribute them locally.

Ribbleside – have purchased hundreds of pounds worth of supermarket gift cards, which volunteers are then using to purchase supplies for those who need it, meaning no money is changing hands making the process more hygienic.

Limerick Thomond – been supporting a ‘Meals on Wheels’ scheme by donating dinner boxes to St. Munchin’s Community Centre, a local not-for-profit organisation who have seen increased demand since the outbreak.

Leatherhead – compiled a list of local businesses who are operating during the outbreak and providing important services such as food, drink and health care delivery while also highlighting those offering a discount to NHS workers.

Crewkerne and District – made two donations totalling £2,500 to a local foodbank and also the Citizen’s Advice Bureau.

In Reading – Eight Rotary clubs in the town are working together in similar fashion collecting prescriptions, fetching urgent supplies, posting mail, dog walking and providing a friendly phone call to those who are self-isolating. Also encouraging children to write letters to nursing homes or to an elderly neighbour.

Lytham – Volunteering as part of a local coalition of organisations and businesses to offer assistance with urgent supplies, shopping, dog walking, phone calls etc.

Gordano Breakfast – members have donated their usual breakfast meeting meal to Clevedon District Foodbank who are experiencing shortages.

Tonbridge – donated £500 to the food charity, Families Eating and Sharing Together (FEAST), which helps families unable to obtain free school meals.

Sittingbourne Invicta – donated £1,000 to Swale Foodbank

Bradford West – supporting Bradford Metropolitan Foodbank to supply dependent families. Club is using social media to provide a regular list of wanted items.

Kings Hill and Sittingbourne Invicta – opening their community funds for applications for funds from small clubs and groups

Maidstone Dawn Patrol – have been taking regular exercise litter-picking whilst maintaining social distancing during the coronavirus outbreak.

Romney Marsh – been involved in setting up of the Romney Marsh Support Hub. The group includes a number of charities, including foodbanks, as well as local church leaders, Kent Police, councils, doctors’ surgeries, scout groups and community wardens. The aim of the Hub is to ensure there is a consistent and factually correct message going out to the public and avoid duplication of effort

Shrewsbury Severn – donate £500 to a local primary school which is open to children of key workers.

Chippenham – providing urgent supplies to those self-isolating, including packing and distributing food parcels in collaboration with local supermarkets, supplying fresh fruit and veg, bread and tinned goods.

Normanton – donation to The Well Project which provides positive activities for the community to engage with, including a foodbank and youth club.

Epworth & Isle of Axholme – part of a ‘Good Neighbours’ scheme, a partnership between voluntary and trad organisations which has fed 16 families, including 27 adults and 37 children.

Glenrothes – Handing out leaflets on behalf of a local community centre who are assisting residents during the outbreak.

Eckington & District – club member Philip Staton is volunteering with the local Age UK group to deliver food parcels to those in need.

Llandeilo – Club member Richard Hughes is hosting a weekly online ‘pub quiz’ as well as supporting residents in the village of Talley by purchasing food and prescriptions.

Fareham Meon – purchased a library trolley so books for a local care home could be easily transported around the building for residents confined to their rooms. Club is also directing funds to a local foodbank, totalling £1,000 so far. Also donated £700 to a village in Australia which was recently hit by wildfires and now coronavirus.

Sheffield – club members have signed up for the NHS volunteer scheme, with one member Mark Casson already cycling around the city to deliver medicine to the vulnerable.

Wymondham – members are involved in delivering a volunteer scheme supporting the village’s 550 residents, many of them elderly, offering practical help from food delivery to chats on the phone.

Ipswich – Rotary member John Skeates has created a neighbourhood WhatsApp group for local residents to talk, answer eachother’s questions and request support. Over 90 people are now connected so far.

In Kettering – members are maintaining contact with visitors to their regular dementia café as well as working with the Salvation Army and Sikh Gurdwara to distribute available food from a local Tesco store.

In East Midlands – planning a significant, long-term food bank support project which includes financial and practical assistance for the network of food banks in the region.

Ellon – donated £2,000 worth of supermarket gift cards to Ellon Food Bank which they said would be life-saving. The money was raised through community fundraising activities earlier in the year.

Louth – funding to several local groups to help some of our most vulnerable people and has already given out more than £3000. Also has assisted in supplying laptops to children having to self-isolate in the early days of the outbreak to continue their education.

Ware – Community Corps – Rotary has helped coordinate 23 volunteers, all with different skills, from compliance to foreign language speakers, to form a Rotary Community Corps. So far the group has delivered newspapers and food, assisted with hospital transport and more. It has been a comforting safety net for local people in need.

Morriston – have created an online Zoom meeting place at 19.00 every evening for one hour inviting Rotarians and the local community to chat, share ideas, identify vulnerable people, signpost and just be a point of contact for those who feel lonely.

Aberystwyth – Made a donation of £795 to the Jubilee Storehouse Foodbank, with club members giving the money they would have otherwise spent on their mean at their regular club meeting.

Cheadle & District – Prior to the widespread closure of shops and restaurants, Rotary member Deborah Puttick collected and safely distributed fresh fruit to regular visitors to the club’s dementia café. The fruit would otherwise have been discarded by a local juice bar.

Mendip – Members of the Club are helping to answer the telephones for the newly formed Cheddar Valley Community hub. Formed by local business people to assist the vulnerable who are self-isolating to get vital supplies. Younger volunteers will then go to get the supplies.

Hamble Valley – Part of coordinated efforts in the area, alongside other community groups and religious organisations. They are sharing key messages about social distancing, registering people as vulnerable and promoting the NHS volunteer scheme.

Barry – £700 donation to Vale Foodbank

Blyth – It was an early start for Rotary volunteers in Blyth who helped transport food from a local supermarket to the nearby foodbank.

Nottingham – Seeking daily volunteers to support Sycamore Dining, a charity which makes affordable meals for those living independently. Daily deliveries of hot meals to elderly and vulnerable in the community are essential.

Thornbury – £500 donation to North Bristol Foodbank

Burford and Kingham – £622 donation to North Cotswold Foodbank

Sussex Vale – Made a £585 donation to local foodbanks and plan to continue donating food and funds throughout the coronavirus crisis.

Colchester – The club’s Easter Egg Raffle has taken place online this year, and the club has also donated a number of large eggs to the Rainbow Trust, which supports terminally ill children and their families.

Barnstable Link – Organising a ‘Children’s Art Challenge’ for pupils to take part in during the month of April while they’re unable to attend school. It’s a chance for children to get creative with any medium and be in with a chance of winning a prize!

Hounslow – Donating food parcels and groceries to the staff at West Middlesex Hospital, as well as supporting the local foodbanks and the Hounslow Open Kitchen which provides free meals to the needy 3 times a day.