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.”

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

Last Week

Howard Johnston regaled us with some entertaining jokes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dorothy Ann Gould

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vocational Service Awards, the Lester Connock Award, Work on the Container, Visitors from Ghana, a Social Meeting and an Upgrade for Rotary Peace Fellowships.

Last Week
President Jean has already told you about the event so I won't repeat it here.

President Jean with our Vocational Service Awardees.  Dorothy Ann Gould with sponsor Roger Lloyd.
And above, Thulani Nkomo & James Delaney with sponsor Liz Short.

Some of the assembled multitudes

The Vocational Service Awards include a donation by the club to the charity of the awardee's choice...and in this instance it will probably be to their own!

Viv Herbert from the Wits Faculty of Nursing Education and Lester Connock Awardee Basi Baloyi

The Lester Connock Award is a R25 000 bursary.






And we had some visiting Rotarians from the Rotary Club of Accra Ring Road Central.

Charles Okyere, Edwin Provencal and Fred Kwofie.  The small people in front are President Jean and the sergeant for the day, Sybille Essmann.

James Croswell has worked extremely hard to get a container from the Rotary Humanitarian Centre to provide an office etc for the Palliative Care volunteers at Baragwanath Hospital as an add on to our completed Global Grant project.

John Hope-Bailie, Jerry Bernardo and Marandi busy with the refurbishment.

This Week
It's one of those relaxing social meeting followed by a Board Meeting.  There will be the inevitable jokes, laughter and maybe a few things to catch up on.....so you never know what will happen.

Upgraded Rotary Peace Fellowship Programmes
This is very important as we have to keep up with trends and at the same time provide fellowships that are of practical use.  If you read this article you will see just how this is being done.

(I have changed all the spellings to English ones for my own amusement....see if I missed one!)

With a new peace centre at Makerere University in Uganda, a re-imagined peace fellowship programme, and ambitious plans for the future, Rotary International advances its push for global harmony

Since Rotary inaugurated its peace fellows programme in 2002, 810 students have graduated with master’s degrees from one of five Rotary Peace Centres; an additional 514 have completed the certificate program from the peace centre at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. These fellows have become thought leaders in the world of peace studies, but only a small fraction of them — 148 — are from sub-Saharan Africa.

That’s about to change. In January, Rotary announced a new peace centre at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda — the first peace centre in Africa — and a complete re imagining of the Rotary PeaceCentres professional development certificate programme. “This is a real bonus not just for Africa but for Rotary,” says Bryn Styles, chair of the Rotary Peace Centres Committee. “It will increase our credibility in the area of peace.”

The announcement was greeted enthusiastically in Kampala. “It was important for us to expand our expertise and our engagement in the area of conflict and peace,” says Barnabas Nawangwe, vice chancellor at Makerere University. “Partnering with an international organisation like Rotary allows us to demonstrate on a global scale what we’ve been doing for 20 years in our local environment. What we’ve learned here we can use to confront strife in populations all over the world.”

Rotary was seeking a program that draws from the regional expertise and experiences of those affected by conflict, says Jill Gunter, manager of the Rotary Peace Centres programme. Makerere, which already offered a programme in peace and conflict studies, was ideal because of its focus on local peace-building and conflict transformation. “The programme will attract candidates dedicated to working for peace throughout Africa,” Gunter says. “It helps that Uganda provides lessons in hosting refugees that the whole world can learn from — and Makerere showed a willingness and desire to adapt their programmes to Rotary’s needs and requirements.”

Nawangwe expects local Rotarians to also play a big role in the success of the new centre. “There are many clubs around Africa engaged in the cause of peace, so there is much they can offer,” he says. “Makerere is located in the heart of the Great Lakes region, which has historically experienced the most strife in Africa. We’ve had frequent experience with conflict, which is why we established our peace programe. We have a formidable faculty that understands and can educate others about conflict and peace.” Nawangwe expects that peace fellows will do field studies in areas struggling with the aftermath of conflict, such as South Sudan and Rwanda. “We will talk with the communities there, finding out what happened, what has been done, and what remains to be done,” he says.

Rotarians from the region had been “very keen” to land the new peace centre, says Styles. “The new certificate programme at Makerere will provide peace fellows with the education and hands-on experience that will allow them to go back to their communities with tools to create positive social change,” he says.

When the first peace fellows begin their studies at Makerere in January 2021, they will be introduced to Rotary’s new yearlong certificate programme in peace-building, conflict transformation, and development. The peace centre at Chulalongkorn University, which has offered the three-month version of the certificate program, will also follow the new model.

“It was important to bring the certificate programme into the larger peace-building ecosystem of Rotary,” says Surichai Wun’Gaeo, the director of the Chulalongkorn peace centre. “We also want to be more aligned with Positive Peace efforts and foster a holistic understanding of the relationship between peace and development. In the past, when we talked about peace, it was separate from development. Peace was considered a separate sector. Now we will move to a comprehensive approach to peace-building.”

In the new model, each certificate programme will accept a cohort of up to 20 peace fellows twice a year. The online application for the 2021-22 peace fellowship is available beginning this month. Qualified candidates for the certificate programme will be professionals with a minimum of five years of experience in peace and development. They must be working on or have an idea for an initiative that promotes peace or social change in their workplace or community.

The programme will begin with an online course to provide each of the incoming fellows with baseline knowledge on peace and development studies. It will also offer fellows the opportunity to share ideas about their peace and social change initiatives with one another.

A 10-week session will follow at the peace centre, where fellows will work on their peace initiatives and create plans to bring them to fruition. After a review of the fundamentals of peace-building and conflict resolution, the curriculum will concentrate on human rights, governance, and the role of media in conflict, among other topics; it will also help fellows develop practical skills, such as in mediation and negotiation. To build on Rotary’s strategic partnership with the Institute for Economics and Peace, a one-week workshop will be devoted to the theory and practice of Positive Peace. Fellows will devote two weeks to field studies, an opportunity to engage in hands-on sessions of experiential learning. (At Makerere, for instance, it’s proposed that fellows visit western Uganda and Kigali, Rwanda, to study ethnic strife and incidents of mass atrocities.) All this will occur within a regionally focused context, which could mean an emphasis on refugees, climate-induced conflict, and peace-building in divided societies.

At the end of the 10-week session, fellows will return to their jobs or communities and implement their initiatives over the next nine months. They will be assisted by a mentor chosen from members of the university’s faculty or network of professionals. Fellows will also participate in interactive online learning sessions with other members of their cohort.

As the yearlong programme concludes, fellows will return to the peace centre for a one-week capstone session, where they will network, hear from prominent experts in the field of peace and development, and reflect and report on their initiatives. To foster a long-term affiliation with one another and with Rotary, the cohort returning for its final week will overlap with a new cohort starting its first on-site session. After the programme concludes, graduates will continue to hone their leadership skills and reassemble periodically to provide updates, inspiration, and encouragement to one another, all with an eye toward creating a robust regional hub of peace-builders.

Other changes still lie ahead for the Rotary peace programmes. An enhanced master’s degree programme — one that concentrates more broadly on the link between peace and development and that is aligned with each of Rotary’s six areas of focus — will be introduced in 2022, and two more peace centres offering the certificate programme are expected to launch by 2030, one in Latin America or the Caribbean and a second in the Middle East or North Africa.

Cruising, Award Presentations and a Library for Rwanda.

Last Week

Salome van Heerden spoke to us on Cruising.  We have some enthusiastic cruisers in the club.  When she talked about a particular vessel that had 4 000 people on board and that didn't include the crew it sounded absolutely horrific...Sandton City and surrounds all at sea!

Fortunately that's the exception as most ships are much smaller.

In a sense it's  suspending reality because you are cocooned in a totally artificial environment with every whim catered for.  Wonderful at first but after a while it begins to pall.  I have been on cruise ships but never long enough for that to happen.  Why I think it must is because on a liner, after a while, the "wonderful food" eventually all tastes the same and you long for home cooking.

We welcomed two guests, Mark Franklin's wife, Yvonne and a potential member, Chrispin Matthieu.

I did ask Salome if they had permanent round the world cruising guests as it is certainly much cheaper than an American retirement village.  She said quite a few Americans and very few South Africans......our retirement villages must be much cheaper and the value of the Rand......

This Week

It's the Vocational & Lester Connock Awards at the Wanderers Golf Club ...don't forget to pay by eft or John Symons will hand you an empty plate!  I am a little concerned about numbers as the Anns, who have proposed an awardee, are barely represented so far and I haven't heard if their awardee will be present.

After the genocide of 1994, Rotarians led a successful campaign to build Rwanda’s first public library. A bastion against ignorance and tyranny, it has become a gathering place where a culture of reading, the arts, and democracy thrives.

Twenty-year-old Noella Umutoniwase and her friends have been hanging out at the library for as long as they can remember. They come to study in its quiet spaces, chill at its rooftop cafe, or chat with friends in the garden. In fact, if you ask her whether she remembers Kigali before there was a library, Umutoniwase scrunches up her face in disbelief. “Before there was a library?” she asks, as if evoking the dawn of time.

For her, it might as well be. The brainchild of Rotarians in Rwanda, the Kigali Public Library was born, at least as an idea, not long after Umutoniwase herself. Back then, the Rotarians who proposed it must have seemed crazy. Only six years before, more than 800,000 people had been killed in an event known today as the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi. Farms and businesses were destroyed, basic infrastructure was broken, Rwandans were traumatized. A public library must have seemed like a strange priority.

But the members of the Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga, Rwanda's first English-speaking club, thought the idea made sense. One of them was Beth Payne, an economic, commercial, and consular officer at the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda and a fan of libraries; she had put herself through law school partly by working at one. But it was more than a personal affection: “I had always believed that a free library is one of the cornerstones of America's democracy,” she says. When the Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga was chartered, in 2000, Rwanda was focused on its future — on ensuring peace and reconciliation, stability and security, and economic growth — and Payne believed it was the perfect time to think about how literacy and access to information could support those goals.

Payne taught a class about the internet to Rwandan businesspeople. “I watched how they responded to this wealth of knowledge and information all of a sudden becoming available to them,” she says. “So I suggested to our club that one of the ways to support stability and growth, even if it's not as direct as other ways, is by having a place where people can come and get information and knowledge. And that captured people's imaginations — although, I'll be honest, I was thinking of something a lot smaller.”

Thinking small, however, wasn't something that the country's newest Rotary club wanted to do. Most of its members were Rwandans whose families had fled the country in 1959, in another episode of violence that many consider Rwanda's first genocide. They had grown up on stories of Rwanda and dreams of return, and now that they had arrived, they had ambitious ideas and limitless energy.

Gerald Mpyisi, the charter president of the Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga and a key figure in the library's founding, was one of those people. He had grown up in Zimbabwe, gone to college in Uganda, and worked in Kenya, where he had loved the McMillan Library — Nairobi's oldest — a neoclassical edifice filled with literary treasures. He drew on the inspiration he had felt while wandering its stacks to galvanize his fellow club members. “Those of us who had lived outside knew the importance of libraries,” Mpyisi says. “I said, ‘Guys, let's think big. There's no public library in this country. Does anyone here know a country without a library?'”

Building a library was a daunting undertaking. But the club was new, energetic, and ambitious, and the members felt buoyed by the scale of the project. “Everyone was in unison; everyone thought it was a great idea, even though we didn't have the means. But if you don't dream big, nothing becomes a reality,” says Cally Alles, a member of the Rotary Club of Colombo, Sri Lanka, who lived in Rwanda for more than two decades and is now that country's honorary consul in Sri Lanka. As a member of the French-speaking Rotary Club of Kigali, Alles helped start the English-speaking Kigali-Virunga club to channel the energy of the country's earliest returnees, many of whom had grown up in Anglophone countries. The club received a $2,000 Matching Grant from The Rotary Foundation for a computer and other items and decided to raise the construction funds itself, tapping support from then-U.S. Ambassador George McDade Staples, himself a member of the Kigali-Virunga club, and the country's president, Paul Kagame, who was the guest of honor at the club's first fundraiser in November 2000. In one night, the club brought in $250,000 in cash and pledges, about 20 percent of the project's total budget, Mpyisi says. “That boosted our morale,” he says.

Rotarians carried the message abroad, and soon they and their friends were donating hundreds of books to the future library. The club began hosting monthly used book sales of duplicate or unneeded volumes, putting the proceeds toward the costs of construction. At the time, books in Rwanda were difficult to find, and prices were far beyond the reach of ordinary citizens, so the club's sales became hugely popular. Virtually all the books on offer would find homes, but some were more sought after than others. “This was when Americans were all getting rid of their encyclopedias,” Payne recalls. “Imagine, in Rwanda back then, seeing a whole set of encyclopedias, and you could buy it for $5. People ate those encyclopedia sets up.”

At one early book sale, President Kagame and his family showed up unannounced. His children picked out several books — and, Mpyisi remembers with a laugh, their father insisted on a receipt.

In fact, Kagame was a key figure in the library's evolution. In his personal capacity, he was among its first donors. Later, when the global economic crisis stalled the club's fundraising and slowed the library's construction, the president stepped in to help keep things moving, according to Paul Masterjerb, a member of the Kigali-Virunga club and the current chair of its library committee. In 2009, Masterjerb says, Kagame donated $500,000 personally and asked the country's ministers of finance, infrastructure, education, and culture to make a plan and allocate funds to finish building the structure.

In 2012, the library opened its doors. It is managed as a public-private partnership between the Ministry of Education and Innovation Group, a local company that offers online and offline creative platforms to communities. The partnership is overseen by a board that includes representatives from the offices of the president and the prime minister, as well as the Imbuto Foundation, a private foundation of first lady Jeannette Kagame that promotes literacy and other programs. The Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga also has a seat on the board, held by the club's library committee chair. Masterjerb says this form of partnership ironed out some early wrinkles in the library's day-to-day functioning. Now, he says, it's “perfect.”

The Kigali Public Library has taken its place as a major institution in the now-bustling capital. On any given afternoon, the reading tables in the “study zone” are full of people in deep concentration, many of them secondary school or university students.

“The library came at the right time,” says Jenipher Ingabire, the Kigali-Virunga club's current president. “We didn't have places you could sit down and read. During summer holidays, when my three children are at home, I take them to the library. We borrow books; sometimes we sit there and read together. For adults, I see it as an opportunity, as a good place for us as Rwandans. As a club, we are really proud to have built that place, for having come up with an idea that not everybody would have thought of at the time as a priority.”

There are also older patrons for whom the library is part of a daily routine. Aime Byimana, 62, is one of them. He wants to start his own firm, and nearly every day for the past year, he has spent a few hours reading textbooks about information systems, corporate management, and business strategy. He finds the library, free and open to all, a hopeful and exciting place — and a reminder of how far Rwanda has come. “You cannot learn when you're in trouble. Psychologically, you just can't,” he says. “A library needs peace.”

Byimana doesn't have the money for the membership fee of 12,000 Rwandan francs, or about $13, that is required to check books out of the library. But many patrons say they prefer to leave the books on the shelves — and hold on to an excuse to get out of the house and come to the library, where they can peruse the more than 19,000 volumes that are housed on three floors (the library also has 30,000 digital titles in its collection). Byimana spends his days upstairs in the study zone; that floor also holds a collection of French books and a corner that's home to the Institut Français. The ground floor, or “interactive zone,” has a large, colorful children's room, an internet cafe, and the Korea Corner, a kind of self-guided language and culture lab. The basement is the “collaboration zone,” with a large conference room and smaller meeting rooms.

That is where Joseph Kalisa, current president of the Rotaract Club of KIE, coordinated the team that planned a national trauma symposium in February 2019 that brought together mental health practitioners, social workers, and community leaders. The symposium, the first of its kind in Rwanda, was one of the events held in 2019 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the genocide, and Kalisa says the library was a key force in making the symposium possible. “The planning team chose the Kigali Public Library for its neutrality,” he says. “We were 15 or 20 people from different organizations and NGOs, and we felt it was important to work from a neutral space where no one would be seen to be taking the lead. We all felt most comfortable at the library because it's a public place suitable for equal discussion between equal parties.”

A thriving culture of arts and literature has also blossomed here. Huza Press, the first independent publisher in Rwanda, got its start in a library conference room in 2015. For several years, Huza Press offered a literary prize to encourage Rwandans to write their own stories and to identify emerging talent. Last year, on the library's rooftop exhibition and events space, the publisher launched RadioBook Rwanda, a three-part audiovisual chapbook series of new fables written in the tradition of Rwanda's old tales, the kind that Huza founder Louise Umutoni grew up listening to her parents read at bedtime. “The library is a space that's been created as a celebration of books, as a celebration of storytelling, as a celebration of literature,” says Umutoni, who grew up in Uganda. “We've worked hard to reinforce that and to use the space that celebrates what we do as a publisher.”