To "attend" the meeting, scroll down the screen, review all the information from top to bottom, view all the videos, read all the information, and enjoy your time here with us at our Rotary meeting.
Dear Fellow Rotarians, visitors and guests!
WELCOME TO OUR E-CLUB!
Thank you for stopping by our club meeting! We hope you will enjoy your visit.
Our E-Club banner is shown at left! Please send us a virtual copy of your club banner and we will send you a copy of our new club banner in exchange. We will also display your club banner proudly on our meeting website.
We are now officially a fully-fledged chartered Rotary Club in District 7020. We celebrated our Charter Gala with the meeting posted the week of January 24. Our charter date is August 12, 2013. We hope you will find the content of our meeting enlightening and will give us the benefit of your opinion on the content.
April is Magazine Month. Our club celebrates our 2014 Butterfly Storybook!
Our District 7020 Conference is schedule for next week - April 29 through May 4.
Visiting Rotarians. Click this link to Apply for a Make-up. We will send you and your club secretary a make-up confirmation. A minimum of 30 minutes spent with us will comply with RI regulations. However, we hope you will stay to enjoy the entire meeting!
Active Members. Click for Attendance Record.
Happy Hour Hangout. Happy Hour Hangout. Our Happy Hour Hangout on a Saturday morning is early enough so that you can join before your day gets away from you.
We meet for a live chat and sometimes business discussion. If you are interested in dropping by, please click the link below. Morning coffee is on the house! (Your house, that is...) Hope to see you there!
Please note: Now, attending our HHH will earn you a make-up!
The link to the Happy Hour Hangout for Saturday is at the bottom of this meeting.
Interested in joining us? Click the link Membership Application and Information.
Our President, Kitty, would now like to welcome you to this week's meeting. Please listen in...
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ROTARY E-CLUB OF THE CARIBBEAN, 7020
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ABCs OF ROTARY (Cliff Dochterman)
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| Cliff Dochterman RI President, 1992-93 |
International Conventions
The Rotary District Governor performs a very significant function in the world of Rotary.
He or she is the single officer of Rotary International in the geographic area called a Rotary district, which usually includes about 45 Rotary clubs. (District 7020 has about 85 clubs!)
The district governors, who have been extensively trained at the worldwide International Assembly, provide the "quality control" for the 32,000 Rotary clubs of the world. they are responsible for maintaining high performance within the clubs of their district.
The district governor, who must make an official visit to each club in the district, is never regarded as an "inspector general." Rather, he or she visits as a helpful and friendly adviser to the club officers, as a useful counselor to further the Object of Rotary among the clubs of the district, and as a catalysts to help strengthen the programs of Rotary.
The district governor is a very experienced Rotarian who generously devotes a year to the volunteer task of leadership. The governor has a wealth of knowledge about current Rotary prorams, purposes, policies and goals and is a personof recognized high standing in his or her profession, community and Rotary club. The governor must supervise the organization of new clubs and strengthen existing ones. He or she performs a host of specific duties to assure that the quality of Rotary does not falter in the district, and is responsible to promote and implement all programs and activities of the Rotary International president and the RI Board of Directors. The governor plans and directs a district conference and other special events.
Each district governor performs a very important role in the world-wide operations of Rotary. The district governor is truly a prime example of Service Above Self performing a labour of love.
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BEIRUT MARATHON
In a moving talk, marathon founder May El-Khalil explains why she believed a 26.2-mile running event could bring together a country divided for decades by politics and religion, even if for one day a year.
The Beirut Marathon is the largest running event in the Middle East. May El-Khalil founded it as an instrument of peace.
The beautiful city of Beirut, Lebanon, has seen its share of tragedy, as a seat of Lebanon's long-running civil war (1975-1990) and the Israeli-Lebanese conflict that came to a head in 2006. But in 2003, May El-Khalil, a local sports official, decided: It's time to start a marathon, open to all, as an antidote to sectarianism. And despite ongoing political and security pressure, the Beirut Marathon, now entering its 11th year, has become not only the largest running event in the Middle East but a powerful force for peace.
El-Khalil was inspired to start the marathon after a personal tragedy: a near-fatal running accident. Doctors told her she would never run again. She was hospitalized for two years and had to undergo a long series of surgeries. But the resolve from this personal struggle created an event that, each year, draws runners and fans from opposing political and religious communities in a symbolic act of peace. Case in point: In 2012, on a rainy and windy November day, more than 33,000 runners turned out. Other countries around the region are now thinking of replicating this model.
"Indeed, as the Middle East fractures under the weight of disparity, the Beirut Marathon continues to unite."
--Debra Witt, Runner's World
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- Peace and Conflict Resolution
- Disease Prevention and Treatment
- Water and SanitationIf yo
- Maternal and Child Health
- Basic Education and Literacy
- Economic and Community Development
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ROTARY ANTHEM
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ADVANCE PROMOTION
HAPPY HOUR HANGOUT - Saturday morning, April 26
Our guest speaker on April 26 will be Donna Wallbank who heads up all the Youth Programs for Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland (RIBI).
This is a recurring meeting so the link will be the same for every Saturday morning.
Some of the initiatives which Rotarian Donna Wallbank spearheads are the nation-wide youth competitions such as Young Writer, Young Chef, Young Musician and Young Citizen. These competitions, over the years, have become very high profile as you can see from the two videos below.
Rotary Young Citizen Awards (RIBI)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26919134
Rotary Young Citizen Awards (RIBI)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-26958207
Don’t miss the opportunity to meet PDG Donna in person on 26th April and to find out more about youth programs in the UK.
The link is provided at the end of this meeting.
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WEAR YOUR SEATBELT!
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"THIS CLOSE" - We are ...
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HERE'S AN IDEA THAT HAS BEEN SHARED BEFORE -
...but what a BRIGHT IDEA!
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SPEAKER - RON MCCALLUM - How Technology allowed me to read
Blind almost since birth, Ron McCallum is one of Australia's most respected legal scholars, and an activist on behalf of disabled people around the globe.
Ron McCallum AO is one of Australia's most respected industrial and discrimination lawyers and a prominent human rights advocate. With a long career as a legal academic and teacher, in 1993 he became the first totally blind person appointed to a full professorship at any Australian university when he became Professor in Industrial Law at the University of Sydney. He served as Dean of the University of Sydney Law School for five years and is now an emeritus professor. McCallum is a leading light in the disabled community, working for equality among all Australians. He is also chair of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
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ROYCE ABBEY - RI PRESIDENT - 1988-89
This video was posted on the REF Lounge and ECafe recently by Philip Merritt.
PRIP Royce Abbey died this year in February.
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WASRAG - RON DENHAM
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TRAVEL TIPS - VERY INTERESTING
And here is a similar video - maybe a little more animated! Still extremely useful!
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NEVER GIVE UP
Eden Grace - Don't Give Up from Michelle Nagle on Vimeo.
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WHY POLIO? - from The Rotarian magazine
In the pages of the magazine, he read that smallpox had been eradicated for a little more than the cost of the two Australian naval vessels he’d seen the day before.
He’d just been in Manila formalizing agreements to launch the first project under The Rotary Foundation’s Health, Hunger and Humanity (3-H) Grants program, and now Renouf was wondering if these new grants could enable Rotary to tackle another disease with similar success. He called his friend John Sever.
Sever was a district governor in the Washington, D.C., area and head of the infectious diseases branch of the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Diseases and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Renouf had met him six months prior, when Sever had arranged for him to speak with contacts in the State Department before his first major trip as Rotary president, to West Africa. “I didn’t expect a doctor to be so businesslike, but he changed that misconception,” Renouf says. “So when I had this bright idea, it was natural I’d seek John’s advice.”
As a researcher, Sever was immersed in studies of infectious diseases that affect children, such as measles, and vaccine development. His professional goal was to identify new causes of disease and bring vaccines to the children of the world. He was keenly aware that smallpox – a scourge especially rampant in developing countries – had just been eradicated, the first disease to be halted through a concerted public health effort.
Sever also was friends with Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, the men who had revolutionized public health with their development of the polio vaccines in the 1950s and ’60s. The vaccines already were stopping polio in the developed world; the United States would see its last case of endemic polio later in 1979. Sever recognized that Sabin’s oral vaccine, available for only 4 cents per dose, had the potential to save more than 350,000 children every year from the crippling disease all over the world, if only someone could organize the effort.
“The oral vaccine had the potential to save more than 350,000 children every year all over the world.”
After Renouf’s phone call inquiring about which diseases to target, Sever consulted with Sabin. A few weeks later, he mailed Renouf a letter with his recommendation: “If a single vaccine were to be selected for the 3-H program, I would recommend poliomyelitis.”
The 3-H program was in its infancy. It was the first time Rotary had committed to new projects beyond the capacity of any one club or district. While the first project, which began in September 1979, focused on bringing polio vaccine to children in the Philippines, the program as a whole was intended to improve health, relieve hunger, and enhance human and social development. Rotary had never had a single corporate cause of this kind.
“The important thing was to get the polio vaccine from the manufacturers to the people who needed it,” Sever recalls. “I knew that Rotarians were a big international army of volunteers. They could work with the governments of the world to assist with immunization and provide financial support and social mobilization.”
Renouf credits Sever, a member of the Rotary Club of Potomac, Md., for convincing Rotary’s leaders that the organization could tackle the disease. “Most would have dismissed it as an impossible dream, beyond our capacity financially or organizationally, as did many former leaders,” Renouf says. “But here was a Rotarian uniquely qualified – a senior scientist with an appreciation of Rotary’s potential, who by virtue of his reputation personally and professionally was able to persuade the 1979-80 Board to adopt the goal of a polio-free world as the major emphasis of the 3-H program.”
The son of a Chicago physician, Sever remembers his father caring for children with polio. At that time, he says, “you could buy polio insurance for your newborn.” He recalls Sundays in Chicago, when families would go to particular schools or other public facilities for vaccine clinics. “That was called Sabin on Sunday – SOS – the equivalent to what we now call National Immunization Days.”
Sever trained at Northwestern University as a pediatrician and earned a PhD in microbiology. At NIH and later at the Children’s National Medical Center, he worked as a scientist who also saw patients, a vaccine expert who understood social outreach, and a medical administrator who knew the politics of public health.
These skills would come into play over the next three decades as Sever, along with many other Rotarians, inspired and led the global health community in its dogged struggle against a crippling disease. When 1984-85 RI President Carlos Canseco took office, he appointed a committee to create a long-term strategy to immunize all the children of the world against polio by Rotary’s 100th anniversary. Sever served as chair of this Polio 2005 Committee, which developed the plan for Rotary to provide polio vaccine and support to any country that needed assistance. (In 1995, he was appointed to that group’s present incarnation, the International PolioPlus Committee, on which he has served as vice chair of medical affairs since 2006.) Along with Canseco and Sever, Sabin and Herbert Pigman, then RI general secretary, were members of the Polio 2005 Committee. “It was these four men, I believe, who were primarily responsible for translating a dream into reality, ” Renouf has said.
In his role, Sever became Rotary’s point man on the polio project and spokesman to the outside world. One of his first challenges was to create a partnership with the World Health Organization. Officials at the organization’s headquarters were skeptical, unsure that the Rotarians knew what they were up against, Sever says. “With Canseco, we had to hold a lot of cocktail hours with WHO members at the InterContinental Hotel in Geneva. They received us politely, but they didn’t think any nongovernmental organization could go the distance. ”
With Sever’s help, Rotary received a special designation as a nongovernmental organization affiliated with WHO and forged an official partnership with the agency. That partnership, now known as the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, includes the spearheading partners WHO, Rotary International, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and UNICEF. Other important sources of support include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and national governments. One of the group’s recent accomplishments was working with the government of India to make the country polio-free. In 2012, when WHO presented the Indian prime minister with a letter recognizing this achievement, he thanked Rotary and the other partners. “I was ecstatic,” Sever says.
Sever is a clear and direct spokesman, as befits a dedicated scientist, but he’s also modest. When he receives praise for his vision and years of nonstop work on behalf of polio eradication, he waves it away like a village health worker swatting at flies. “It wasn’t just me, ” he insists. “Many, many others were involved.”
After 47 years at NIH and the Children’s National Medical Center, Sever works part time at the National Cancer Institute. Today, at an energetic 81, he continues to travel the world for the campaign he inspired 34 years ago, now 99 percent complete. “This last little piece is the hardest part, ” he says.
Sever’s dual role as a Rotarian and respected scientist has proved “invaluable” to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, says Hamid Jafari, the campaign’s director at WHO. “He’s a bridge between the world of science and the technical areas of public health that WHO and CDC scientists deal with, and the world of Rotary. Rotarians look up to him for validation of the science, of the technical strategies, of the research we have. So his word is important. ”
When the campaign switched from the trivalent vaccine to the monovalent and bivalent versions to concentrate on the remaining types of poliovirus, Sever was among those who helped build confidence in that strategy. “John was right there,” Jafari says. “He understood the science, he understood the value of the change, and he was right there championing this as a strategic shift in the program.”
This past spring, Sever took part in several press conferences to announce the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s 2013-18 strategic plan. The plan lays out a blueprint for eradication in the last three polio-endemic countries – Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan – and certification of a polio-free world by 2018.
“It was important to have him there because he first spoke to the fundraising and advocacy strategy, the feasibility of financing this plan upfront, and then he spoke to the technical rigor and scientific basis of the document,” Jafari says. “You have one person who is speaking on both aspects. To have that facility, when you have the New York Times or Washington Post or other important press persons in the room, was helpful.”
Health ministers at the World Health Assembly in 2012 raised the polio eradication campaign to “emergency ” status, an official designation meant to drive the political will to get necessary funding. Television and print campaigns such as the End Polio Now “This Close” ads, featuring notable figures like Bill Gates and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, also raise public consciousness and support.
The final push will be costly: $5.5 billion, which will come from a combination of donations, NGO contributions, and funds from national governments. The money will fund not only the interruption of wild poliovirus transmission but also the intensive three-year surveillance period after the last case is reported, necessary for the world to be certified polio-free.
“With the end in sight, now is the time to bear down.”
With the end in sight, now is the time to bear down, Sever says. “Rotarians get fatigued. The governments in countries that now have very little polio get fatigued. They sometimes say, ‘Why don’t you help with measles or parasites or something else?’ Even if we sometimes merge polio immunization with these other efforts, we’re here to eradicate polio. We’re not here to switch to another program. Now is the time to stay focused. ”
“The polio eradication program is where it is today,” Renouf says, “because of the contribution of some remarkable people – none more so than John. At a crucial time, he had the knowledge and experience and ability to breathe life into a nebulous idea and provide the leadership needed to reach a historic goal. I just hope he is on stage when that announcement is made, to receive the recognition he deserves.” – Peter Ross Range (additional reporting by Diana Schoberg)
...from http://therotarianmagazine.com/why-polio-the-story-behind-rotarys-determination-to-end-a-cruel-disease/
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A LITTLE HUMOUR - A CLASSIC APRIL FOOL'S JOKE
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TO END OUR MEETING
To end our meeting, please recite aloud (on your honour!) the Rotary Four-Way Test of the things we think, say, or do.
Our Vice-president, Paul, leads us.
1. Is it the TRUTH?
2. Is it FAIR to all concerned?
3. Will it BUILD GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
4. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
...and official close of meeting
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Thank you for stopping by our E-club meeting! We wish you well in the next week in all that you do for Rotary!
The meeting has now come to an end. Please do have a safe and happy week! If you have enjoyed our E-club meeting, please leave a comment below.
Rotary cheers!
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Visiting Rotarians. Click this link to Apply for a Make-up. We will send you and your club secretary a make-up confirmation.
Please consider a donation to our Club. Just as any Rotarian visiting a Rotary Club would be expected to make a donation, we hope you will consider a donation to our Rotary E-Club of the Caribbean, 7020. Please click the button below:
Active Members. Click to indicate your Attendance.
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HAPPY HOUR HANGOUT - Saturday morning, April 26
Our guest speaker on April 26 will be Donna Wallbank who heads up all the Youth Programs for Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland (RIBI).
This is a recurring meeting so the link will be the same for every Saturday morning.
Some of the initiatives which Rotarian Donna Wallbank spearheads are the nation-wide youth competitions such as Young Writer, Young Chef, Young Musician and Young Citizen. These competitions, over the years, have become very high profile as you can see from the two videos below.
Rotary Young Citizen Awards (RIBI)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26919134
Rotary Young Citizen Awards (RIBI)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-26958207
Don’t miss the opportunity to meet PDG Donna in person on 26th April and to find out more about youth programs in the UK.
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