Second Day at the Rotary International Convention in Bangkok

For anyone who hasn’t been to a Rotary International Convention, the first day (Sunday) is where we get the formalities over and check out the House of Friendship – it’s Day 2 when we get into the real stuff.  So we made our daily trek out to the Convention Centre in good time.   

Our first speaker was Hugh Evans, founder of the Global Poverty Project, who looks frighteningly young for one who has achieved so much. His social entrepreneurial spirit was brought to life during a stay in the Philippines when he was 14. He lived with his host family in a tent in a Manila slum built on a garbage dump.  This experience, as well as the year he spent in India when he was 15, enabled him to see opportunities to help improve the lives of the world’s poor. In 2002, he established the Oaktree Foundation, Australia’s first youth-run aid organization, dedicated to bringing young people together to help end global poverty. Since 2003, development projects funded by Oaktree have been established in the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, India, Ghana, and Timor-Leste, providing educational opportunities to more than 40,000 young people. His next endeavour was the Make Poverty History campaign, which included illuminating the sails of the Sydney Opera House for several days with faces of poverty, and a globally broadcast concert featuring U2’s Bono.  A captivating speaker and big fan of Rotary - "A conviction that 1.2 million people can work together to change the world - that's Rotary", Hugh provided a terrific start to the day.

He was followed by Benin-born, Angelique Kidjo, a Grammy Award- winning singer-songwriter and activist who was named a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2002. In addition to her work with UNICEF she has partnered with groups including Oxfam, the International Federation of Human Rights, and Amnesty International, in campaigns promoting peace, clean water, AIDS/HIV awareness, and human rights. In 2006, she founded the Batonga Foundation, which gives girls access to secondary school and higher education so they may take lead roles in changing Africa.  Angelique had us singing along to one of her compositions.

Indian motivational speaker Shiv Khera followed.  Based in the US, he runs motivational & leadership courses.  Of the many homilies & bon mots he treated us to, (each repeated slowly several times!) my favourite was “Confidence without humility equals arrogance” – how often have we seen that?

 

Nobel Prize-winner Dr Mohammed Yunus, universally known as the father of microcredit through the Grameen bank in Bangladesh was next.  In 1976, during visits to very poor households in Jobra, a village near Dhaka University, Yunus discovered that very small loans could make an enormous difference. Bamboo furniture is made by women in the village of Jobra. To obtain bamboo to produce furniture, women were forced to take loans at usurious rates from moneylenders. The majority, if not all, of the profits derived from their efforts were owed to pay back the loans provided by the moneylenders. Shocked by this reality, he lent the equivalent of US$27 from his own pocket to 42 people in the village to help them pay back their loans. As of May 2009, Grameen Bank had 7.5 million borrowers, 97 percent of whom are women. With 2,554 branches, the bank provides services in 84,237 villages, more than 97 percent of all villages in Bangladesh, and had lent over $7 billion to poor people, with nearly 100 percent repayment rate.  Dr Yunus also spoke of his ideas of social business, where small businesses are encouraged in partnership with a more affluent entrepreneur  – have to say that this idea didn’t resonate with me – mind you I might have thought the same about microcredit when it was first launched, so what do I know?

All this was in the morning session!  In the afternoon we went to a breakout on social media.  Despite being a user of Facebook & Twitter I feel I need to know more about how these and other social media developments can help Rotary relate better to the world of the younger people we would like to attract as members.  The session did not disappoint.

To date the journeys hadn’t been too bad.  However, this turned out to be the exception.  For reasons best known to themselves the organisers, having finished the afternoon sessions at 4p.m, elected to not have the coaches going back to the hotels until 6 p.m. 

It’s reasonable to say that chaos ensued in the queues for the shuttles going to the coaches that were going to the Skytrain terminus!

Big treat of the evening was drinks at Lebua.  A bar on the 64^th floor of State Tower, it has outside seating with magnificent views of the city of Bangkok, home to 12 million people (roughly the same size as London).  

Inevitably we found ourselves with fellow Rotarians, from Germany, Solingen to be precise, the steel capital of the area.  We were presented with a most impressive knife (not to be paced in hand luggage! Dinner at Mesamis café at Grand Central hotel across from the Marriott rounded off the day nicely.