A Busy Rotary Month - not half!

Somewhat behind the times!  Have been very lax - keep updating Twitter but blogless for more than a month!  What's been up?

Well 28 May went and heard RC Newbury's Club Assembly - great bunch of people - also went to their 60th anniversary dinner in June (16th), complete with a founder member (someone who was there when they started in 1952!!).
29th May - Conference Committee for 2014 District Conference Inaugural meeting
30th May RC Elthorne Hillingdon President's Night at Northwood Golf Club.
2nd June - Club (RC Elthorne Hillingdon stall at Northwood & Northwood Hills Residents Associations Diamond Jubilee Fair - unprepossessing weather to start with but cheered up and we met lots of nice people and sold £500 of our Meal for Two tickets (for two local charities)
9th June - down to Upton-on-Severn to see Pepperpot Players in Joan Greening's (my clever wife!)The Continental Quilt - I was in the World Premiere in 1981!
11th June had to stand in as speaker at a combined clubs meeting in place of poorly Rotary in Britain & Ireland President Ray Burman - and no one threw anything - some even said they'd enjoyed it!
12th June - RC Sinodun Assembly - best turnout I've ever seen - more than 90% of membership
13th June - Off to Number 23 in my Be Better Known campaign - RC Faringdon
19th-20th June we were at The Compass Theatre, Ickenham for two charity performances of Madame Blavatsky Lives (written & directed by Joan Greening -2011) presented by RC Elthorne-Hillingdon - terrific audiences, brilliant cast and £3,500 raised for Kamuli Mission Hospital in Uganda.
23rd June at the Ickenham Festival Gala Day - great turnout - not much rain - super sales of Meal for Two and draw for the 22 lucky winners!!

Will try and keep up to date better!!

A message from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

I make no apology for quoting the full text of an article by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on how vital is for the world to complete the task of eradicating Polio.  In it he praises the work of Rotary - help us to help free the world!

"Wipe Out Polio, Now -- By Ban Ki-moon

Wild viruses and wildfires have two things in common. If neglected, they can spread out of control. If handled properly, they can be stamped out for good. Today, the flame of polio is near extinction — but sparks in three countries threaten to ignite a global blaze. Now is the moment to act.

During the next two weeks, on two continents, two events offer the chance for a breakthrough. First, the leaders of the world’s largest economies — the G8 — congregate at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David in rural Maryland. A week later, the world’s ministers of health convene in Geneva. Together, they can push to deliver on an epic promise: to liberate humankind from one of the world’s most deadly and debilitating diseases. 

The world’s war on polio, declared nearly a quarter of a century ago, was as ambitious an undertaking as the successful campaign to eradicate another great public health menace, smallpox. Slowly but surely, over the years, we have advanced on that goal. Polio today survives in only three countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. That’s the good news. The bad: we are in danger of falling victim to our own success.

Here’s why: the world is now populated by a generation which has either never been exposed to polio or has been inadequately vaccinated. When the virus strikes under those conditions, the impact can be devastating. We saw that in the Republic of the Congo in 2010 and elsewhere in Africa when an outbreak killed half of all who were infected. A prompt emergency response by the international community halted that budding epidemic. But the incident gives an idea of the potential consequences of failing to eradicate polio while we have the chance. This year fewer than one hundred people were left paralyzed by this easily preventable disease, almost all in the three countries I have mentioned. Left unchecked, however, UN epidemiologists warn that a renewed outbreak could cripple as many as one million people within the decade, many of them children — the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.

This threat keeps me up at night because I know how easy it is to address. My wife and I have personally immunized toddlers in Asia and Africa, joining tens of millions of government workers, Rotarians, volunteers, political and religious leaders (not to mention parents) who have worked for decades to ensure that every child is protected.  Most recently, we visited India, which just two years ago was home to half of all the world’s children with polio. Now, thanks to a concerted drive, we were able to celebrate India’s first polio-free year in history. 

Similar efforts are under way in the three remaining polio-endemic countries. President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria, Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani of Pakistan and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan each personally oversee their national response. Nigeria has committed funds from its own treasury, and polio eradication in all three countries depends heavily on government resources. But that in itself is not enough. With a determined push, the international community can wipe out polio once and for all. To do so, however, it must organize — and commit the required financial resources.

The United Nations, with its partner Rotary International, is driving the global campaign. Our agencies are working hard to reach all children, including those in refugee camps or swept up by natural disasters and hunger emergencies. It may be difficult but it can be done. Somalia, to name but one example, is afflicted by just about every human and natural hardship known to humankind — but not polio. Its last case was in 2007, thanks in no small part to local women who donned bright yellow smocks and traveled their communities distributing vaccination drops.

The workers on the frontlines have no shortage of dedication. But they do face a financial deficit. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative has only half of the $2 billion it needs to procure vaccines and deploy staff to the last bastions of the disease.  Properly equipped, they can win this final battle. If the international community recognizes the stakes and musters the resources, we can win the war against polio — at long last and forever.

Now is the critical moment. If we invest $2 billion now — if we can cover a relatively modest $1 billion shortfall — we can save the world an estimated  $40-50 billion in the cost of treatment by 2035, not to mention many lives and many young futures. When the world’s health ministers gather in Geneva later this month, they will declare a global public health emergency and call on the world to response to the threat of a resurgent polio. As the G8 leaders meet at Camp David, they should be aware of what is coming — and recognize this great opportunity to act in the name of the world’s people.

Those meetings will soon be followed by others: the annual gathering of the G20 in Mexico, the Rio+20 conference in Brazil and the European Union summit in Belgium.  I hope polio will be on the agenda.  I appeal to all leaders, everywhere, to act now to protect future generations. By funding the Global Polio Emergency Action Plan for the next two years, we can make the threat of polio a distant and fading memory.

Ban Ki-moon is Secretary-General of the United Nations.

After the Convention

After the intensity of the convention we needed to get away for a few days to unwind – we needed a little oasis of calm and serenity, not to mention somewhere to catch up on some much-needed sleep!  We found it a two hour drive away (not driven by us I hasten to add!) in Hua Hin, at the Centara Grand resort.  

Originally built as the Railway Hotel in 1924 in a resort popularised by the King, the Centara Grand retains the colonial feel (although Thailand has never been colonised, Britain has been a favourite example since the days of King Rama V (famous as the King in The King & I)), lofty and airy corridors, space, gardens (with exotic topiary!), pools and beach.

We ventured out occasionally for a little light shopping & eating, including small elephant souvenirs and a couple of jackets tailored in 48 hours, but other than that we just enjoyed the peace & quiet.   

Apart, of course, from our visit to a Rotary Club!  At the convention we met some Rotarians from Hua Hin and discovered that there are two clubs in Hua Hin, one older established & Thai-speaking and one, meeting in the next door hotel, that is two years old & English-speaking and having their Presidential Inauguration for the 2012-2013 Rotary year on the Saturday night of our stay, the Rotary Club of Royal Hua Hin.  And so we spent the evening in the company of the mainly expatriate members and their other halves, the incoming District Governor and his “Special Representative” (no idea what that is), several Presidents of neighbouring clubs and visiting Rotarians from Hawaii, Nepal and St Petersburg.  Great fun and good to see a new club doing great Rotary service with the local schools.

Convention Final Day

On Day 1, there were tens of thousands of us in the main Convention Hall.  Probably set up to seat 25,000 people it was clear that barely a couple of thousand made it to the first plenary session of the day.  Anyone one tells you this wasn’t achieved without self-sacrifice is being economical with the truth.  Up at 6:45 every day, on the road by 8:00 – and this is supposed to be a holiday?  Fortunately for those of us who did make the effort, it was rewarding.

Surprisingly, for those of us who have been less than enthusiastic about Conference business sessions in the past, the elections and voting held some interest.  Interest from two perspectives – the general and the personal. General from the viewpoint of the number of clubs represented being around 11% of our worldwide chartered clubs, just a little more than the 10% needed for a quorum – found this interesting in the context of the recent RIBI conference where almost 40% of clubs were represented and also in the response rates for both the RIBI quinquennial review (just over 10%) and our own District Conference survey (13%).  Personal from the aspect that, having participated in the official election of RI President-Nominee Ron Burton, who will be RI Presidemt when I am District Governor, I then found myself voting in the election of all the RI Officers for 2013-2014 – yes dear readers, I voted for myself – now that’s a first!

President Nominee Ron gave a thoughtful speech with passion for the things at the core of Rotary for the future, implementation of the Strategy and support for The Rotary Foundation.

Wilf Wilkinson, past RI President and incoming chair of the Rotary Foundation set out his key hopes for the coming Rotary year – his ambition for Polio "interruption" in 2012-13 (I think he meant significant progress in Pakistan, Afghanistan & Nigeria and no recurrence in re-infected countries) – good planning for the introduction of Future Vision, support for incoming RI President Sakuji Tanaka’s theme of Peace Through Service, and increasing the sum raised through the Every Rotarian Every Year programme (individual $100 donations) to $US 120 million)

John Hewko, RI’s General Secretary/CEO took us through his vision of how the Secretariat will support the Strategy by:

a) making sure we get our due share of the credit for the Eradication of Polio,

b) implementing the Strategic Plan and making Future Vision a reality,

c) defining our Value Of Service collectively – in financial terms, in man-hours to better show the total contribution we make to society,

d) to make Membership more appealing & relevant to younger people,

e) significantly improving our Global Impact & Recognition

He said that Vision, Intelligent Planning & Hard Work are needed to meet the challenges of our second century but that he didn’t doubt that Rotarians had the collective tenacity to do so.

In a breakout session specifically for District Governors for 2013-2104, RI President-Nominee Ron Burton & his wife Jetta talked to the 100 or so of us.   

He gave us his views on what our priorities needed to be for our collective year:

a)      Make sure that the need for membership is institutionalised in our clubs-we should each  sponsor a new member during the year personally and get each of our Presidents to do the same

b)      Make a personal contribution to Foundation, make the class of 2013-14 the first class of District Governors to do so and get each of our President to do the same

Our job is to inspire others!  He also promised us several times “ You’re gonna lurrve the theme”.

Day 3 at the RI Convention 2012

Early on we took our regular trek out to IMPACT Muang Thiong Thani without incident (which when you look at Bangkok’s traffic never ceases to amaze me).  Day 3 was essentially Foundation day and following the report that we had indeed managed to achieve a quorum of voting delegates for the proceedings on Day 4 (10% of clubs present) it was over to out-going chair of The Rotary Foundation, Bill Boyd to oversee proceedings.   

Bill chose as his theme “What a difference a day makes” and took us through a selection of days during his visit to Foundation grant projects throughout the world. He talked about how a simple thing like the availability of clean water can enable families to have the time to build businesses using microcredit & have healthy lives, healthy children and prosper more.  He spoke also of the importance of inclusivity – for a water project in Cameroon where Foundation funds helped provide three water tanks for a village - for a variety of reasons the tanks were 2.5 km from the village and the villagers were asked to contribute their labour to dig a trench to pipe the water in - 4,000 of them turned up – instantly local ownership was established!

Amanda Martin is a Rotary Peace Fellow alumna from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. She currently works as Displaced Persons Public Health Curriculum development coordinator in the Global Health Access Program at Community Partners International in a refugee camp on the Thai/Burmese border. Amanda’s career focus is the protection of human rights in developing countries. Prior to taking her position with Community Partners International, she supported human rights in Burma for ALTSEAN-Burma, a network of organizations and individuals based in ASEAN member states working to support the movement for human rights and democracy. She has also worked as director of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission.  While I’m sure that her heart is in the right place I did have to wonder at the wisdom of some of the things she told us of.  I’m not sure that telling refugees in the camp that they don’t get the basic rights of refugees because Thailand hasn’t signed up to the 1951 treaty on refugees is entirely likely to maintain peace! 

Major Polio Plus donor Rajashree Birla spoke next.  Mrs Birla serves as a director on the boards of all of the businesses that make up the Aditya Birla Group (ABG), a Fortune 500 company that is one of Asia’s most diversified conglomerates. ABG produces aluminum, carbon black, cement, clothing, copper, palm oil, and other goods. Subsidiaries include a mobile phone company, an insurance firm, and a chain of supermarkets. In 1995, the Birla family established the Aditya Birla Foundation in memory of Birla’s husband, Aditya, one of India’s foremost industrialists and an active philanthropist. She is an honorary member of the Rotary Club of Bombay and received that club’s Citizen of Bombay Award in 2003. She is also an honorary member of the Rotary Club of Mulund, which recognized her with the Pride of India Award in 2004. The Birla family strongly supports the End Polio Now campaign and has generously contributed $US5.2 million to Rotary’s US$200 Million Challenge, including a donation of $US1 million at the Convention.

Undoubted the highlight of the morning, and probably of the whole Convention was Bruce Aylward from WHO.  Bruce addressed Convention in Montreal two years ago. Equally outstanding then he said “you have Polio on the run" and "Rotary's decision in 1985 challenged the world to change the course of history by eradicating this crippling disease. Rotary is the heart & soul of the largest global health effort in history".  Today he told us that “we now have the lowest number of polio infected countries, the lowest number of polio cases in history”.  He went on “A polio free India, which was said to be impossible, is a magnificent achievement - it is Rotary's achievement. When India was declared polio-free, India's Prime Minister said thank you, not to WHO, not to UNICEF, not to US CDC but thanks to Rotary”.  He declared “there are now no technological barriers to eradication, only political & social barriers and these are the areas where Rotary can excel”.  Type 2 polio is now history, Type 3 is now limited to only two countries in the past 10 months.  But the need for action to complete the task is now critical, is now an emergency - recent cases have highlighted the pressing need.  In recent times it is adults now being infected and 50% died in last year’s outbreak in Tajikistan.  “We must be faster - more focused - faster in finding the missed children and why they were missed”.

Stirring stuff!  

We then had Bill Gates on pre-recorded video, reminding us that the additional US$50million given in January was to encourage further fundraising – we aren’t done yet!  Echoing Bruce Aylward’s words he said “Raise your voices even louder to mobilise others to be as committed to end Polio as you are”.  He urged us to galvanise our politicians to take the steps needed, to declare an emergency at the upcoming World Health Summit and to support it with funds.

Finally, to round the morning off, John Germ, Rotary’s US$200 Million Challenge Committee Chair gave us an update on what the Challenge has raised to date – more than $US215 million and still 6 weeks to go.  He said “There are people in the room who haven't been vaccinated against Smallpox because they were born after it was eradicated. Let's get to the same point with Polio”.  He noted that Rotary has raised (with Gates) US $2 billion US towards eradication, but we have to keep going, we’re not done yet.

In the afternoon we attended a breakout session on Best Practices for Membership Growth.  Including RIBI President Ray on the panel, the session reminded us of some fairly basic things that we need to keep doing and some useful pointers to work on, including some very useful stuff on generating a new club of younger professionals.

Another tedious journey back to our hotel took us over two hours from the end of the breakout session to our arrival.   

However the evening was outstanding – I mean you can’t come to Bangkok and not go to the Calypso Cabaret (the LadyBoys of Bangkok).  Judge for yourself from the pictures!!

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.