It was a Rotary Information Meeting and Steve du Plessis showed a couple of videos off the RI website. We don't have any photos of the meeting because I forgot to take any (a common problem) so instead I will concentrate on some Rotary International stories:
SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENT REFLECTS ON HIS JOURNEY TO ROTARY
My father moved us from Vietnam when I was a child to provide us with more than what we’d had under the communist regime. We ended up in a ghetto in Oakland, California, USA. I went to Fremont High School, one of the worst schools in a neighborhood plagued by violence, poverty, and high dropout rates.
Our house was on a busy street, and every night we heard gunshots.
The spring of my junior year, a group of Rotarians visited my class. They told us about the Rotary Club of Oakland’s Enterprise Institute, a three-day camp that allows students to develop and test their business skills. Spending time in the Santa Cruz Mountains, creating a business plan with my peers, didn’t appeal to me so much as escaping the projects for a few days. In my world, the only businesses I saw were funeral homes, liquor stores, and drug dealers.
The Enterprise Institute exposed me to a new reality. I met teenagers who talked about Plato and Shakespeare, not drive-by shootings and AK-47s. It was at camp that I heard the word “entrepreneur”for the first time. Surrounded by high school students from schools that were far superior to my own, I learned just how little I knew. As we considered case studies and came up with our own business plans, I also saw a future that didn’t involve assault rifles and prison cells. These kids talked about going to college and starting their own companies, and I realized I wanted the same things. Coming from the streets, I knew I was at a disadvantage and would have to work even harder to achieve the same goals. That was one of the most important lessons I took away from the Enterprise Institute–not a business outline, but a sense of ambition and self-motivation.
My father moved us from Vietnam when I was a child to provide us with more than what we’d had under the communist regime. We ended up in a ghetto in Oakland, California, USA. I went to Fremont High School, one of the worst schools in a neighborhood plagued by violence, poverty, and high dropout rates.
Our house was on a busy street, and every night we heard gunshots.
The spring of my junior year, a group of Rotarians visited my class. They told us about the Rotary Club of Oakland’s Enterprise Institute, a three-day camp that allows students to develop and test their business skills. Spending time in the Santa Cruz Mountains, creating a business plan with my peers, didn’t appeal to me so much as escaping the projects for a few days. In my world, the only businesses I saw were funeral homes, liquor stores, and drug dealers.
The Enterprise Institute exposed me to a new reality. I met teenagers who talked about Plato and Shakespeare, not drive-by shootings and AK-47s. It was at camp that I heard the word “entrepreneur”for the first time. Surrounded by high school students from schools that were far superior to my own, I learned just how little I knew. As we considered case studies and came up with our own business plans, I also saw a future that didn’t involve assault rifles and prison cells. These kids talked about going to college and starting their own companies, and I realized I wanted the same things. Coming from the streets, I knew I was at a disadvantage and would have to work even harder to achieve the same goals. That was one of the most important lessons I took away from the Enterprise Institute–not a business outline, but a sense of ambition and self-motivation.
LANDING ON FIRM GROUND
We didn’t have much money, so I applied for every college scholarship I could. I filled out 20 applications and received 19 rejections because I was not a U.S. citizen. Only one scholarship program accepted me: the Rotary Club of Oakland’s. The Rotarians met with me and my family and listened to what I had been through and where I wanted to go. I know they had many applicants, and when they awarded me the $5,000 scholarship, it proved they believed in me. The scholarship, along with financial
aid, allowed me to go to college.
At the University of California, Davis, I used the scholarship money to pay for rent and books. The first three years I was in school, the scholarship meant that
I didn’t have to work and could concentrate solely on studying. Whenever I would talk to my Oakland club counselor, Terry Turner, he would always ask how I
was doing, and I would tell him truthfully that I was struggling. Fremont High School had not prepared me for UC Davis. Terry offered me advice, and I listened to it. I started at Davis at the same time as three other Fremont High School graduates. By my second semester, I was the only one left. The Enterprise Institute
had jump-started my future. The Rotary scholarship kept it in motion.
I spent several years working for a series of small companies before striking out on my own with Novateck PC in 2004. As soon as I opened my business, I joined the Oakland club. Its members became some of my first clients. Novateck has grown since then and now has three employees. My family has also grown; I now have a wife and two young daughters.
Last year I took my wife and oldest daughter to Vietnam. The little fishing village I left as a child 30 years ago is now a bustling metropolis. My childhood home in Oakland has also morphed into something else; the basketball court where I used to play has been replaced with apartment complexes. The Rotary Club of Oakland’s Enterprise Institute is one of the things that remain unchanged. Now in its 30th year, the institute continues to take dozens of high school juniors to the mountains and teach them how to make their own future in the business world. I have helped with the institute for the last seven years and am now co-chair of the committee that runs the whole thing. I know that the camp experience will help other teenagers change their way of thinking and give them hope for a better future. That’s what it did for me.
I found my cell phone!
Rotary Humanitarian Centre
Jenine Coetzer and Gregor Heidemann stood in at the Humanitarian Centre last Saturday. They took a couple of pictures:
Whose rubbish bins are these? Are they emptied?
This Week
It's a Business Meeting with more about PBO Status progress, the Cycle Tour, Hotel Hope and most important of all, the Golf Day Next Week!
We didn’t have much money, so I applied for every college scholarship I could. I filled out 20 applications and received 19 rejections because I was not a U.S. citizen. Only one scholarship program accepted me: the Rotary Club of Oakland’s. The Rotarians met with me and my family and listened to what I had been through and where I wanted to go. I know they had many applicants, and when they awarded me the $5,000 scholarship, it proved they believed in me. The scholarship, along with financial
aid, allowed me to go to college.
At the University of California, Davis, I used the scholarship money to pay for rent and books. The first three years I was in school, the scholarship meant that
I didn’t have to work and could concentrate solely on studying. Whenever I would talk to my Oakland club counselor, Terry Turner, he would always ask how I
was doing, and I would tell him truthfully that I was struggling. Fremont High School had not prepared me for UC Davis. Terry offered me advice, and I listened to it. I started at Davis at the same time as three other Fremont High School graduates. By my second semester, I was the only one left. The Enterprise Institute
had jump-started my future. The Rotary scholarship kept it in motion.
I spent several years working for a series of small companies before striking out on my own with Novateck PC in 2004. As soon as I opened my business, I joined the Oakland club. Its members became some of my first clients. Novateck has grown since then and now has three employees. My family has also grown; I now have a wife and two young daughters.
Last year I took my wife and oldest daughter to Vietnam. The little fishing village I left as a child 30 years ago is now a bustling metropolis. My childhood home in Oakland has also morphed into something else; the basketball court where I used to play has been replaced with apartment complexes. The Rotary Club of Oakland’s Enterprise Institute is one of the things that remain unchanged. Now in its 30th year, the institute continues to take dozens of high school juniors to the mountains and teach them how to make their own future in the business world. I have helped with the institute for the last seven years and am now co-chair of the committee that runs the whole thing. I know that the camp experience will help other teenagers change their way of thinking and give them hope for a better future. That’s what it did for me.
 |
| I found my cell phone! |
Rotary Humanitarian Centre
Jenine Coetzer and Gregor Heidemann stood in at the Humanitarian Centre last Saturday. They took a couple of pictures:
 |
| Whose rubbish bins are these? Are they emptied?
This Week
It's a Business Meeting with more about PBO Status progress, the Cycle Tour, Hotel Hope and most important of all, the Golf Day Next Week!
|
PARTNERING WITH MERCY SHIPS TO FIGHT DISEASE IN GUINEA
A team of health professionals is touring Donka hospital in Conakry, Guinea, in March when they spot more than a dozen large, greenish masses covering the ground. To the U.S. team members, they look like an art installation; in fact, they are hospital gowns and surgical drapes, laundered and spread out to dry. They are a vivid example of the group’s objective: to lower deadly infection rates caused by unsterile procedures.
This Rotary Foundation vocational training team is the first to serve under Rotary’s partnership with the nonprofit Mercy Ships. Rotary District 7690 in North Carolina, USA, sponsored the team with a packaged grant, part of the new Rotary grant model that launched worldwide 1 July. The team’s five members will train Guinean health professionals at the two national hospitals.
The Africa Mercy, a 500-foot oceangoing hospital ship, is docked in Conakry for a 10-month medical mission. The Mercy Ships staff and visiting experts, such as this team, will tackle a range of tasks, including setting up medical and dental clinics, conducting health screenings, performing surgeries on board, and conducting health care outreach throughout the country. The ship also will serve as a steel-hulled security blanket.
“Mercy Ships looks for ways to continue helping local medical professionals after the ship leaves port, ” says Michelle Bullington, who helped advise the team. “Improving sterilization techniques would have a sustainable impact.”
Rick Snider, former governor of District 7690, worked on a Mercy Ships vessel for five years with his wife, Linda, and coordinated the Guinea project. He recruited assistant governor Jenny Braswell as team leader. A recently retired public health official, Braswell has volunteered on numerous Rotary projects in rural Nicaragua and Jamaica. Her husband, Sherrill, a physician, became Braswell’s first recruit for the Guinea team. She handpicked the rest from among former public health colleagues in North Carolina.
In Guinea, the team’s work begins with a tour of the century-old Ignace Deen Hospital. Laundered gauze bandages droop over railings to dry in the sun for reuse. The well-worn examination tables have no sterile paper, and the medical units are nearly devoid of supplies and equipment such as autoclaves and medical waste boxes. Doctors and nurses provide their own rubber gloves and sterile masks and gowns. Germ-killing bleach is rare.
In the generally clean wards, the patients’ family members sleep under the beds; they are the main caretakers. Food is stored on the floor where it is accessible to vermin, and flies and mosquitoes glide freely through doorways kept open to contend with the heat.
The team also visits Donka hospital, where toilets are flushed with water from a pail, and power outages are common. “The staff members touch patients without gloves, going patient to patient without washing hands. There are unbandaged wounds, flies and roaches, open sewage right outside a patient facility and no sterile barriers, ” says Sherrill Braswell, adding an observation that he later repeats so often it sounds like a campaign slogan: “They are doing the best they can with what they have. ”
For a week, the team provides training in reducing infections, covering topics such as using surgical gloves, masks, and gowns; controlling rats and mosquitoes; disinfecting with bleach; tracking infectious diseases; and hand-washing.
“Fifty percent of hospital-associated infections could be prevented with hand-washing, ” Lyon says. Knowledge gaps soon become apparent. A serious misunderstanding exists about hand sanitizer: that it causes germs to stick to the hands. “It is important to clarify that hand sanitizer kills bacteria ” – particularly in a place where running water is unreliable, Jenny Braswell says. An exchange on wound care illuminates the need to treat wounds immediately to avoid infection instead of waiting until symptoms appear.
Donka’s director, Hadja Fatou Sikhé Camara, says her hospital wants to reduce infection, “but we lack the equipment and supplies. We are willing to do what you do, but as an undeveloped country, we lack the means. ”
When Sherrill Braswell presses for what is needed to reduce infections, the answer is lengthy: more autoclaves, antibiotics, vaccines, bed nets, and rubber gloves, in addition to computers for blood analysis and a water tower to maintain running water. Of six operating rooms, only the new maternity units have UVGI (ultraviolet germicidal irradiation), a standard sterilization method.
After decoding the health system and enduring the non-gridded power, the team accomplishes its objectives, at least according to pre- and post-tests that show significant learning. Positive results also are evident in the participants, who voice a new commitment to educating family caregivers.
Even small changes could have a big impact, the team says. “If they could get patients and caregivers to wash their hands, and if they would hang up the surgical drapes instead of drying them on the ground, significant improvement would result, ” Jenny Braswell observes.
But the lack of supplies and equipment cannot be ignored, she notes. Providing bars of soap would help, as would arranging for inexpensive solar-powered autoclaves for sterilizing surgical instruments.
Back home in North Carolina, the team is continuing its work by trying to acquire and deliver materials the hospitals need. “The hospital workers are able to do the job,” Braswell says. “But they need the supplies. ”
A team of health professionals is touring Donka hospital in Conakry, Guinea, in March when they spot more than a dozen large, greenish masses covering the ground. To the U.S. team members, they look like an art installation; in fact, they are hospital gowns and surgical drapes, laundered and spread out to dry. They are a vivid example of the group’s objective: to lower deadly infection rates caused by unsterile procedures.
This Rotary Foundation vocational training team is the first to serve under Rotary’s partnership with the nonprofit Mercy Ships. Rotary District 7690 in North Carolina, USA, sponsored the team with a packaged grant, part of the new Rotary grant model that launched worldwide 1 July. The team’s five members will train Guinean health professionals at the two national hospitals.
The Africa Mercy, a 500-foot oceangoing hospital ship, is docked in Conakry for a 10-month medical mission. The Mercy Ships staff and visiting experts, such as this team, will tackle a range of tasks, including setting up medical and dental clinics, conducting health screenings, performing surgeries on board, and conducting health care outreach throughout the country. The ship also will serve as a steel-hulled security blanket.
“Mercy Ships looks for ways to continue helping local medical professionals after the ship leaves port, ” says Michelle Bullington, who helped advise the team. “Improving sterilization techniques would have a sustainable impact.”
Rick Snider, former governor of District 7690, worked on a Mercy Ships vessel for five years with his wife, Linda, and coordinated the Guinea project. He recruited assistant governor Jenny Braswell as team leader. A recently retired public health official, Braswell has volunteered on numerous Rotary projects in rural Nicaragua and Jamaica. Her husband, Sherrill, a physician, became Braswell’s first recruit for the Guinea team. She handpicked the rest from among former public health colleagues in North Carolina.
In Guinea, the team’s work begins with a tour of the century-old Ignace Deen Hospital. Laundered gauze bandages droop over railings to dry in the sun for reuse. The well-worn examination tables have no sterile paper, and the medical units are nearly devoid of supplies and equipment such as autoclaves and medical waste boxes. Doctors and nurses provide their own rubber gloves and sterile masks and gowns. Germ-killing bleach is rare.
In the generally clean wards, the patients’ family members sleep under the beds; they are the main caretakers. Food is stored on the floor where it is accessible to vermin, and flies and mosquitoes glide freely through doorways kept open to contend with the heat.
The team also visits Donka hospital, where toilets are flushed with water from a pail, and power outages are common. “The staff members touch patients without gloves, going patient to patient without washing hands. There are unbandaged wounds, flies and roaches, open sewage right outside a patient facility and no sterile barriers, ” says Sherrill Braswell, adding an observation that he later repeats so often it sounds like a campaign slogan: “They are doing the best they can with what they have. ”
For a week, the team provides training in reducing infections, covering topics such as using surgical gloves, masks, and gowns; controlling rats and mosquitoes; disinfecting with bleach; tracking infectious diseases; and hand-washing.
“Fifty percent of hospital-associated infections could be prevented with hand-washing, ” Lyon says. Knowledge gaps soon become apparent. A serious misunderstanding exists about hand sanitizer: that it causes germs to stick to the hands. “It is important to clarify that hand sanitizer kills bacteria ” – particularly in a place where running water is unreliable, Jenny Braswell says. An exchange on wound care illuminates the need to treat wounds immediately to avoid infection instead of waiting until symptoms appear.
Donka’s director, Hadja Fatou Sikhé Camara, says her hospital wants to reduce infection, “but we lack the equipment and supplies. We are willing to do what you do, but as an undeveloped country, we lack the means. ”
When Sherrill Braswell presses for what is needed to reduce infections, the answer is lengthy: more autoclaves, antibiotics, vaccines, bed nets, and rubber gloves, in addition to computers for blood analysis and a water tower to maintain running water. Of six operating rooms, only the new maternity units have UVGI (ultraviolet germicidal irradiation), a standard sterilization method.
After decoding the health system and enduring the non-gridded power, the team accomplishes its objectives, at least according to pre- and post-tests that show significant learning. Positive results also are evident in the participants, who voice a new commitment to educating family caregivers.
Even small changes could have a big impact, the team says. “If they could get patients and caregivers to wash their hands, and if they would hang up the surgical drapes instead of drying them on the ground, significant improvement would result, ” Jenny Braswell observes.
But the lack of supplies and equipment cannot be ignored, she notes. Providing bars of soap would help, as would arranging for inexpensive solar-powered autoclaves for sterilizing surgical instruments.
Back home in North Carolina, the team is continuing its work by trying to acquire and deliver materials the hospitals need. “The hospital workers are able to do the job,” Braswell says. “But they need the supplies. ”
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