In the past few meetings we have roamed the world from Dubai to Durban, from desert to dance and all the time with one eye firmly on our date with the Golf Day on 21 October at Parkview Golf Club.
Dubai is where Hannes Dressler and his family now find themselves after leaving South Africa in a hurry in May when they found out their daughter had to start school much earlier than they thought she would have to.
Hannes says this meant he has had to do about six trips to South Africa and back during the past few months to pack up and wrap up their South African sojourn, all the while holding a very senior job with the software company SAP.
Hannes and Katya and their two children have now settled in the United Arab Emirates and life is slowly returning to normal, he said in his online talk.
They enjoy the sense of personal safety, security and freedom in their new home city, he said. It is a country with very strict laws and a resultant very low crime rate.
Another thing they don't miss is load shedding and water supply interruptions in a city where water is plentiful due to desalination of sea water and where water, electricity and food prices have remained stable for the past 15 years.
They do miss the more relaxed atmosphere of Johannesburg "because not everything is perfect there" and the bush compared with an extremely cosmopolitan city where only about 10 - 15% of the population are native to the UAE, the rest being made up of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis as well as people from all over the rest of the world.
"Dubai is very hectic, but everything works," he pointed out.
This includes the sewerage "system" of Burj Khalifa, where he works. The tallest building in the world went up so quickly that there was no time to include a sewerage system before the building deadline, so this is now removed by scores of trucks every day.
Joseph Tebandeka attended the meeting with Mark Hawkins, a freelance dancer with Sabiqwa and who has a professional dance company called Afrofusion. With the assistance of Joseph, who hails from Uganda, they performed in the inaugural Body Moves Festival in Johannesburg this past week.
They were at the meeting as guests of Brenda Sakellarides of the National School of the Arts.
Hawkins is passionate about inclusivity and creating awareness around disability and enabling disabled and able bodied dancers to work together on a shared platform.
The organisers hope the festival will be the first of many festivals in the years to come.
Although most of the other performers received funding from their embassies, Tebandeke had to rely on sponsors to get him here from Uganda and to cover his stay, transport and food.
He managed to get the Rotarians at the meeting to perform a ballet movement before talking about the festival and what they aim to achieve.
At the meeting the previous week another member, Rayana Edwards, spoke to the club about her project Saris for Change and whereas members at the meeting last week had to perform some ballet moves, this time it was an opportunity to dress up. This was mainly for the girls of course, but our esteemed president, Julian Nagy, didn't need an invitation to join in the fun.
Rayana has been in the clothing and textile industry for more than 25 years and has travelled all over the world as a buyer.
She returned to South Africa in 2000, "divorced and with 4 children and 5 suitcases and nothing else. When I finally became self-sufficient, I made it my mission to enable women."
She realised that saris, the traditional Indian garment, were ending up in landfills by the ton and started training mothers in townships to repurpose the saris into new garments. She buys these garments from the women and sells them on.
"When I first started the project I appealed to Indian women to donate old saris and they rained on us to such an extent that we had to find storage space for all of it."
In the training they emphasise the teaching of business skills rather than just sewing and have broadened the scope to include fashion design and teaching young people IT skills in the fashion world.
This Week: It's a meeting for committee meetings but most of the emphasis will be on the Golf Day which is now approaching very quickly. There's still lots to be done and members can contribute by bringing along a few bottles for the Barrow of Booze; four items to give away as prizes or which can be included in hampers for the winning players; a full sheet or two of raffle contributions; and maybe a hole sponsor or two.
These are all very important to the club as the Golf Day is our biggest fundraising effort and the amount of money we can raise will dictate how much there is to spend during the coming year.
Remember, the bulk of the funds raised will go to bursaries for schooling and somewhere out there are kids desperate for the opportunity at a decent education.
A Thought for the Week: When a clown moves into a palace he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus. - Turkish Proverb)
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