April 2021 is upon us. For me, April means Spring, flowers, gorgeous weather, baseball, my broken March Madness bracket, my birthday month, picnics, outdoor activities – it’s just a really excellent month!
April 2021 Newsletter
April 2021 is upon us. For me, April means Spring, flowers, gorgeous weather, baseball, my broken March Madness bracket, my birthday month, picnics, outdoor activities – it’s just a really excellent month!
Giving is more than an activity. It is a way of life and a beacon in the search for hope in troubled times. There is great turmoil today, but these are not unusual times, not in the span of human history. The wisdom of the ages is especially important to help us set our path and purpose.
Such wisdom comes from the 12th-century philosopher known as Maimonides. Born in Córdoba, Spain, he and his family went into exile in Morocco to escape religious persecution. As a young man, he mastered Aristotle, astronomy, and later medicine. After moving to Cairo, Maimonides became known as the city’s greatest rabbi, producing tomes of commentary on the Torah, and he lived out his final days as a renowned doctor.
But his greatest gift to humanity captured his thoughts about giving itself. His Eight Levels of Charity is a masterpiece that teaches us about what giving means and what motivates us to do it.
The bottom rung of Maimonides’ ladder is giving out of pity or grudgingly. The next step up is giving less than one should, but doing so cheerfully. Climb up to the fifth rung and you are giving before being asked. Further up the ladder is giving in a way that the receiver does not know who the giver is. The eighth and highest level of charity is to anticipate distress and giving to avoid or prevent it.
When we immunise children against polio, we are anticipating potential illness. We do so with other efforts, such as Rotary projects that reduce the incidence of malaria or cervical cancer.
- And although we had 6 new cases of the vaccine derived poliovirus reported this week, that’s down more than 50% from last week’s count of 13. Total cases year to date are now thirty-two, compared to thirty-eight last year at this time. So we are seeing improvement here as well. Note that although the report below states 8 new cases reported, only 6 occurred in 2021, the remaining 2 occurred in the 2020 calendar year.
Hira’s story epitomizes the heroic contribution of women polio workers in Afghanistan who continue building trust in vaccines among parents and caregivers in the quest to immunize every last child and end polio.
The yellow taxi drives slowly on an unpaved road in one of Kandahar city’s districts. It has rained heavily turning the detritus on the ground into a muddy quagmire. The car labours in its efforts not to get stuck.
Stopping near a house, a young woman in a black scarf and traditional dress climbs out of the car. She holds a big registry book containing detailed information on each house in the neighbourhood: which family lives where, how many children they have and, most importantly, if they are refusing to let their children have the polio vaccination. This woman is Hira, 28, a UNICEF consultant for the polio programme. Today she is visiting parents who are refusing to let their children be vaccinated to explain why the two drops of oral polio vaccine (OPV) are critical for their health and wellbeing.
We enter one of the houses and meet an elderly woman.
“I am not vaccinating my grandchildren!” The woman sounds resolute, but we stay anyway.
“Can we talk about something else?” Hira asks calmly. Shortly thereafter, we’re drinking tea and praising the mild weather. The grandmother tells us her left leg was almost fully paralyzed half a year ago and she can’t walk normally.
Every day mothers risk their lives giving birth and millions of children die each year from treatable, preventable causes. At least 7 million children under the age of five die each year due to malnutrition, poor health care, and inadequate sanitation. Rotary makes high-quality health care available to vulnerable mothers and children so they can live longer and grow stronger by providing immunizations and antibiotics to babies, improving access to essential medical services, and supporting trained health care providers.
Rotary provides education, immunizations, birth kits, and mobile health clinics. Women are taught how to prevent mother-to-infant HIV transmission, how to breast-feed, and how to protect themselves and their children from disease. Rotary makes amazing things happen, like:
Providing Mobile prenatal clinics in Haiti that has the highest maternal and infant mortality rate of any country in the western hemisphere.
Rotarians provided a mobile Cancer screening unit and awareness trainings around Chennai, India, where there is a high mortality rate of women with breast and cervical cancer due to late diagnosis.
And Rotary members launched a $3 million, five-year pilot to save lives of mothers and children during home deliveries in Nigeria.
Please join us for 2021 Virtual Convention: Rotary Opens Opportunities, 12-16 June. Registration opens in mid-April.
This year’s event will connect you, virtually, with members around the world. It will open new opportunities to learn and to engage with the family of Rotary, near and far. Together, we’ll inspire action, strengthen our commitments, work on our challenges, and celebrate our successes.
Visit the convention event page on Facebook to connect with other participants and share what you’re looking forward to experiencing with #Rotary21. The Virtual Convention is open to all Rotary members and participants, so invite a friend to join you or share the event with your community.
While it is unfortunate that in person events were canceled this year, we are very excited for the Rotary Week of Service. While online meetings have given an easy way for Interactors to communicate with their Rotary clubs, we have not had the opportunity to help at as many service events. We are encouraging our Interact clubs to get in touch with their Rotary clubs and see if they can work on a joint event that is COVID safe. For example, my club is going to host a canned food drive for our local food bank and make a free library with the help of our Rotary club. We really hope that the Rotary Week of Service can get us back into the spirit of serving together.
We are coming to the end of the year for the District Council and we are now working on next year’s council and executive board. Anyone in Interact can apply to be on the District Council; because we focus on building leadership and teamwork it is a great opportunity to get more involved and make new connections within the organization. An assistant governor is given the responsibility of connecting with their assigned Interact clubs and supporting them throughout the year. The District Council also plans and hosts both the Fall Leadership and Interact District Conferences. We love to receive applications from underclassmen because if they choose, they can have multiple years on the council. It is beneficial to have veteran members on the council who can mentor the new members to the council. Existing assistant governors can also apply to be the next year’s district governor. Instead of working with Interact clubs for a year, the district governor manages the entire council. The district governor interviews the applicants, forms each committee on the council, and leads monthly meetings. If you know someone who you think would be a good fit for the District Council, encourage them to apply! Applications are open until April 15th.
If you would like to connect with your Interact clubs, we can connect you with the club and the Assistant Governor assigned to the club. You can always contact me at ashtonkling34@gmail.com or Art Harrington at arthts@msn.com. You can also see some of the amazing things that our Interact clubs are doing by going to our official Instagram page, interactaz5495. Don’t forget that Interact is the start of the chain that leads all the way to Rotary.
Thank you, and stay safe!
The project, located at the Friends of the Sedona Library’s used book store at 3270 White Bear Road in Sedona included cleaning up the property’s landscape, laying weed block material, spreading recycled rubber mulch, planting low maintenance evergreen bushes and installing a drip watering system.
Red Rocks Rotary partnered with Friends of the Sedona Library and a private donor to cover the cost of materials. The crew of ten Rotarians and three family members along with Sedona Public Library executive director Judy Poe provided the labor.
The goal of the project was not only to improve the appearance of the property but to target weed and dust abatement while incorporating low water usage.
The Rotary Club of Phoenix East has been a loyal supporter of the Boys & Girls Clubs and the children in the Balsz Community. This past year, those in the greatest need have been hit the hardest by the pandemic and left overwhelmed by job loss, hunger, and the impact of kids missing months of school. Without the Clubs, a generation of young, hopeful lives could be left behind. During this challenging time, the Rotary Club of Phoenix East gave a gift of $3,750.00 to help many families in the Balsz community who are still reeling from the crisis, with lost jobs, little money and no school meals.
During his talk, Sadvary stated he was proud of the healthcare community’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He was thankful for healthcare staff putting their lives on the line; was sadden by the deaths incurred in the line of duty; and, appreciated all the time healthcare workers spent away from families. He acknowledged the scientific industry’s quick development of vaccines. He highly recommended getting the vaccine to stay healthy and minimize covid symptoms.
Soon to be Hollywood star, John Angelo, who is shooting a commercial on Saturday, introduced our speaker of the day, Matthew P. Mayo an award-winning author (Two-time winner of the Spur Award and Western Heritage Wrangler Award).
He writes n o v e l s , n o n - f i c t i o n b o o k s , p o e t r y , and short s t o r i e s . John raved a b o u t some of M a y o ’ s books he has read, i n c l u d i n g C o w b o y s , Mount a i n Men and Grizzly Bears, calling him a fantastic western writer, with great knowledge of the Southwest and Arizona history. Rather than a typical “talk”, this turned into an interesting question and answer session which was a good way to learn more about this unique and talented man, how he got into writing and even the process he uses to write. We learned that he and his wife, photographer Jennifer Smith-Mayo, along with their trusty Golden/Australian Shepherd mix pup, Miss Tess, live in the wilds of Maine. They doubled the size of their home a year-and-a-half ago and now consider 600 square feet palatial on 15 acres he calls a “wonderful place to be.” He indicated he writes books, essays, journalistic pieces and poetry but his bread and butter is novels. Matthew grew up with parents—his father a dairy farmer and his mother a teacher— who loved to read—books and reading was the common denominator. He was raised on TV westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza and grew up wanting to write stories like that. He was impressed with the Hollywood versions but “it is much more complicated and far more interesting than that,” he says. Traveling in various vehicles including a 28 foot Airstream and teardrop camper, he has traveled to 46 states. He particularly loves the west because it is so beautiful and also because he needs to do research.