Rotarians, time for my first Monday post: Seven years ago when I and several other Rotarians started a new club, my current club, I knew that GSE would be the best thing to not only show this group of new Rotarians what Rotary was really all about but to also unify our group into a real Rotary club. In our second year we hosted a group from Brazil, many of those team members will read this on Facebook because we all stay in touch. To say that it was a bit of a hard sell to explain that these folks, people we didn’t know from a foreign country, would be staying in our homes for three days would be an understatement. To say that the experience was a resounding success would be an even bigger understatement. GSE quickly became an integral part of our new club. For the club members in our club who were new to Rotary, it made Rotary something special, not just another service club. It created relationships that still exist. One of the team members was a teacher and that resulted in the fifth graders in our very small school district becoming pen pals with students in Brazil. That teacher returned to Brazil, joined Rotary and is now the president of her club. The team leader is now the district governor of his district. The effect of that GSE visit went even farther. The team leader asked if we would participate in a matching grant with his home club to purchase laparoscopic equipment for a small charity hospital in the rural area of his district. Our two year old club jumped at the opportunity, not because of some grand wish to send money to a foreign district but because of a wish to help out people who had become our friends through one short visit seven years ago. We are not a rich group of Rotarians, sometimes we jokingly refer to our club as “Rotary RFD,” but there was no problem in gathering our part of the matching grant and there are now impoverished Brazilians receiving medical treatment through a laparoscope purchased in part because of a cooperation between a Brazilian Rotary Club and a brand new Club of twenty Rotarians in a very small community in Texas. A group of Texans that before the GSE experience probably never thought much about Brazil or much of anything outside our state and our country except the stories of war, misery and unrest we see and read in news accounts every day. By the way, Future Vision also did away with the matching grant program, the program that allowed for the purchase of the laparoscope in Brazil. The following year we jumped in line to host a GSE team from India. That was a bit more challenging. To say there is a big cultural difference between Danbury, Texas and anywhere in India is an understatement. We had participated with a neighboring club because the schedule kept changing and communication was so sporadic that we had a short notice to get our host families secured but we pulled it off and once again it was a great experience. I still see communications on Facebook between some of our club members and the India GSE team members but for us it was our last GSE experience. The following year we became a Future Vision Pilot District and GSE died. Another thing came out of my Club’s GSE experience, we became a 100% sustaining member club. After the Brazilian GSE visit I explained to our board that I felt we should increase our financial participation in The Foundation because we had seen how it benefitted not only other countries but benefitted us directly. Unlike other international charitable groups, it wasn’t just a syphon pulling money out of us, it actually gave something back and filled a need in our community. Since I knew many of our members might be unable or unwilling to participate the full $100 each I had devised a method where we could supplement those who didn’t make the full donation. When I presented it to the board their response was to not worry with supplementing anyone’s donation, we would just donate the full amount on behalf of each member out of our club treasury. That was all because of GSE. Now, in our fifth year of Future Vision we donate nothing because we feel that The Foundation has abandoned our little club. They’ve just become one more international charity, looking to syphon money out of our country and our little community, with nothing more in return than any other charity. It is no longer our Foundation. So much for this month and a wrap up of my GSE story, sorry it took two installments. Next month I’ll talk about my first trip to a Rotary Zone meeting, the place where I first started to learn about what’s wrong with Rotary, but let me close with one more story about GSE and the negative impact of its loss. We always involved our GSE teams to varying degrees in our local school. After we became a Future Vision district our high school principal saw me and asked, “Which country is Rotary bringing to our school this year?” I had to answer him that we would not be bringing a group to the school this year, that Rotary no longer supports that program. What a shame.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 14:40:34 +0000
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