Rotarian saved hundreds of children at risk of being killed by the Nazis in the lead up to World War II

 

Rotarian saved hundreds of children at risk of being killed by the Nazis in the lead up to World War II

By Dave King

“If something is not impossible, there must be a way to do it,” Rotarian Sir Nicholas Winton once said. Known to his friends as “Nicky,” the British stockbroker rescued hundreds of predominantly Jewish children from the Holocaust in the months leading up to World War II. Winton, who died in 2015 at the age of 106, is now the subject of a new film, “One Life,” starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter. It was released in January 2024 in the United Kingdom.

The film tells the true story of how Winton rescued 669 children from the Nazi advance and found homes for them in the United Kingdom. During a visit to Prague, Czechoslovakia, in December 1938, Winton saw numerous families who had fled the spread of Nazism in Germany and Austria. The refugees were living in desperate conditions, with little or no shelter or food, as the German invasion of Czechoslovakia loomed. Winton immediately realized it was a race against time: How many children could he rescue before the borders closed?

Producers Emile Sherman and Iain Canning first contemplated telling Winton’s story when they co-founded See-Saw Films more than 15 years ago.

“We were very lucky to have had the opportunity to meet Nicholas Winton before he passed away,” Canning says. “He was the most modest, generous human being. [He] felt the film should not glorify him, but celebrate how the most ordinary of people can make a huge impact.”

With the blessing of Winton’s daughter, Barbara Winton, See-Saw approached screenwriter Lucinda Coxon to adapt Barbara’s 2014 book “If It’s Not Impossible.” Collaborating with Barbara, the screenwriting team gained access to Nicholas’ archives and letters. Barbara was a familiar face at Rotary district conferences. She passed away in 2022, during the making of the film.

Barbara’s book was an essential resource for the cast. Explaining how she got a sense of Nicholas Winton’s mother, Babi, Bonham Carter said, “Barbara was named after Babi. I was very lucky to speak to Barbara, to have her perspective as a granddaughter.”

It was Barbara’s wish that Sir Anthony Hopkins should play her father.

“When Barbara read the first draft of the script, she called us to say that Anthony Hopkins would be perfect for the role, which we of course agreed with,” Canning says. “But [that] left us with a challenge because it was beyond our wildest dreams that Hopkins would read the script and want to play Nicky. Incredibly, he did, and it was magical for all of us to know we had an extraordinary actor playing a man who was such an inspirational humanitarian.”

Hopkins got to meet some descendants of the people Winton saved, who were featured in one scene of the film.

“It was like a kick in the chest when all the descendants came in,” Hopkins says. “It was hard to try not to be sentimental, but it was very moving.”

The screenplay addressed Winton’s family history and how it informed his choices.

“Nicky’s Jewish ancestry meant he was alert to what it meant to be an émigré from the rise of Nazism in Europe,” says Nick Drake, who wrote the screenplay with Coxon. “He was ashamed by the Allies’ betrayal of the Czech people in the Munich Agreement. [He] saw the consequences of that agreement in human terms, [in] these appalling camps where refugees from Germany [and] Austria… were living in intolerable conditions. He was motivated by the reality he saw in front of him and decided to do something about it.”

The film was shot in Prague and England, working with two crews in two languages. It used authentic Prague locations, even filming on the same station platform where the children said goodbye to their families and departed for the UK more than 80 years ago. A bronze statue of Winton marks the historic spot.

Winton faced many challenges in bringing the children to the UK.

“There was a belief in the UK [that] they weren’t at risk; a lot of people saying, ‘It’s fine, there’s no issue… they’re not in Austria or Germany,’” says James Hawes, the film’s director. “Another challenge was British bureaucracy and xenophobia: the newspapers and politicians saying, ‘We’re a small, crowded island. There’s no place for more people here.’ Nicky had to fight that prejudice – raising the public consciousness, writing articles – way before the Internet or broadcast news.”

Hopkins adds that he hopes the film will keep the memory of Winton’s effort alive.

“I only hope this will send a message, lest we forget,” he says. “Because we forget so quickly.”

Learn more about Rotary’s commitment to peace.

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https://www.rotary.org/en/new-film-tells-story-sir-nicholas-winton-world-war-ii-hero-and-humanitarian

Submerged ships transform into artificial reefs in Mexico

 

Submerged ships transform into artificial reefs in Mexico

By Clara Germani

Marine life is drawn to the submerged skeleton of the first of two ships sunk in a planned chain of artificial reefs at Guaymas.

Courtesy of Juan DworakMarine biologist Carlos Sánchez has spent much of his 40-year career plying the placid blues of the Sea of Cortez on census expeditions, counting the rich biodiversity that has lured explorers from the Spanish conquistadors to oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.

Beneath this 750-mile-long inlet of the Pacific Ocean along Mexico swarms an array of life that Cousteau is said to have called “the world’s aquarium.” Rocky and coral reefs sustain a food chain starting with microscopic phytoplankton and topping out with the largest mammal on Earth, the blue whale.

However, scientists like Sánchez and the people who depend on the region for their livelihood know that the sea isn’t all it once was.

The loss of reefs is a source of eco-anxiety globally — from subsistence fishers with empty nets to people far from shorelines touched by heartbreaking documentaries about the death of brilliant reef life. But the problem, in turn, does inspire hopeful environmental and economic innovation.

The contagiousness of that innovative impulse has taken shape in an ambitious artificial reef project in the port city of Guaymas in northwest Mexico.

A coalition of city, state, and Mexican navy officials — supported by far-flung Rotary clubs and a Rotary Foundation global grant — are sinking an armada of decommissioned Mexican military ships, helicopters, an airplane, an amphibious vehicle, and artillery to form reefs.

Intentionally submerging vessels and other structures, including bridges and lighthouses, has been used around the world to form reef-like habitats for corals, fish, and other marine life. Behind the Guaymas project’s sink-it-and-they-will-come approach is the hope that the hard surfaces of these structures will quickly draw flora and fauna, and in turn tourists, local subsistence fishers, and conservation education and research opportunities. The idea is not to replace but to supplement and take pressure off natural reefs, and to capture carbon that contributes to global warming.

Keeping track of habitat loss — and reversing it

To illustrate how dire habitat loss has become, Sánchez offers a bit of nostalgic show-and-tell: a 1982 episode of the TV show Wild Kingdom featuring scientists as they free dive in a roiling school of dozens of hammerhead sharks at an underwater ridge off Espíritu Santo Island. Today, he says, divers at that spot near the entrance to the Sea of Cortez are wowed if they encounter a single hammerhead.

The health of a reef, he says, can be measured by how many sharks and other top predators, like big grouper and snapper, it hosts: “Around Espíritu Santo you see small fish [today] but no big predators.” Their absence, explains Sánchez, a professor at the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur in La Paz, is evidence of the collapse of links in the food chain.

A census that Sánchez helped conduct last fall in partnership with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego examined about 100 reefs throughout the sea. Ninety percent were found to be suffering significant degradation. One obvious cause is the industrial fishing trawlers that haul away vast amounts of sardines, groupers, and shrimp. Less understood, but well-documented, are the warmer water temperatures caused by climate change.

To sink the 190-foot Suchiate, a decommissioned Mexican navy research vessel, small explosives were detonated in the hull.

Courtesy of Kikis López de Arbesú

In the attempt to reverse the declines, the first ship was sunk to the sandy bottom, 100 feet deep, less than a mile off the rocky shore in 2022 and has grown a thriving reef system. But “nobody knew how to do the next step,” says Juan Dworak, the Guaymas marine consultant who conducted the environmental impact study for the project.

Then, he says, The Rotary Foundation’s $176,000 global grant provided a “miracle” boost and became “a crucial factor for a cascade of events that are happening now.” It paid for the cleanup and sinking of a second decommissioned ship, the 190-foot Suchiate, a 1940s-era U.S. Navy water barge inherited by the Mexican navy as a research vessel. But possibly more crucial, the grant funded the environmental impact study, which was written to cover all future sinkings in the project.

“There was the first sinking without Rotary. But there wouldn’t be a second vessel sunk without Rotary, and there wouldn’t be an environmental impact assessment already approved for the other artifacts to be sunk,” explains Dworak.

By the numbers

1. 7.4 square miles

   Artificial reef footprint in U.S. waters

2. 14%

   Global loss of corals from 2009 to 2018, primarily from rising ocean temperatures

3. 900

   Species of fish in the Sea of Cortez

Avery Paxton, a research marine biologist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says there was a 2,000 percent increase in the seafloor “footprint” of artificial reefs in the past 50 years in the United States. But growth has slowed significantly due to costs, challenging logistics, and a lack of materials permitted for use in artificial reefs. Paxton’s studies suggest artificial reefs are “hot spots” for large predatory fish, likely because they create such tall underwater habitats.

Some illegal dumping to create habitat, however, has also caused environmental problems in sensitive ecosystems.

Sánchez, the marine census taker, says that the natural reef nearest Guaymas he has visited is so degraded that he deems the prospect of artificial reefs nearby a good idea for drawing fishing pressure away if done well.

A district governor makes a difference

Standing in the warm gulf breeze aboard a Mexican navy frigate last March was Kikis López de Arbesú, a member of the Rotary Club of Puebla Gente de Acción, 1,000 miles to the south. López, a driving force behind the global grant, recalls shivering with goose bumps as she watched the Suchiate barge descend gently — her dream of making a difference as a Rotary district governor reaching its climax. (The sinking was gentle because only small explosives could be detonated in the hull to prevent damage to the reef forming on the first ship nearby.)

This all started in 2020, she says, when she saw a documentary about the loss of coral. A year later, as she was trying to decide on a project for her 2022-23 year as governor of District 4185, she focused on the idea of protecting reef ecosystems. A conversation with her brother, a Mexican navy officer, led to a plan to sink a ship for an artificial reef in Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico. But that project was scuttled when local officials who had supported it were voted out of office.

Rotary members joined government and navy officials to watch the sinking of the Suchiate from a frigate last March.

Courtesy of Kikis López de Arbesú

López’s project partner Kevin Pitts, an Arizona Rotarian who served as 2023-24 governor of District 5495, admits the loss of Veracruz felt like the end. But he and Salvador Rico, a member of the Rotary Club of South Ukiah, California, who is a member of The Rotary Foundation Cadre of Technical Advisers, both point to López’s description of herself as a “restless spirit” who won’t take no for an answer. Soon, through her brother, she found the Guaymas project.

Rico considers the Guaymas project one of the most complex he’s ever seen, with difficult layers of state, local, and environmental requirements to meet and a significant fundraising burden. But keys to successful Rotary grants, says Rico, are walking the talk and channeling volunteer passion impactfully. And López was serious about those points as she stepped in to help the Guaymas project, which was already showing signs of its sustainability with a nascent reef and tourists eager to visit.

Within months — record time, says Dworak — the project was approved, all parties were cooperating, and the barge was ready to sink.

López, who plans to dive on the reef this month, still chokes up when she repeats a line from her speech at the sinking as a way to encourage club members to fulfill their service to help the world: “If we can dream it, we can live it.”

This story originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

Visit :-

https://www.rotary.org/en/submerged-ships-transform-artificial-reefs-mexico

With transplant changes afoot, Rotary members push to end global organ shortages

 

With transplant changes afoot, Rotary members push to end global organ shortages

By Neil Steinberg

Anil Srivatsa, who tells his kidney donor story to make people feel more comfortable about giving, is pushing Rotary members to new levels of advocacy for organ donation.

Image credit: Gayatri GanjuAnil Srivatsa drives an SUV plastered with stickers and slogans across India on a quixotic mission: to teach as many of the country’s 1.4 billion people as he can about the importance of organ donation.

He’s one man in his truck, often accompanied by his wife, driving from town to town for several weeks each year to try to increase India’s organ donation rate, because it ranks among the world’s worst. “There is a deep cultural bias against organ donation in India,” says Srivatsa, a media entrepreneur who helped found the Rotary Club of Organ Donation in 2022. “There is much work to be done in this space, to counter misinformation and fear.”

For Srivatsa, the mission is intensely personal. Ten years ago, he donated his left kidney to his brother, Arjun Srivatsa, a neurosurgeon and a member of the Rotary Club of Bangalore, who had chronic renal failure. On his driving tours, Srivatsa sleeps in a rooftop pop-up tent on his SUV. One of its decals says “Kidney donors are sexy!” He speaks to a Rotary club if there is one in town — there are more than 4,000 in the country — or he assembles what residents he can when there’s not.

India trails most of the world in organ donation for varied, sometimes complicated reasons, including a simple lack of information, inadequate transplant care hospitals in rural areas, and distrust among families of potential donors about how organs will be used. But major shifts are happening with donation regulations and initiatives in India and other countries, giving organ donation its strongest spotlight in years. That includes attention affixed on early experiments in the U.S. and China with transplanting gene-modified pig organs into humans as one potential solution for shortages. And a 2023 U.S. law that will overhaul the national donation system to try to break up an inefficient monopoly and reduce organ shortages.

Education and access

For years, Rotary members have taken a lead position in expanding access to kidney and liver surgeries and coordinating transplant training for medical staffs. That includes a project led by clubs in District 3640 (Korea) to teach surgeons in Myanmar and Mongolia advanced skills to transplant organs from deceased people, a source of organs that is growing but lagging its potential to save lives.

With walkathons, social media campaigns, and more recently a chatbot that answers organ donation questions, Rotary members contribute to a movement to educate people about how important the gift of their organs and tissues can be — whether after death or in life with a kidney or part of a liver.

Rotary and Interact clubs in India, where members helped eliminate some restrictions on organ donation, are particularly active in promoting the cause. They educate people using expert speakers at club meetings, support from well-known Rotarians like RI Past President Jennifer Jones, and a walkathon that included many high schoolers. Courtesy of Anil Srivatsa

In India, the laws pose their own challenges. Until recently, citizens in some states could only register to receive a deceased-donor organ transplant in their home state. With the help of other Rotarians, Srivatsa successfully challenged the requirement through the nongovernmental organization he formed to coordinate international support of his work, the Gift of Life Adventure Foundation.

In Britain, instead of relying on people to sign up, under recent laws most adults are considered potential organ donors when they die unless they opt out. In 2021 the Rotary Club of Leicester Novus, England, hosted a speaker to explain the law.

For more than 20 years in Mexico, people have received help paying for kidney transplants through an initiative of the Rotary Club of Cuajimalpa. The project is supported by a nonprofit in the country, other Mexican clubs in District 4170, and U.S. clubs in zones 30 and 31, a slice of Middle America. Like many parts of the world, Mexico is experiencing increases in chronic kidney disease as two main causes, diabetes and high blood pressure, rise too. While kidney transplants are increasing, their high cost keeps them out of reach for a large portion of Mexicans. Rotarians have used multiple global grants for the project, guiding donors and recipients through the process leading up to the surgery and quelling fears about donors’ health afterward, similar to how Srivatsa counsels people in his travels across India.

Clubs in India have been particularly active promoting the issue, with education sessions for factory workers and college students, rallies of people with banners and flags who walk city streets, and events to encourage people to pledge to donate their organs when they die.

Srivatsa, who divides his time living in Bengaluru (formerly called Bangalore) and New Jersey in the U.S., has also done drives to counter transplant myths across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. He circles the globe to address business groups — in December he went to Bali to talk to Pepsi executives. He estimates he has spoken to more than 270,000 people in 58 countries on over 1,000 occasions, many of those at Rotary clubs. “Love gets thwarted by fear, and I believe fear comes from unanswered questions,” Srivatsa says. “What I’m trying to do is answer those questions. I don’t go out and tell people to become organ donors. That’s a decision they can make once they learn that the fear is misplaced.”

Left: Anil Srivatsa says his kidney donation to his brother, Arjun Srivatsa, was not a sacrifice. Image credit: Gayatri Ganju. Right: The Srivatsa brothers demonstrate healthy post-transplant life with grueling mountain biking and other physical challenges. Courtesy of Anil Srivatsa.

He helped start the Interact Club of Venky Yoda, which stands for youth organ donation awareness, at the Venkateshwar International School in Delhi. The Interactors worked with his club to launch a chatbot recently that teaches people about organ donation. Srivatsa, who has helped form two other clubs, also worked with the Rotary Action Group for Blood Donation to add organ donation to the group’s mission (and its name) to increase Rotary members’ focus on the issue. The group already has hundreds of members dedicated to supporting blood drives, so the expansion to include organ donation advocates will be a powerful force.

Srivatsa uses his experience of giving his brother a kidney to show that donors live normal, healthy lives. “When people say I sacrificed a lot to give a kidney to my brother, I don’t believe that was sacrifice,” he says. To demonstrate how active post-transplant life can be, the brothers took a grueling mountain bike tour in 2015, six months after their operations. They competed in the World Transplant Games in England in 2019 and in Australia in 2023, with medals for Arjun in golf and Anil in cricket ball throwing and race walking.

Removing hurdles

Despite grassroots efforts by Rotary members, the World Health Organization estimates that transplants cover only about 10 percent of need. Many people waiting for kidneys survive only through the debilitating process of dialysis, where their blood is cycled through a machine and washed of toxins that are usually removed by healthy kidneys. (See the author’s essay about helping his cousin on dialysis and trying to give him a kidney.) But dialysis isn’t available everywhere or is too expensive for many people around the world. In India and many countries, the use of organs donated from people who died is minuscule, and transplants are limited mostly to kidneys from living donors. 

Among Rotary members with a personal link to the issue are Prashant and Hemali Ajmera, a couple in India who hit the legal hurdle requiring a residency certificate in Gujarat state, where Hemali Ajmera was getting dialysis treatments and needed a kidney transplant.

The two, who are both Canadian citizens, learned about the requirement in spring 2022 when Prashant Ajmera went to a Gujarat hospital to register his wife to receive a transplant from a deceased donor, he says. “I made the application, and in four days I heard back from the police department: Your wife is a Canadian citizen so is not entitled to a domicile certificate in the state of Gujarat. So the hospital will not take her as a patient.”

“As a lawyer, it didn’t make sense to me,” says Ajmera, a member of the Rotary Club of Ahmedabad Metro. He did his research and discovered that such residency requirements were a significant drag on the transplant rate nationwide. “It was not only a problem for me, but it was affecting people across India,” Ajmera says. A judicial petition by Hemali Ajmera succeeded, and Gujarat’s residency requirement was ruled unconstitutional in late 2022. Srivatsa’s NGO advanced a challenge to the highest court in India. “We used Anil’s foundation to file a class action,” Prashant Ajmera says. “It all happened because of Rotary.”

The federal government adopted a policy in March 2023 that forbids domicile requirements for those seeking deceased-donor organ transplants, along with lifting a ban on people older than 65 receiving such transplants. “Doctors came to me and told me this was the big hurdle, and it has been removed, making one less complication in the process,” says Ajmera, who speaks to Rotary clubs about the complexities of India’s organ donation rules.

Srivatsa’s SUV is his home on the road for weekslong treks to reach Rotary clubs and anyone else he can gather to address hesitancy about organ donation.

Image credit: Gayatri GanjuSrivatsa’s SUV is his home on the road for weekslong treks to reach Rotary clubs and anyone else he can gather to address hesitancy about organ donation.

Before the legal battle could be resolved, however, Hemali Ajmera’s condition deteriorated, forcing her to get a kidney transplant from a living donor — her sister. The operation was performed in February 2023 at a hospital recommended by a Rotarian doctor, and Hemali Ajmera later moved her membership to the Rotary Club of Organ Donation. “Rotary has helped me in all my life, connection after connection, doctor after doctor, all because of wonderful Rotary,” Prashant Ajmera says.

To help others in considering whether to donate, Srivatsa’s foundation published a book, A Rotarian’s Guide to Organ Donation, edited by Hemali Ajmera.

Prashant Ajmera pushes for Rotary members to play a wider role in promoting organ donation. No one expects progress to be easy, but members are in it for the long haul.

Srivatsa says members sprinkled in communities across the globe are in a strong position to push systemic changes that improve organ donation and get people’s attention on how to prevent conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes, that can lead to organ failure. “Me passing through, making one passionate speech then walking away is not optimum. You need someone on the ground always there pushing the agenda.”

This is an abridged version of a story that originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

Visit :-

https://www.rotary.org/en/its-time-consider-organ-donation

¡Gracias a Edgar López @mentor_edgaralonso y al Club Rotario Aguascalientes

¡Gracias a Edgar López @mentor_edgaralonso y al Club Rotario Aguascalientes @clubrotariodeaguascalientes por la invitación! Tuvimos la oportunidad de hablar sobre las actividades que realizamos el semestre pasado, compartiendo experiencias y aprendiendo juntos. ¡Estamos muy agradecidos por el apoyo y la oportunidad de seguir trabajando en proyectos tan valiosos!

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