Rotary projects around the globe

 

Rotary projects around the globe

May 2024

By Brad Webber

Mexico

A community kitchen built by the Rotary Club of Nuevo Santander at a local school is ensuring hundreds of children have meals in low-income neighborhoods of Nuevo Laredo, a city on the U.S. border. “Most of the houses in this area do not have running water or electricity,” says Club President Jorge Tello. The club launched the $150,000 project in 2018, and the kitchen at the Comedor Santa María school began operating in August 2020; meals were first served to-go due to the COVID-19 pandemic before the dining room opened in May 2021. “Operation costs for providing breakfast and lunch for 230 children every day is $9,300 a month,” Tello says. The funds are donated by businesses and individuals. Club members supervise the operation, and Rotarians are providing solar panels to the facility.

Burundi

A spinal surgery for a child in Burundi was made possible by the coordination of Rotary members on multiple continents. The young girl, named Maïssa, had early-onset scoliosis, a curvature of the spine. A team of Belgian surgeons working in the country found that she was in urgent need of intervention. A local doctor was not available, and her family could not afford to travel out of the country. So the doctors contacted Pierre De Vriendt, a member of the Rotary Club of Gand Maritime-Gent Haven with experience coordinating medical missions, to help recruit surgeons from India in hopes of finding a lower-cost option. Word of the girl’s need eventually reached Els Reynaers Kini of the Rotary Club of Mumbai Sobo, which supports the work of the Spine Foundation in India with the help of a Rotary Foundation global grant. In November, two doctors, Abhay Nene and Harshal Babulal Bamb, traveled at their own expense to Burundi, where they performed the first operation on Maïssa, now 6. Reynaers Kini, who intends to expand the medical work in Burundi, relays the gratitude of the girl’s mother, Martine Karabona: “Not only has Maïssa been given a new lease on life so she can grow into a confident woman, but along the way all of us have grown really close and are now truly one global family spread across India, Belgium, and Burundi.”

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

Albania

In December the Rotaract Club of Durrës delivered care packages to 30 families in need in the city on the Adriatic coast. Each package was tailored for the recipients, an approach that was important to the project’s success, says Club President Geri Emiri. Rotaractors gathered information on the number of family members, their genders, and their health needs before assembling the packages, which were supplied using monetary and in-kind contributions. The club distributed food packages, along with panettone (a Christmas sweet bread), lemonade, fruit and vegetables, hygiene goods, detergent, children’s books, toys, clothing, household appliances, and furniture. The aid “was modest and does not solve the problems of these families,” Emiri says, “but it aims to strengthen the relationships.”

Netherlands

Thousands of Rotary members celebrated the centennial of Rotary in the Netherlands in 2023 in typical Dutch fashion: with a bicycle tour, specifically a yearlong, 3,100-mile journey on an electric cargo bicycle. Cyclists taking turns in the relay-style tour visited most of the roughly 500 clubs in the country. Past RI President Holger Knaack, district governors, and about 1,000 other revelers were on hand for the start of the relay in January at Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam. At the end of the ride in December in the province of Zeeland, Rotarians planted trees for a food forest, a type of food cultivation based on woodland ecosystems. “With the electric bike and the forest, we made many people aware of Rotary’s environment area of focus,” says Madelon Schaap, of the Rotary Club of Amsterdam-Zuid, immediate past governor of District 1580. The project made Rotary visible to the public. Schaap adds that “connecting the clubs and unifying them is a great achievement that we did not expect at the beginning.”

United States

The Viva! Vienna! festival offers a master class in how a special event can galvanize residents and community groups, says Gunnar Spafford, a member of the Rotary Club of Vienna, Virginia, which took on the project in the mid-1990s. The Memorial Day weekend event in a suburb of Washington, D.C., has grown into a celebration that features food, ukulele performances, singing princesses, and tributes to those who’ve died in military service. The 2023 event raised $230,000 and attracted 60,000 people. The biggest share of the proceeds, about $130,000, came from carnival rides. The next highest sum was brought in from vendors, who pay higher fees for spots closer to the town green, the hub of activity. “I see this as an opportunity to have other Rotarians experience Viva! Vienna! for the fundraising prowess it has,” Spafford says.

Visit :-

https://www.rotary.org/en/rotary-projects-around-globe-may-2024

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

Specialists in the field

 

Specialists in the field

You learned of a need in a community. Now deploy the experts: a vocational training team.

By Arnold R. Grahl

Ramona Delmas shares a photo of a tiny infant on its back, bathed in the blue light of a therapy cradle used to treat jaundice. The device was donated through a long-term initiative that has revolutionized maternal and pediatric care at a hospital in Ángel Albino Corzo in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

The Rotary Club of Bishop Sunrise in California provided the machine to the facility. “Within three days, we had our first baby,” beams Delmas, a club member. “That machine turned this into a regional pediatric hospital in addition to an OB-GYN hospital.”

The global grant project, sponsored by the Bishop Sunrise club and the Rotary Club of Oriente de Tuxtla Gutiérrez, included multiple vocational training team visits to Chiapas over several years beginning in 2019. During the initial visit, medical professionals from California taught local doctors, midwives, nurses, and medical students emergency obstetrics skills and supplied equipment to support maternal care.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a pause in the project, yet many doctors learned of the new equipment at the hospital and began traveling from all over to perform their surgeries there. As a result, the California team scrapped a plan to perform elective surgeries during a return visit because the abundance of local doctors made it unnecessary. The project shifted instead to creating a pediatric unit after a new community assessment.

The Rotary clubs of Bishop Sunrise, California; and Oriente de Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, Mexico, organized vocational training team visits to Chiapas over several years beginning in 2019

Courtesy of Ramona Delmas

Delmas praises this ability to pivot and notes the lasting relationships that have resulted from the team visits. “The doctors, nurses, and midwives there can talk to our doctors in Bishop any day of the week,” she says.

By organizing vocational training teams, Rotary clubs can arrange for a group of professionals to visit another country to teach local professionals in a particular field or learn more about their own. Teams should have at least three members, including a team leader who is a Rotary member. Everyone on the team should have at least two years of related work experience.

The team’s activities must align with the goals of an area of focus and adhere to The Rotary Foundation’s conditions to qualify for a global grant. In addition, the team should address a need identified by the local community.

Preventing wildfires in Portugal

That was a priority for Gary Morgan, a member of the Rotary Club of Ballarat South, Australia. A decorated member of Forestry Australia, Morgan is well connected in the international fraternity of forest fire management. At the request of district officers, he explored setting up a vocational training team to help prevent wildfires overseas. He decided to focus on Portugal, where a devastating fire season in 2017 had caused widespread damage and loss of life. Politicians were demanding a change in fire management practices.

“I’ve known the people in charge there [Portugal] for quite some time, and that made it easy,” Morgan says. “We had many online conversations before I even approached people for a team to make sure we really understood the situation, what they wanted, and why they wanted it.”

The team, supported by a global grant co-sponsored by the Rotary Club of Ponta Delgada S. Miguel (Açores), focused on methods of prescribed burns to mitigate wildfires, particularly in areas with eucalyptus, highly flammable trees native to Australia that also grow in rural Portugal.

Morgan recommends that teams be a manageable size and include people with the variety of skills needed to deliver on the objectives. His team included individuals with practical experience in fire suppression, an ability to manage people, a background in research, and an understanding of the policy side of fire management. He kept the team to four so all members could fit into one vehicle during trips into the field.

Delmas and Morgan both have found value in including professionals who are not members of Rotary. As the only Rotarian on her team, Delmas says nonmembers opened the project to greater funding and publicity.

“They learned so much, they became ambassadors for Rotary,” she says. “The next thing I knew, they were talking about Rotary to everyone. As a result, we received funding from organizations that we might not have.”

Delmas says vocational training teams enhance any grant project. “It’s hard for me to visualize a Rotary project without one.”

This story originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.

Visit :-

rotary.org/en/specialists-field

¡Increible reunión Iberoamericana!

El pasado dia 24 de Septiembre 2013, los equipos de imagen pública rotaria de la zona 21A de America Latina y 13B de España y Portugal nos reunimos para desarrollar campañas conjuntas, aprovechar nuestras sinergias y en definitiva formar a los rotarios, rotaract, interact iberoamericanos para convertirnos en un referente mundial del S.XXI

Esta es la primera vez que dos equipos de habla hispana intercontinentales rotarios se reunen en riguroso directo.

Nuestra intención es compartir nuestras experiencias, aprender de los demás y sobretodo poder hacer de este un mundo mejor para vivir.

Si nuestro fundador Paul Harris tuviera la posibilidad de ver los avances que hemos logrado en tan poco tiempo seguro se quedaría maravillado.