Welcome from Club President - Headline News

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Greg Mortenson, best-selling author of Three Cups of Tea and cofounder of the nonprofit Central Asia Institute, encouraged Rotarians on 21 June to keep working to make the world a better place and thanked Rotary for its efforts to eradicate polio in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Speaking during the second plenary session of the 2010 RI Convention in Montréal, Québec, Canada, Mortenson stressed the similarities between how his organization works and how Rotarians operate, especially the importance of building relationships and involving local leaders.

"All of us here, as Rotarians or honorary Rotarians, we are compelled to help people," he said. "The real key -- and Rotarians do this -- is that it's not about helping, but it's about empowering people. And when you empower people, then you can make a change in the world."

The Central Asia Institute has been empowering villages throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan to combat illiteracy by building schools for children, especially for girls who have been denied an education. Mortenson shared that there are now more than nine million children in school in Afghanistan, 2.9 million of those girls, compared with only 800,000 children, mostly boys, 10 years ago.

"We can drop bombs, we can surge troops, we can put in electricity, we can build roads, we can put in computers. But if girls are not educated, society will never change," he said. "In Africa as a child, I learned a proverb. It says, 'If we educate a boy, we educate an individual. But if we educate a girl, we educate a community.'"

Mortenson said he learned a powerful lesson from an elder named Haji Ali in Korphe, Pakistan, a village he described in Three Cups of Tea. After watching Mortenson struggle for almost three years to build a school, Ali told him that he needed to sit down, be quiet, and let the villagers do the work.

Note from the webmaster. This is a great book to read, and shows the power that we all have to make a difference in the world. I wish I could have been at the Rotary International Convention in Montreal to hear Greg speak.

Update on Polio.

Kick Polio out of Africa video.

I n a video message to Rotarians, Bill Gates, cochair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, thanked Rotarians for their hard work in the effort to eradicate polio and congratulated Rotary for surpassing the halfway point in meeting Rotary's US$200 Million Challenge.

"The work you're doing to raise funds for the program is critical, especially given the tight government budgets and increasing costs for a very aggressive polio program," Gates said. "Your work as advocates is also very important. We need to keep this fight high on the world's list of priorities."

Click on the link below to see a timeline of how Polio has developed and how Rotary is being joined by Bill and Melinda Gates with their foundation to help rid our world of POLIO.

http://www.rotary.org/en/ServiceAndFellowship/Polio/Timeline/Pages/ridefault.aspx

Click here to listen to Bill Gates talk on Polio Eradication 

https://riweb.rotaryintl.org/donor_xml/contributionmenu.asp