Monday, 18 November 2024

This Week: A Project Meeting

 


It's one of those end of calendar year meetings when there are various things that need to be cleared up such as Christmas at Bethany and Christmas at Gerald Fitzpatrick Home.  Also two Christmas outings to two of our beneficiaries, Cresset House and Little Eden.  

These discussion meetings are valuable as they give everyone time to talk about possible projects and where we should go from here.




Rotary Club of Knights Pendragon

Notice of 

Annual General Meeting


The AGM will be held at

18:30 on Wednesday 27th November, 2024

on Zoom

The minutes of the previous AGM, the Agenda and the necessary link will be forwarded to members in due course.

Last Week

Carlo Gomes and Martin de Bruiyn gave us a very different talk which was certainly thought provoking.

I imagine it's a hard job trying to convince our primarily patriarchal society and the business spawned by it that there is a big difference between leadership and management.  Most of us will have survived in a management culture where you were just told what to do whether you liked it or not.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. 

Social Brunch, last Saturday at The Landing, Bedfordview.  The turn out was better than expected, the venue was fine and the food excellent.  I am sure we will go back.  It's important that we keep these social meetings going even if we feel that the attendance is low because those who go enjoy themselves.

We have a lot of social meetings at the end of the year and it's particularly we make an effort to support them.

Next Week

It will be our AGM.  We have to have it before the end of the year so that RI is informed of the main office bearers for the next Rotary Year beginning on the 1st July.  

International - Bulgaria

In 2007, the Rotary Club of Sofia-Balkan teamed up with the Bulgarian Basketball Federation and the National Sports Academy to form a basketball club for wheelchair users, and the project has kept growing. Over the years, the club has lured coaches from the European Wheelchair Basketball Federation to offer a player clinic, cultivated referee skills, and established a Rotary Community
Corps to help. On 13 February, in conjunction with a Rotary zone event, the Bulgarian team faced off against a Serbian team for a friendly match. RI’s president at the time, Gordon McInally, sounded the starting whistle and tossed the ball into play. The club’s signature project is a point of pride for Rotarians, says Past Club President Krasimir Veselinov, and several organisations that advocate for people with disabilities have signed on to support the venture.


Tuesday, 12 November 2024

Carlo Gomes & Martin de Bruiyn - Fitness

 

Duality Fitness, in which they are partners, is just one of their business ventures.  They have an interest in a coffee shop and are creating the website for Clan McCando.  




It's all on hold for the present with Ron Smith away until the 15th  January!

It will be interesting to hear what they have to say and I am sure it will provoke a lot of questions.


Last Week

It was a Business Meeting that created quite a lot of discussion relating to meeting changes with the Christmas and the New Year looming.  Make sure you look at future events in the side bar to ensure that you are au fait with the future.

Next Week

It will be a Project Meeting.  An important one as it will be necessary to look at existing projects and new ones for the coming calendar year. NGOs have lost their government funding which creates additional problems for them and more demands upon us.

International - Bosnia

Jesenko Krpo was studying architecture in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, when war broke out in the former Yugoslav republic in 1992. During a break in the fighting, Krpo went to stay with a cousin in Prague. The move was meant to be temporary. But the war, one of a series of ethnic conflicts that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, lasted until 1995. In Bosnia, the war killed around 100,000 people and displaced more than 2 million.

It wasn’t until 1998 that Krpo returned home to his native Mostar, a city nestled in the mountains in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina known for an elegant stone bridge at its center that had spanned the Neretva River since Ottoman times. A tall, slim 55-year-old with a youthful face, Krpo saw the end of the war as an opportunity not just to return home but to help rebuild it. “Because everything is destroyed, so they will need me, my help as an engineer,” he remembers thinking.


The Rotary Club of Mostar, which includes (from left) Sinan Merzić, Zlatan Buljko, Marinko Marić, Nevzet Sefo, Martina Šoljić, and Jesenko Krpo, has members from Bosnia’s three major ethnic groups. Pictured here with the landmark Old Bridge behind them, members say they’re united by shared empathy.

He isn’t being boastful, just honest. About 70 percent of Mostar’s buildings were heavily damaged or destroyed by the fighting, including the 16th century Stari Most, or Old Bridge, which gives the city its name. The stone arch, a masterpiece of Ottoman architecture dating back to when Mostar was a Turkish garrison town, collapsed under relentless shelling.

It wasn’t just the structures that needed repair. Once known for having the most ethnically mixed marriages in the region, Mostar was now divided along the Neretva, with Bosnian Croats on one side and Bosniaks, the city’s other main ethnic group, on the other. It was the same picture across the country. The Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war with an imperfect peace kept Bosnia intact but largely divided along ethnic lines and with a weak central government.

Amid that perpetual political stalemate, the Rotary Club of Mostar hoped to achieve what the politicians couldn’t. Chartered in 2002, it was, as far as members can tell, the first multiethnic organization to emerge from the city after the war. The six businessmen who initially organized the group included Krpo’s father. The club “was the beginning of a very positive thing for connecting people, especially in Mostar, where the city was very, very divided,” Krpo says.

One of the few remaining charter members, 70-year-old Marinko “Maka” Marić, was attracted to Rotary’s approach to peacebuilding by addressing the underlying causes of conflict. A retired economist now working in real estate, Marić says Mostar “needed such a club to be a symbol of tolerance.”

Before the war started “we were like one family,” he says. To re-create that camaraderie, it was obvious what the club’s first project should be.

Members set out to bridge the divide — literally — by helping reconstruct Stari Most. Linking two fortified towers, the bridge was long a symbol of peace and friendship and the center of the city’s life and identity. Generations of daredevils plunged over 75 feet from its ledge to the river in diving competitions. Many works of art depict the structure. It was so beloved, the community insisted on an exact replica, which was painstakingly reconstructed using stone from the same local quarry that supplied the original.

Five of the Mostar club’s 21 members at the time — including architects, civil engineers, and a city administrator — aided in the bridge’s reconstruction, which was carried out under the auspices of UNESCO.

Completed in 2004, the bridge is a symbol of reconciliation and the centerpiece of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “This is our legacy that is still present, to unite the people,” Marić says.


Monday, 4 November 2024

This Week - a Business Meeting

 There's not much to say about that especially as I have been away for two weeks.




Many thanks to everyone for your kind comments following Jean's accident on the cliff path at Hermanus.  She broke a small bone in her wrist but you only realise these things a day or two later when there seems to be no improvement.  She spent time in hospital and had an operation which was successful, though her arm will be in a cast for 3 weeks. She has an incompetent carer/chauffeur in the mean time and you can be sure that sadly wages are out of the question. 

A Social Meeting is Scheduled for this coming Saturday but I have no details as yet.




Last Week

We had a scheduled New Members' Meeting.......and I also missed the social braai at Modderfontein 10 days before.

Jim Rankin sent this email, I gather, to all of us:

Zen and I have been full members of the Korsman Conservancy in Benoni for some years.   In brief, “Korsman Conservancy is a non-profit organisation of residents and 'Citizen Conservationists' caring for Korsman Bird Sanctuary on The Drive, Westdene, Benoni.   Korsman is a natural pan surrounded by a residential area where visitors can escape the city and enjoy the peace of nature.   Korsman Conservancy works with Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality to protect the biodiversity and preserve this jewel of nature.”   The attached article sketches some of the background to the Korsman Conservancy.

Jane Trembath is Chairman of the Conservancy Committee and has devoted herself to the Conservancy.   At their AGM in May I asked Jane if there was a way that Rotary could help.   She came back to me last week with a rather urgent request for a temperature data logger to monitor water temperature as there is a correlation between water temperature and avian botulism.   Avian botulism leads to bird deaths and subsequent deterioration of the environment for bird, plant, mammalian and fish life.   You will see from the attached article the scope of the work which Jane Trembath is undertaking and that Benoni Aurora Rotary Club has helped in the past.  It seems as though Benoni Aurora’s involvement has fallen away more recently.   We would need to liaise with them in this regard.   Because of the urgency of needing the temperature logger, AGFACTS has sponsored this and it will be installed this coming week.

At Discon earlier this year I sat on a panel to discuss environmental matters and how Rotary Clubs could serve the community on environmental matters.

Our request to the Board and to the Club is whether we could or should get involved in co-operation with the Korsman Sanctuary.   I feel sure that Jane Trembath would be more than willing to speak to us and outline where we could help them.   I don’t foresee our donating much in the way of money, but rather, with our contacts, helping them with some of their projects.   One of the people who served on the Discon panel with me is an environmentalist who is knowledgeable about water quality.   Jane Trembath has asked whether we know anyone knowledgeable in this aspect of the environment.   I could contact him and ask him to get involved.   He has also been involved in cleaning up the Jukskei, more particularly in Alexandra.

Before getting involved with Korsman sanctuary, we would like to have the blessing of the Board and the Club to go ahead.

Here's more about it:




Next Week



Carlo Gomes and Martin de Bruiyn are partners in Duality Fitness, a company that has a holistic approach to health and fitness.  It's not quite what you expect and even includes ready cooked meals.

I will leave them to explain it.






International - Ethiopia

With the wind at their backs, members of the Rotary Fellowship of Kites and its founder, Henock Alemayehu, gathered for a day of kite making and flying with 250 children, many of them displaced by conflict among the more than 80 ethnic groups in Ethiopia. The children and volunteers converged on the grounds of an elementary school in Quiha, in the northern Tigray region, for the Ashengoda Kite
Festival on 9 June. “The simplicity of this activity carried profound significance, offering a rare moment of peace and joy for these children,” says Alemayehu, a member of the Rotary Club of Addis Ababa Central-Mella. The kite fellowship, which has more than 100 members from 12 countries, is “creating lasting change through the simple yet powerful act of kite flying,” says Alemayehu.


Friday, 11 October 2024

This Week: A Project Meeting - Terry Cannon, District Chairman of Youth Exchange will be joining us.

zMy apologies for the Zoom problem last week.  I couldn't sign in despite using the correct password and then the password changed without being requested!  Many thanks to Jim Rankin for stepping in with his business Zoom.  Unfortunately some people were left out.  I managed to guess the new password and sort things out so hopefully we will not have problems this week.


Terry Cannon has headed up Youth Exchange at District level for a number of years now and many of our members have had experience of hosting so it will be an interesting discussion both on long and short term Youth Exchange.  

Youth Exchange has been open to abuse in the past and my experience of hosting and the general administration of it.....I hasten to add, not in this District......has made me quite cynical about it.

I must say that outgoing and incoming students with any Rotary Clubs I have experienced in this District have been faultless.

Saturday the 19th October will be our Annual Spring Braai at Modderfontein Dam.  Lauwrence Vosloo will let you know the details separately via WhatsApp.


Ron McCormick and Andy Stevenson represented the club at RetinaSA Bowls for Sight at the Edenvale Bowls Club last Saturday.

I will be away in the Western Cape for our next two meetings so this is what the Beano used to call "A Bumper Issue".

Next Week

Dr Mark Potterton will be talking to us about educating refugee children.

Mark has a distinguished career in education but it's not high profile.  His doctorate followed on from his research into violence in schools. and he began his teaching career at Sacred Heart College, Observatory.  He has been involved in many other things from Umalusi (Council for Quality Assurance in General and Further Education and Training), Principal of Holy Family College which he developed further and rebuilt the hall after a devastating fire and is currently Principal of Sacred Heart Primary School and also the former Dominican Convent School building in Jeppestown where Sacred Heart has established a school specifically for refugee children to prepare them for integration into the normal school curriculum.


And the Week After That!

We have several new members who will be given the opportunity to tell the club about themselves.  President Andrew Paschalides has requested this and he will let us know who will be chatting to us.

I will try to attend these meetings on my 'phone.

Last Week



Martin Kobald gave us a very interesting and far ranging talk about his career as a chef and his subsequent position as President of the SA  Chefs Association and as President of the World Association of Chef Societies which represents 10 million chefs.  We were particularly interested in the fundraising and projects that had been achieved.  Martin is a member of the Rotary Club of Lungau in Austria and I am sure the connection between our two clubs will be mutually beneficial.




STOP PRESS

Jacques Borman of Boschkloof Winery was a guest speaker last Rotary Year.  Here is a section from the report of the Cape Winemakers Guild Auction:

Heralding a significant milestone for the South African wine industry, this past weekend saw the successful roll-out of the 40th annual Nedbank Cape Winemakers Guild Auction. Taking place on Friday, 4 and Saturday, 5 October both online and in person at the Lord Charles Hotel in Somerset West, the hybrid event drew 276 bidders from 13 countries, raising a sum of R16 645 500,  and up 11% on last year.

A total of 2,118  cases (6 x 750ml) were sold, with an average price of R1,309 per bottle, R1,210 for white wines and R1,375 for red wines.

With prices reaching R45 000 per 2 x 6 bottle case lot of 750ml, the Mullineux Swartland ‘The Gris’ Old Vines Sémillon 2023 set a new record for white wines. This was the highest average price for any wine on Auction. Kanonkop Wine Estate’s CWG Paul Sauer 2021 was the most successful seller by value and the last of Abrie Beeslaar’s Cape Winemakers Guild offerings from Kanonkop. The top five sellers by average price also included Savage Wines Auction Syrah 2022, Boschkloof CWG Epilogue Syrah 2022 and David & Nadia  Veiling Chenin Blanc 2023. The Boschkloof was remarkably the first wine offered by winemaker Reenen Borman, since taking over from his father Jacques, a previous Guild member.

International - France

More than a dozen Rotarians and friends in southeastern France donned inflatable dinosaur costumes and stumbled along a 100-meter course in a playful race that raised funds and awareness for Rotary’s mission to end polio. Organised by District 1730, the T-Rex Race took place last October during the Fréjus International Air Festival, a kite fair that draws thousands of people. “The idea came to me to create an event to rejuvenate the image of Rotary in the fight against polio,” says Dinh Hoan Tran, the district’s immediate past governor and member of the Rotary Club of Nice. Spectators could place bets on the contestants. “We made people laugh and we informed people,” says Tran. More than 40 of the district’s 71 clubs participated in the event, as the district motivated clubs to “support PolioPlus to the tune of about $45,000,” he says.

Monday, 7 October 2024

Martin Kobald, Honorary Past President of the SA Chefs Association, Vice President of the World Association of Chefs Societies.

 


  • After a double apprenticeship in culinary Arts, Chef and Hotel Management, Chef Martin first worked in several hotels in Austria and Germany.
  • Immigrated to South Africa in October 1998
  • Started working for Southern Sun Hotel Group
  • Joined SACA – The South African Chef’s Association
  • Joined Board of Directors of SACA in 1994
  • President of SACA 2004 – 2009
  • Board of Directors of World Chefs in 2008
  • Honorary Past President of SACA
  • Vice President – WorldChefs – World Association of Chefs Societies WACS -118 member countries, representing over 10 million chefs globally
  • Owner of ChefMLK group of companies.
  • World Chefs accredited international “A” Category judge.
  • Awarded Honorary Member Awards Emirates Culinary Guilds 2015, Abu Dhabi and Jordanian Chefs Association 2015; Jordan
  • Global operations manager owner and head judge of Global Pizza Challenge
  • Head judge and national co-ordinator of the Shoprite-Checkers Championship Boerewors competition since 2002
  • Convener – World Chefs Tour against Hunger
ChefMLK School of Cooking started as a fun cooking school for amateurs but very quickly became a school for professionals as well. 

Next Week
It's a Project Meeting but we will be concentrating on Youth Exchange.  Terry Cannon, who heads up Youth Exchange at District will be present.

Last Week
Our Business Meeting extended support for Agang Sechaba Remedial Solutions with R5 000 and that new batteries had been supplied to Little Eden for motorised wheelchairs at a cost of R42 000.
Andy Stevenson and Ron McCormick represented the club at Retina SA Bowls Day.

International - Colombia
Sonia Uribe and her husband, Alberto Londoño, created a stuffed animal collection called El Zoo del Amor, or the Zoo of Love, to comfort seriously ill children and raise money for polio eradication. Sales of Anna the giraffe, Lucas the tiger, and other animals — each wearing a shirt with Rotary and End Polio Now logos — have raised about $550,000 since their introduction in 2018. In addition to giving the animals to sick children, Rotarians carry them on their travels and snap photos of them at iconic
landmarks. “All these animals have travelled, being ambassadors of the Rotary brand,” says Uribe, a member of the Rotary Club of Nuevo Medellín and, like Londoño, a past governor of District 4271. Londoño is a member of the Rotary Club of Medellín Nutibara. The couple also manage the 
Fundación Monica Uribe Por Amor, which assists children with spinal bifida.

Monday, 30 September 2024

This Week - A Business Meeting

 There's not much to say about a Business Meeting as we won't be sure what is involved until the agenda is complete.

Jim and Zen Rankin attended the Annual BirdLife South Africa Owl Awards ceremony last Wednesday.




Owl Awards are given to individuals and organisations in recognition of their valuable contributions to the conservation of South Africa’s birds and their habitats.


At the ceremony, Jim received an Owl Award in recognition of his leadership in raising R100,000, together with the Rotary Club of Knights Pendragon and his company Agfacts, towards the eradication of introduced mice on Marion Island.

In reading the citation, BirdLife South Africa CEO, Mark Anderson, expressed his gratitude to the Rotary Club of Knights Pendragon and Agfacts for their valuable contributions to this important conservation project.

Here is Jim receiving the award from Yvonne Pennington, Chairperson of BirdLife South Africa.


Last Week

Charles Hopkins, winemaker at De Grendel, gave us a very interesting talk which ranged from the history of wine farming in South Africa to De Grendel itself and ended up with him waving a grape vine stokkie at the camera and chatting about grafting.  

This box is full of grafted root stock with the graft protected by green wax.


Next Week



Martin Kobald, Honorary Past President of the SA Chefs Association, Vice President of the World Association of Chefs Societies will be talking to us.  He owns Chef MLK School of Cooking in Kempton Park.  This could be an opportunity for the Club in a number of ways.





International 

Global partnership a dream come true for clean water advocate

  • Lis Bernhardt
  • Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, 2000-01
  • Master’s in international affairs, Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland, 2002
  • BA, Henley Business School, England, 2012

Few people could have been more thrilled than Lis Bernhardt, a former Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, when Rotary and the UN Environment Programme announced a joint initiative this year to empower Rotary members to protect, restore, and sustain local bodies of water with technical guidance from UNEP experts.

A programme officer for UNEP, Bernhardt spent five years moving the idea for Community Action for Fresh Water forward through leadership changes at both organisations. After the agreement was revealed during Rotary’s International Assembly in January, she posted on her LinkedIn page: “A professional dream has come true.”

“Rotary has been a huge part of my working for the United Nations,” she later explained. “To be able to give back to Rotary, close that loop, and connect in a global partnership is super exciting.”

Bernhardt has held multiple positions in international development since her Rotary-supported studies at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland in 2000-02. Her work has often focused on the overlap between development and the environment. As a program officer for UN-Water in New York in 2015, she essentially “held the pen” for the UN’s sustainable development goal 6, which is to ensure the availability and management of clean water and sanitation systems. Many of her roles have had one thing in common: water.

That may have something to do with a chance encounter midway through her Rotary scholarship that altered her career trajectory.

Bernhardt arrived in Geneva sponsored by the Rotary Club of Valparaiso, Indiana, in her hometown. With her undergraduate degree in international studies from Northwestern University near Chicago, she intended to focus on conflict resolution and the rights of minorities.

As an intern with UN Volunteers during the summer between her first and second year, she was part of a programme where nongovernmental organisations and other civil society groups in developing countries could apply for online volunteer assistance for projects like building a website, translating documents, or writing a funding proposal. Her job was to vet applications, including one from the Navajo Nation in the United States.

“Their request met all of our qualifications,” she recalls. “They clearly needed access to education. They had issues with drinking water and sanitation. They were a disadvantaged group and a minority. They met all the criteria, except that they were in the U.S.,” which disqualified the group.

Though the group’s application was rejected, its plight stuck with her. She remained in contact and visited the Navajo Nation. The example became the basis for her master’s thesis that explored the disconnect between the environmental and socioeconomic tracks of development.

“In the end, all of their issues were environmental. I saw how conditions in the environment underpin all other development issues,” she says. “That’s where I shifted my thinking. Every job I have had since has been in the environmental sphere.”

After short stints with Amnesty International and as a consultant for UN Volunteers, Bernhardt joined the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change in Bonn, Germany, serving as a program officer and head of external relations. In 2009, she took a job with a UN-Water program in Bonn and later moved to UN-Water’s office in New York where she contributed to writing the sustainable development goals on water and sanitation.

As influential as that work was, she began to get an itch for the implementation side “to help make these sustainable goals a reality.” Moving to Kenya in 2016, she joined the Freshwater Ecosystems Unit at UNEP. It was there in 2018 that she was part of the reception for a Rotary International delegation, including incoming President Barry Rassin, that was exploring a partnership. Wheels were already in motion for the environment to become one of Rotary’s areas of focus.

“A couple of us, including Dan Cooney, our head of communications who was a Rotary Peace Fellow, were largely responsible for driving the idea of a partnership on our end forward,” Bernhardt recalls. “We had both been involved with Rotary and knew what a relationship could look like.”

Monday, 23 September 2024

Charles Hopkins of De Grendel Wine Estate talks about his and De Grendel's Wine Journey

 

Charles Hopkins has been at De Grendel since the very beginning of wine-making on the Durbanville farm in 2005, when Sir David Graaff lured him away from Graham Beck with an irresistible offer to head up wine-making, and to design and build his own cellar. Charles is a lifelong student of wine and even after 30 years’ experience in the industry and multiple local and international accolades, he remains always curious to learn more on his wine-making journey.

In November 2019, he achieved a major milestone on this journey, with the award of his first five-star rating in the Platter’s South African Wine Guide, for the 2017 Elim Shiraz from De Grendel – a wine that is especially close to his heart.

Charles was born in Somerset West and grew up in Bredasdorp and Strand. He did his national army service after finishing school and then studied wine-making at Elsenburg before joining the old Union Wines, now DGB, and then Graham Beck. He is passionate about the process of making wine and finds the impact of soil, climate and viticulture practices on the end product especially fascinating. His other passion is helping young winemakers on their own journeys, and he has mentored more Cape Winemakers’ Guild protégés than any other Guild member.

Charles has been involved in all facets of wine-making in South Africa and has extended his learning by working two vintages overseas, one in France and one in California, as well as regular study tours to other wine-making countries. He has served the industry as a board member of the Cape Winemakers’ Guild and various producer associations. His wines have achieved gold and double gold, and scores of 95 and more, in local and international competitions and wine ratings.

Next Week

It's a Business Meeting.  There's not much to say about that at this stage.

Last Week

Dickon Jayes gave us a very interesting talk about his entry into the Butane Gas Industry.  What was particularly interesting was how he used his experience in the distribution of print media in a completely different industry and how he saw the gap.  What was particularly interesting was his battle with the conservative attitude of gas suppliers and how he was eventually able to show them the value of his approach. Because of the interest generatedI will seek out more speakers of this type.

International - Canada




About 200 college students, faculty, and community members took turns swinging baseball bats at junkyard vehicles during a Car Smash for Charity event organised by the Rotaract Club of Vancouver-University of British Columbia. The fundraiser, held each of the past three years before final exams, “offers people a fun way to relieve stress or test their own strength, while supporting a wonderful cause,” says Sara Lee, a past co-president of the club. The event, held on the campus quad in April, raised more than $2,200 Canadian for education-related endeavours. A scrap car company delivered a Volkswagen and a Chevrolet and collected the remnants afterwards for recycling. “Our team is continually amazed at the response the event receives,” Lee says.