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The Midland Rotary Club recently got a boost for its $180,000 project proposal (including an 80% match from Rotary International) to bring dialysis machines and service to central Ethiopia. Networking at the June 2022 Rotary International Convention in Houston occurred at specialized booths, selected breakout meetings with relevant topics and a chance meeting on a shuttlebus. Results included generating a vendor referral for use by the Ethiopian hospital, a promise to send a copy of an example of a successful grant-proposal to use as a model and an offer from an expert on diabetes (to help prevent the major cause of end-stage renal disease) to speak to project partners in Midland and Ethiopia.
The week-long Rotary International Convention wowed a culturally diverse audience. Daily two-hour morning general sessions mixed speakers with varied forms of entertainment. With 11,000 people seated theater style on a large floor, eight screens were needed to view the people on the stage. Closed captioning and translation into French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese aided visitors representing the 1.4 million world-wide Rotary members. Afternoon breakout sessions and continuous trade-fair-like displays of more than 600 booths rounded out the days, along with quickly-sold-out tourist events, such as a NASA tour. At least six routes of hourly shuttlebuses ferried between George Brown Convention Center and the participating hotels.
Early on, a highlight involved the parade of flags. Since more countries are represented in Rotary than are members of the United Nations, just presenting flags through the A’s and B’s seemed amazingly time consuming. A loud ruckus would sporadically erupt as enthusiastic visitors, for example from the Philippines, heard their country announced. Movingly, the announcement of Ukraine brought 11,000 people spontaneously to their feet with a long applause.
A speaker lauded progress on Rotary’s decades-long efforts to rid the world of the crippling and sometimes deadly disease of polio. Last year, the best year to date, involved eight cases. And, thus far, calendar 2022 has experienced only two cases, one each in the last two remaining countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
