March 26, 2008

The Deposit Rotary Club is always busy preparing for its next community project. At our lunch meeting on March 5, Nancy Zacharias took charge in the absence of our president, Harry Dilello, who is currently visiting his son in Costa Rica. During the meeting, Nancy smoothly orchestrated the discussion, allowing us to begin organizing some of our upcoming events.

First of all, Rotarian Tina Strong is busy preparing for the annual Easter Egg Hunt. This year, the hunt will be held on March 22 at Fireman's Park. Rotary members have already begun donating plastic eggs and candies with which to fill them. The Easter Egg Hunt looks to be another fun event for local kids and their families. I will be sure to bring you more information soon and remind you of the event!

We also began planning for our annual activities at the Lumberjack Festival this summer. As many of you know, Rotary is one of the most active groups during the annual festival, providing the big tent that serves as the principal focal point and main meeting place for festival patrons on the field through the entire weekend. Whether folks are buying beer, clams, or shrimp from us, or those legendary barbecue beef sandwiches offered by the Order of the Eastern Star, or beer from the VFW, both of whom share our tent, just about everyone finds their way into the Rotary Tent to relax, eat, chat, or meet up with long-lost friends. In fact, most DCS classes that have planned their reunions during the Lumberjack Festival all meet up in the tent.

The Lumberjack Festival is crucial to the economy of our community, benefiting local businesses and especially all our local nonprofit organizations, which rely on the festival to provide them a solid base for significant fundraising efforts. Rotary is no exception as the monies we raise during the festival from our tent and, of course, our famous duck race in Oquaga Creek are vitally important to sustaining our absolutely innumerable service projects that we conduct throughout the year. In case you have missed all of my previous columns, the Deposit Rotary Club is responsible for the international youth exchange program, raising and donating literally thousands of dollars to the Food Pantry, distributing free hardcover dictionaries to every DCS fourth grader, sending high school juniors to the incredible RYLA conference every year, and trick-or-treating for UNICEF, all the while supporting Rotary International's global charitable endeavors, and giving to countless groups in countless ways right here in our own hometown. I have neglected some other really huge benevolent work our club does, but I would need the space of an entire issue of the Courier to just name them all. To find out even more, check out the Rotary Blog at depositrotary.blogspot.com to read my past columns which discuss some of Rotary's doings just since I proudly became a member in September. I am humbled and inspired by simply being one part of this amazing organization and I encourage everyone to stop by one of our meetings for lunch or, better yet, to join us by becoming a Rotarian.

March 5, 2008

On Tuesday, February 26, I had the opportunity to sit on the RYLA participant selection committee at Deposit High School.  RYLA, the acronym of the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards, is a conference exclusively for high school students during the summer following their junior year with the hope that they will share their experiences with their peers when they return to school for their senior year.  Each year, thousands of students have the opportunity to attend the week-long conferences held across the country and beyond.  In our Rotary district, spanning a huge portion of the Southern Tier from Oneonta to Ithaca, local Rotary Clubs have the opportunity to send students from their communities to the campus of the State University of New York College at Oneonta to meet and bond with other young people, participate in numerous character- and esteem-building activities, and explore their own leadership potential.  This year, the conference will take place over four days from the end of June into the beginning of July, during which the Deposit Rotary Club will be sending three local students to stay in a college residence hall—rooming with a student from another school whom they do not know—and attend the conference's offerings.  RYLA is a highly competitive but highly prized opportunity and nearly every student who attends comes to deeply treasure the experience as an inspiring and life-changing event.  Last year's participants Lindsey Wagner, Kim Bosket, and Amelia Blair were able to share their enthusiasm for RYLA at a Rotary lunch in the fall.  

 

Pete Hempstead, who has served for many years as Deposit's RYLA coordinator, chaired the selection committee which was comprised of Rotarians Tina Strong, Leo Cook, Bill Waldron, Ray Cornwell, and myself.  We were lucky enough to be joined by DCS senior Lindsey Wagner, who, as a RYLA alumna, was able to answer questions from the candidates and provide us all with greater perspective into what candidates could expect from the conference.  After spending the entire morning interviewing the ten truly impressive applicants, the committee finally settled on three students who we felt would both benefit tremendously from their RYLA experience and also well represent our community and their class.  Our deliberations were difficult, but we are very proud to announce our selection of Lydia Krembs, Zachary Matthews, and Brittany Stanton to serve as Deposit's delegates to the conference.  Congratulations to the participants and a big thank-you to all the applicants, Pete, the committee members, and our always-delightful RYLA cheerleader, Lindsey Wagner.

 

I'm also very happy to share that at our weekly meeting on Wednesday, Rotarian and DCS Superintendent Bonnie Hauber announced that, following the presentation of Mary Hogan and Dave Bergstrom regarding the Deposit Family Recreation Group and its valuable project at an earlier meeting, the district was able to enlist the help of a BOCES grant-writer to secure a generous grant from the Mee Foundation in Hancock.  Congratulations to DFRG and thank you to Mrs. Hauber!

February 20, 2008

Quite often, I hear comments and feedback regarding my column and I wanted to thank everyone for reading it and those of you who take the time to tell me how much you enjoy it and look forward to it every week.  I've begun to notice that every compliment I hear is usually followed by the sentence "I never thought Rotary was so fun!"  This was especially true after hearing about the Rotary Trivia tournament several weeks ago!  In fact, many people have confessed that they thought Rotary would be a stodgy and boring affair that consisted exclusively of older people and on top of that, how much fun could community service be?  After all, if community service, along with fines and jail time, are among the punishments that judges can impose on law-breakers, how glamorous could it be?  

 

I'm very happy to be able to contradict these assumptions since, as you can see from my descriptions, Rotary meetings are anything but dull and boring and Rotary makes serving the community not only painless, but an incredibly great time.  And our local Rotary club is lively enough to have attracted fun, friendly, and fascinating members of all ages, though I have to admit to being the youngest!  Here are just a couple examples of the ways in which the Deposit Rotary Club and Rotary International have a great time raising funds to help others in our local and global communities.

 

First of all, at a recent lunch meeting, club secretary Rick Zacharias read the minutes of the Rotary Board of Directors meeting held the previous evening.  One of the matters of new business that had been discussed was the pink flamingo situation.  Apparently, some of Rotary's pink flamingo assets were in disrepair and new flamingos had to be procured so as to preclude the possibility of a dreaded flamingo shortage and thus avoid the risk of our fine club suffering the embarrassment of being represented by less-than-healthy looking large pink plastic birds.  Thankfully, the club was adequately reassured of the state of its flamingo holdings.  I hope to have accurately portrayed that part of the meeting considering that this columnist may have missed some of the important pink flamingo details while he was taking his notes, distracted by fits of laughter.  A dull meeting it certainly wasn't!

 

I also wanted to mention that Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland livened up their flood relief fundraising efforts by holding a glamorous fashion show during London's fashion week back in September.  Attended by all sorts of celebrities and featuring the modeling talents of Naomi Campbell, Lily Cole, Claudia Shiffer, Elle Macpherson, Fergie (the Duchess of York), Faye Dunaway, and Sting, top designers such as Chanel, Emilio Pucci, and Versace contributed garments and helped Rotary raise one million British pounds (about US$2,000,000).  Rotarians are experts at achieving the best results from their community service initiatives by getting people involved and having a fabulous time!

February 13, 2008

This week, I wanted to bring attention to the fact that Rotary International and Rotary clubs around the world are commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Rotary's commitment to eradicate polio from the planet.  Twenty years ago, Rotary International (the global network of local Rotary clubs) joined the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and two agencies of the United Nations: the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in forming the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.   The program has proved to be enormously successful based on the fact that a 60% drop in polio cases occurred during 2007 and that there has been a 99% drop since the 1980's, when the initiative was started. As Rotary and its partners successfully educate people about the virus and supply oral vaccines to spread worldwide immunity, much financial support has poured in to help the project.  It is estimated that Rotarians alone have given $630 million to fighting polio, not counting the time and other personal contributions that are provided by members of Rotary every year.  Also, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations just recently gave a $100 million grant that Rotary International has promised to match.  

 

Despite the initiative's success and the fact that—for most of the developed world, at least—polio is no longer a public health threat, there still exist corners of the world where the virus is still a very real and daily cause of misery.  These are the places where Rotary and the other partners of the initiative plan to concentrate their efforts.  For example, in Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, Mali, and Pakistan, vaccination teams are trying their hardest to reach every possible individual, especially children, in the most rural and isolated locations.   These teams are made up of public health professionals, activists, and Rotary volunteers from places like the United States, Canada, and European nations.  This month's issue of the Rotarian magazine, includes many moving and inspirational photographs of children being immunized.  In particular, I found particularly striking the picture taken in Addis Ababa, Ethipia, where three smiling children hold up their stained fingers (indicating their having received the vaccine) in an image that recalls those of excited Iraqis whose fingers were stained during the country's first democratic elections since the fall of Saddam Hussein.  Adding to the power of the photograph was the fact that celebrity singer Beyoncé Knowles accompanied the group to Ethiopia.  In addition to her helping give the oral vaccines herself, her presence brings worldwide attention to the persisting hardships that polio inflicts on many people and to remind us all that with the help of Rotarians and other individuals everywhere, polio's days on earth will soon be numbered.

February 6, 2008

At the Deposit Rotary Club's weekly meeting on January 30, no speaker or activity was scheduled after lunch so that the club could catch up on business matters, planning for future projects and events.  With no program to report on, I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to use my column to bring one very special Deposit Rotarian to center stage for a well-deserved révérence (the elaborate bow ballet dancers do when receiving applause).  I've taken the liberty of declaring this remarkable person the Rotary Review's Woman of the Year:  Mrs. Nancy Zacharias. 

 

I'm sure that everyone who knows Nancy—a.k.a. everyone in town—is already aware of the reasons that the staff at the Rotary Review—a.k.a. me—would choose Nancy for this prestigious award.   It is hard to imagine this community and many of its unique and valuable programs without Nancy's talent and hard work.  In Rotary, for instance, Nancy serves as Treasurer, which is an office that holds a huge amount of responsibility with all the money Rotary takes in and distributes back to the community and all the paperwork and legal forms that go along with it.  I absolutely marvel at the amount of time and meticulousness she must put into making her Treasurer's reports and budget spreadsheets, which can only be described as fiscal works of art.  She also just recently handled the administration of our lottery fundraiser, for which she has to remain dutifully on top of who wins the daily contest, and she also is the editor of our club newsletter which is utterly essential, not only for keeping Rotarians informed of club happenings, but also for assisting the Rotary Review staff in compiling the column every week!

 

Next year, Nancy will be taking on even more endless work for Rotary.  Since we will have a different club president each month, it seemed necessary to find someone who was undeniably intelligent, articulate, organized, experienced, and highly respected to help keep the presidency from falling apart into a chaotic mess, much like Condoleezza Rice does on the federal level.  We are truly blessed to have Nancy on board. 

 

Unfortunately, I don't have the space in this column to give adequate treatment to all of Nancy's accomplishments and contributions to Rotary, let alone the life of our entire community—her work for the Deposit Free Library just being one important example that comes to mind—but it was my hope that by bringing the attention of all the readers of my column to Nancy's impact, you will be able notice for yourself all the ways she enriches life in Deposit and all the work, both in the public eye and behind the scenes, that she is able to successfully tackle and of course, how we all benefit from it.  

 

Perhaps Nancy's greatest contribution is her genuinely warm presence and fabulous sense of humor which unfailingly brighten every place she happens to be.  Her kindness, determination, and caring manner greatly inspire me, as I'm sure they do countless others lucky enough to know her.  Thank you, Nancy, for everything you do.