President's Emphases for 2008-09
Wilfrid J. Wilkinson
RI President
It's really a pleasure and a fantastic privilege to be here today,
addressing the new incoming class of Rotary district governors. When
I look around at all of you, I can't help but think back on my own
first International Assembly. As I'm sure you'll all agree, it is not
an experience anyone is ever likely to forget.
Coming to your first International Assembly is, in a way, like
climbing up on top of a mountain for the first time and looking down
at the view. Suddenly, you see things that you've never seen before
because you were either too close or too far away. You start to
understand the bigger picture and see how things fit together. You
get a sense of perspective that you could never have had if you'd
just stayed at home.
But to be honest, I have to tell you that that sense of perspective
is really the only way in which your first International Assembly is
like having just climbed a mountain, because being here in San Diego
doesn't mean that the challenge of the journey is over. It means that
the hard work has only just begun.
When I addressed my incoming governors-elect last year, I asked them
all, as they set out on their journeys together, to make one promise
to themselves and to their districts. I asked them to set aside the
coming year as the year that all of them would say yes to Rotary, to
say this is the year that I will give to Rotary, freely and fully.
This is the year that I will do the very best that I can for my club,
my district, my community, my world. This is the year that I will put
my whole self, and my whole soul, into Service Above Self.
And today, I ask all of you to make that same commitment. I ask all
of you to decide that 2008-09 will be your year for Rotary. It will
be your year - the year that you will Make Dreams Real.
A great deal is asked of every district governor in every year.
You're asked to motivate, to inspire, to challenge your clubs. You're
asked to be sure that each of your clubs does the best it can and
that it achieves as much as it can.
President-elect D.K. asks all of this of you. And he is asking you
for something more, something very specific: to work together to
reduce the rate of child mortality in the world, through focusing
on our Rotary emphases of water, health and hunger, and literacy.
It's a tall order; there's no question about that. But there's also
no question that this is something that Rotary is very capable of
doing.
A few months ago, I attended a peace forum in the city of Sofia, the
capital of Bulgaria. As I was driving through the streets of the
city, someone mentioned to me that the population of the city was 1.2
million. You probably know that that's the same as the world membership of Rotary. And I looked around that sprawling city, looked
at all the people walking on the sidewalks and going into the stores,
going to work and school and doing their daily business, and I
thought this is how big Rotary really is. If we had every single
Rotarian in one place, they would fill an entire European capital
city.
That's pretty impressive when you think about it. And when you think
about the scale of the job that's been put before you this year, it
might seem a little bit less daunting if you remember just how many
people you have behind you. You have 1.2 million people in more than
200 countries and geographical areas around the world, all of them
with the skills and abilities and qualities that enabled them to
become Rotarians.
What else do you have? You have the backing of The Rotary Foundation,
which stands ready with the grants that allow clubs oceans apart to
work together and combine their capabilities and resources effectively. And you have the experience and expertise of your
training leaders and of the countless Rotarians who have been carrying out projects in water, health and hunger, and literacy now
for so many years. Draw on these resources and become educated about
the issues, so that you can do your work as effectively as possible.
We talk a lot in Rotary about the need to balance ambition and
realism, our minds and our hearts, small projects with large ones. I
can't think of any better example of how to do this well than President-elect Lee's theme and emphases for 2008-09. We are not
saying that we will save all the children of the world, because as
much as we would like to do this, we know that it isn't within our
abilities. What is within our abilities, however, is making a real
and significant difference, working with everything we have, as well
as we can, to avoid as many needless deaths as we possibly can. And
we will do it not by changing the way we serve in our clubs but by
thinking about our emphases in a carefully directed way and targeting
our efforts to where we can make the most difference to children. We
will do it through our emphases, which are areas we know and know
well. Water. Health and hunger. Literacy.
Water will be the first of your emphases in 2008-09, as it is this
year and as it has been for several years now. For the task you face,
it is of paramount importance. The lack of safe water, as you may
know, is directly or indirectly responsible for 6,000 preventable
deaths of children under the age of five every day. There are many,
many ways to address this issue, and many of them are familiar to
you. We install water filters and dig wells. We ensure that the local
communities are invested in each project, so that the water doesn't
dry up as soon as the pump breaks or the parts run out. We help to
equip schools, hospitals, and clinics with water supplies of their own
and try to make sure that as many people as possible have close
access to safe water.
But as important, or even more important, are the sanitation projects
that keep water from becoming dangerous in the first place. In too
many villages and city slums, there is no system for the disposal of
garbage or waste. Open sewers spread sickness, and contamination
seeps into the groundwater. According to UNICEF, 2.6 billion people
globally have no sanitation. The impact that this has on the health
of children cannot be overestimated.
I know that sometimes, especially in developed countries, there can
be a tendency to see projects like toilet blocks as somehow less
important than projects that bring water directly, or even an inclination to be embarrassed by putting a Rotary wheel on such a
project. I cannot be too clear about this: Sanitation projects are
among the most valuable projects a club can do. For the 2.6 billion
people living without sanitation, these are projects that make a
tremendous difference, not only to their quality of life but also to
their chances to simply live. Every Rotary club should be proud of
the work they do in this area, and every Rotary club should be
involved in work in this area, directly or in partnership with other
clubs.
Health and hunger, our second emphasis, is a particularly key one
given the task we will face. To understand our work in this emphases,
and to understand how to achieve our goal of reducing child mortality, all of us need to know what it is that kills children.
It's a grim question. But if we are to stop the deaths, we must
understand the causes.
Seven out of 10 childhood deaths are caused by sickness. The very
great majority of the diseases are preventable, and many of the
deaths have contributing environmental factors, such as contaminated
water, polluted air, and malnutrition. A child who is chronically
malnourished or weakened by intestinal parasites will be much less
able to survive malaria or pneumonia than one who is strong. Globally, 54 percent of all children's deaths are associated with
malnutrition.
A third of the children who die before they are old enough for
kindergarten are killed by the "big three" of childhood diseases:
acute respiratory infection, diarrheal illnesses, and malaria.
And almost a quarter of these children die before they are even a
week old because they were born without a skilled birth assistant or
in the dirtiest corner of their parents' hut, or because they were
given improper care in the hours and days after birth.
And that is where we come to our third emphasis, of literacy. Because
many of the issues affecting children's health are issues of access,
knowledge, and education. Children of literate mothers have a longer
life expectancy than children of illiterate mothers in almost every
country in the world. An education is a gift to a child from one
generation to the next. Educated parents understand better what their
children need. They can provide for them better, and they have better
access to the health care, the nutrition, and the safe environment
that all children need.
Again, while the problems may seem too huge for any of us to tackle,
they are not. They are areas where a great deal can be done with
moderate but well-considered investments and where intelligent and
carefully targeted assistance is much more valuable than one-off
financial contributions.
This is where Rotary shines. We have the local knowledge, we have the
compassion, and we have the global connections to bring the right
help to where it is needed. What all of you need to do now, as
incoming district governors, is begin to understand the issues,
communicate with each other about the needs and resources in your
districts, and cooperate with each other so that you can make the
absolute most out of everything that Rotary has.
The task that President-elect D.K. has set you - of reducing child
mortality - is a monumental one. But it is achievable because the
main contributing factors to child mortality are all in areas where
Rotarians are uniquely placed to help and where we have been helping
for many years now. And I want to remind you, very strongly, that we
know that we cannot save every child. We won't even save most of
them. But we also know, and this we know absolutely, that we can save
some of them.
And so I ask you all, whether or not you are parents yourselves, to
think for a moment of how you would feel toward the person who saved
the life of your child. And I think you will agree that if we succeed
at all in this great task of ours, then none of us will have walked
this earth in vain.
Source: San Diego International Assembly Speech-book
