The Rotary Foundation has Exceeded the 2014-15 Rotary Year $123 Million Global Annual Fund Giving Goal!
This is the first year in which Annual Fund Giving has exceeded $120 Million.
What would happen if you just jumped into your life and went “all out” toward achieving and creating a dream life?
What if you didn’t hold back because of fear, limitations, or obstacles? As a matter of fact, what if you simply ignored these negative things and only focused on what you wanted?
What if you didn’t worry about being tired or working too hard?
What if you did what you could with what you have to work with at this time?
What if you just did one to three simple things every day toward creating your dream life, and when the next one to three things appeared you did them quickly as well?
What if you lived by the motto, “Do It Now?”
What if you temporary stopped doing the things you know are contrary to your well-being and counter productive toward your dream life? What if you just stopped doing them for even a period of 90-days?
What if you ignored what other people thought about you, and instead, lived according to what you want to be?
What if you stopped needing other people’s love and acceptance because you decided to love yourself to the maximum?
What if you stopped complaining about life, people, and situations, and instead, only lived in Gratitude for everything—good or bad?
What if you started looking throughout each day for the most miniscule miracle?
The answer to all of these questions is the same. If you did these things, you would succeed in experiencing your highest GOOD LIFE that God has waiting for you.
In Loving Service,
Dr. Michael J. Duckett
Taken from One Minute Mental Break Newsletter (July 22, 2015) - Dr. Michael J. Duckett
Nigeria has gone almost one year — longer than ever before — without a case of wild poliovirus. The last case was reported on 24 July 2014 in Kano state. Once the gateway to polio in Africa, Nigeria is paving the way to eradicating the disease on the continent.
But reaching the milestone is only one step on the final road to ending polio and it is too soon to celebrate victory. Until polio is eliminated everywhere, it can return to Nigeria and the rest of Africa. Less than a decade ago, in 2006, polio paralyzed 1,000 people in Nigeria.
For the African region to be certified polio-free, including Nigeria, there must be no polio cases for two more years. To do this, all children in Nigeria and throughout Africa — including those in hard-to-reach and underserved areas — must continue to be protected against the disease.
“The ultimate goal is to ensure that the routine immunization infrastructure is established to increase and sustain the level of herd immunity” [protection for people who are not immune that occurs when a large percentage of the population has been vaccinated], says Tunji Funsho, chair of the Nigeria PolioPlus Committee. This will enable children to “continue to be immunized on schedule and protected from the virus even after the cessation of IPDs [Immunization Plus Days].”
Once all surveillance data is processed, Nigeria will be poised to be taken off the list of polio-endemic countries by the World Health Organization (WHO) in September. That achievement would leave only two polio-endemic countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2014, Pakistan accounted for 85 percent of the world’s polio cases. As of 17 June, polio cases in Pakistan had decreased by nearly 70 percent.
“With Rotary, we made tremendous progress last year,” said Hamid Jafari, WHO’s Director for Global Polio Eradication and Research, speaking to attendees at the Rotary International Convention in São Paulo, Brazil, in June. “We must keep going to end polio. If the world’s commitment to polio eradication remains strong, we will soon see a polio-free world.”
"What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high."
~Author Unknow
Our District's campaign for candidates for the 2016-2016 Rotary Ambassadorial/Global Grant Scholaships is now underway.
Application materials have been e-mailed to all club presidents and club foundation chairs.
We are seeking your help in promoting the program, and in identifying, recruiting and sponsoring (through your club) a post-graduate candidate, well in advance of the October 23, 2015 applicaton deadline.
Each club may sponsor one candidate.
The District interviews will be held in Houston on November 21, 2015.
The application materials have been posted on the District 5890 website.
Some of us learn best in the classroom, and some of us ... well, we don't. But we still love to learn — we just need to find the way that works for us. In this charming, personal talk, author John Green shares the community of learning that he found in online video. This Ted Talk was filmed in November, 2012 at TEDxIndianopolis.
Why you should listen
John Green is the author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, and The Fault in Our Stars. He is also the coauthor, with David Levithan, of Will Grayson, Will Grayson.
In 2007, Green and his brother Hank ceased textual communication and began to talk primarily through videoblogs posted to YouTube. The videos spawned a community of people called nerdfighters who fight for intellectualism and to decrease the overall worldwide level of suck. (Decreasing suck takes many forms: Nerdfighters have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight poverty in the developing world; they also planted thousands of trees around the world in May of 2010 to celebrate Hank’s 30th birthday.) Although they have long since resumed textual communication, John and Hank continue to upload two videos a week to their YouTube channel, vlogbrothers. Their videos have been viewed more than 500 million times, and their channel is one of the most popular in the history of online video.
From National Geographic videos July 20, 2015 - Sam Van Aken, an artist and professor at Syracuse University, uses "chip grafting" to create trees that each bear 40 different varieties of stone fruits, or fruits with pits. The grafting process involves slicing a bit of a branch with a bud from a tree of one of the varieties and inserting it into a slit in a branch on the "working tree," then wrapping the wound with tape until it heals and the bud starts to grow into a new branch. Over several years he adds slices of branches from other varieties to the working tree. In the spring the "Tree of 40 Fruit" has blossoms in many hues of pink and purple, and in the summer it begins to bear the fruits in sequence—Van Aken says it's both a work of art and a time line of the varieties' blossoming and fruiting. He's created more than a dozen of the trees that have been planted at sites such as museums around the U.S., which he sees as a way to spread diversity on a small scale.
November 21, 2015 Polio Plus Society Dinner – featuring Susanne Rea – Founder of World’s Greatest Meal – from Australia – and recipient of the International Service Award for a Polio Free World at the 2015 RI Convention in Sao Paulo.
Rotarians...Here's a 40-second video with half of the 620 elementary students reciting Rotary's Four-Way Test at one of our six EarlyAct FirstKnight (EAFK) Knighting Ceremony held each school year. 100% of the 620 K-5th graders recite it each school day, and their daily, 10-minute EAFK curriculum teaches them strong morals and ethics like honesty, responsibility, service, tolerance, etc. In Rotary District 5890, we have 15 EAFK campuses with nearly 13,000 students, and more schools will be added for 2015-2016!
