Visiting the Mother Club

Since I arrived in Cape Town, the rotarians here have been a source of guidance, good advice, and fellowship. It has been great to finally make an appearance at my host club's meeting. I have had the extraordinary luck to have been assigned the Cape Town Rotary Club, the flagship club of the greater Cape Town area. It is also known as the Mother Club, just as Cape Town's moniker is the Mother City.

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of their major projects is Glencairn. But the club is involved in many other things. A recent project I worked on was helping serve the calamari at one of the food booths at the Cape Carnival, a big fair that is held every year, featuring delectable dishes of all sorts and the proceeds go to a foundation called the community chest. Proudly i wore my San Francisco Rotaract polo and met some very cool Rotarians from my club. Check out the club's website.

My first visit to the club meeting, held at the Royal Cape Yacht Club, was very nice.

President Myra Goldenbaum and I exchanging the flags.

Greeting the club with San Francisco West flag in hand. Pat Mayers, Rotary host counselor extrordinaire, always has my back. Pat has been wonderful throughout my whole time here thusfar, from bringing me fragrant rose from her garden when I arrived at the airport, to having a good chat over pizza, and taking me along to a meeting for the planning of the launch of the South African arm of the global right to health campaign. She is a socially conscious and engaged woman who does a lot of really great work. Very straightforward and no-nonsense but also wonderfully warm and understanding. She has been a solid source of support through all the ups and downs.

I delivered my first presentation to my host club recently as well. I spoke a lot about my experience as an Asian American woman with a disaporic consciousness, and how that is tied into my interest in issues of diversity and my work with the South African Bone Marrow Registry. I hope to do a post in the future that updates on my work there soon as well.

And I know I promised a link to the video of my ostrich riding, but that has yet to materialize. Apologies to those of your who have expressed a desire to witness this feat. You may start to think that I didn't actually ride it...

Suffice to say, I really like my host Rotary Club a lot. They are a group of really dynamic people who take service to their community very seriously, but they also have a really light sense of humor on the whole. And I find them to be supremely accomplished people, as I discover in conversations with them.

As I continue to engage in more Rotary experiences I will be sure to include them in other entires. It's a bit quiet on my end, but now that I am adjusting to life in Cape Town, the activity will likely pick up the pace. Keep your eyes on the palimpsest to see how things develop...