A very Happy New Year to you my fellow Rotarians and to your families. I hope that you are all blessed with good health and hope that with your help we as a Club can achieve some good things within our Community and worldwide in 2019.
Just a couple of reminders for you all, beginning with our first meeting on 8 January: it will be at the Caloundra Lighthouses as our first Vocational visit for the year. What a wonderful start. It has been awhile since our last visit and Roger will be able to update us on what is happening for 2019 for the Lighthouses. Looking forward to seeing you all there.
On Monday 14 January our first Board meeting for the year will be held at McGrath Real Estate at 3.30pm.
Then it will be back to Oaks for our regular meetings on 15 January.
Judy we hope that your Mum is recovering well and we wish her all the best.
I am looking forward to seeing you all again and catching up on what has been happening over the past weeks.
The introductory statement and three of the four tenets of the Object of Rotary relate to Vocational Service, underlining its importance to the philosophy and culture of Rotary.
Those objectives are:
To encourage and foster high ethical standards in business and professions, to recognise the worthiness of all useful occupations, to dignify the Rotarian's occupation as an opportunity to serve society.
To apply the ideal of service in personal, business and community life.
To advance international understanding and goodwill, and peace through a world fellowship of businessmen and professional men and women united in the ideal of service.
What a great time of the year. Most of us will be planning for extra family time, children will be agog with hopes for a special surprise and we should make the effort to reflect and maybe plan for what we’d like to happen in the year ahead.
Vocational service can be hard to define, but it is easy to describe: It is simply the point where our Rotary lives and our professional lives intersect. When we put our Rotary ideals to work through our work, that is vocational service.
When I returned to the Bahamas after many years working in health care administration abroad, I realized that my country badly needed a modern health care facility. The resources we had at the time were out of date and inadequate, and people who were unable to travel abroad for care often did not receive the care they needed. Without the experience I had gained in the United States, I could have done nothing to change the status quo. But since I did have that experience, I was in a unique position to have an impact. I knew I could turn my professional path to good and make a career out of improving Bahamian health care.
I would be willing to bet that most Rotarians remember the person who sponsored them into their Rotary club. It's a person we will never forget and to whom we will always be grateful for sharing with us such a life-changing opportunity. Having said that, I'm not really sure most of us can pinpoint exactly when our Foundation became so important to us. It's not quite as simple as ...