The people one meets when doing a Make-up
Posted by Franz Huber on Oct 30, 2016
Membership in Rotary simply is the gift that keeps on giving… Where else would you have the opportunity to meet so many extraordinary people? Past RI President Clem Renouf’s famous statement keeps coming to mind: “Rotary takes ordinary men and gives them extraordinary opportunities to do more with their lives than they ever dreamed possible.”
A couple of weeks ago, whilst in Sydney, I attended a meeting of the Brookvale Rotary Club. If you met their guest speaker, Liz McDougall on the street, you may simply consider her to be an “ordinary” person. Ordinary? Yeah Right. You’d change your view very quickly after hearing her speak for just a few minutes! Liz is extensively involved with Fiji “outside of the tourist areas” and has visited the Ra Maternity Hospital at Navunibutu, at the head of Viti Levu Bay for almost 20 years. It serves the remote north coast and interior of Fiji’s main island. You may recall that the first 10 wheelchairs our club produced went to Fiji, documented in a video broadcast by Ray Martin’s A Current Affair, in August 1997 (see report in the Download section on the right). The huge devastation caused by Cyclone Winston in February 2016 is off the scale: 46 people were killed, tens of thousands of homes destroyed, 500,000 people left homeless. Winston was the worst cyclone to ever hit the southern hemisphere, hitting the northern islands, as well as the northern parts of Viti Levu, the main island. But that is NOT where the tourists go, so the view from an outsider is that “everything looks quite normal”.Well, in Clem Renouf’s words, Liz is one of those, "ordinary" people who achieve extraordinary results. Her full report, which also outlines some of her work with other Rotary Clubs, is in the download section on the right. Go on, well worth your time to read it!