Rotaract or I can still pass as an undergraduate

Dear fellow Rotarians,

I have discovered the blog format and me are not natural friends.  So I will work at posts that suit me and are more frequent. I’m generally more “on to the next thing” than writing you a reflective post of some kind.

However, tonight I was invited to the UW-Madison kick off Rotaract meeting.  Present from the club were Dan Larson, Mary Rouse, Maggie Peterman, Rob Stroud, and Tom Popp — and a full house of undergrads!

My job was to tell them about our club and Rotary.  Which I did.

What was really cool, to use my out-dated undergrad parlance, was that I sat in between two freshman.  One’s mom is a Rotarian and she went to Brazil as a RYE student. The other knew about Rotary from Interact in high school.  Both found out about the meeting at the student organization fair and came to the meeting without knowing anyone.  They both live in the southeast dorms.

I was just very impressed that so many students turned out to learn about Rotaract and that the leadership of the club was very well organized, ran a good meeting, served my favorite Ian’s pizza and did a great job of stressing the mix of Rotary values we all love — fellowship, service, food. . . there was a real emphasis on international and multicultural interests which is a good lesson for the rest of us.

We could eat more pizza and they could consider singing.

Also in the understatement of the year department, I asked those from our club what else to add on international and Tom Popp in one sentence said something like “I just returned from a trip to Malawi.”  We need to hear more about Tom’s trip but that’s another subject.

Tonight was just extremely encouraging and fun and a great reminder that we should all take advantage of getting to know our Rotaract colleagues.  And thanks to our fellow Rotarians for their help and mentoring of our two clubs.