SEASON 4: SERVICE THROUGH ROTARY (PART 2)
Money alone does little good.
Individual service is helpless without money.
The two together can be God-sent to civilization.
Arch Klump (1869-1951), Past R.I. President
Though I had joined Rotary in the year 1988, I started doing some community service seriously only from 1997. I received a call during the first week of July 1997 from then incoming club president, requesting me to be the Director for Community Service, just a couple of days before the Installation function during which the President and Board of Directors get installed formally to manage the new Rotary year. The member who was supposed to take up that position, a medical professional, had to leave for U.K and Canada for a long-term training programme. Thus, filling up the vacancy of Community Service director during the Rotary year 1997-8 became a turning point in my Rotary journey. In the same Rotary year, by a strange coincidence, Dr. Gabriel Minder, a Swiss national, who had become a charter member of the newly formed Rotary club near Geneva – Rotary club of Ferney-Voltaire in 1996, got anointed as its president!
Dr. Gabriel Minder (1936-2019) had a brilliant academic record; born in Budapest, had his schooling in Switzerland and Brazil, graduated in engineering from the well-known ETH, Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, translated into English- Federal Institute of Technology), did his Masters in Engineering from University of Cambridge, UK and PhD in Management Sciences again from ETH, Zurich. Spread over forty years, Gabriel initially served his country as a Captain in Artillery and in the Intelligence Service for logistics and Air Force, worked for a few large Multinationals, CERN, (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) the European Council for Nuclear Research and as a partner of two International Consulting Firms. Having done well academically and professionally, on his retirement in 1996 he decided to dedicate his time and efforts for humanitarian work and joined Rotary. It was my good fortune that I met Gabriel, who having been nominated as Member-at-large of R.I for Avoidable Blindness (AB) area, visited India to attend the Rotary Avoidable Blindness Conclave held at Hyderabad during April 2002.
During August 2003, I received an email from Gabriel informing me that he’d be visiting Bangalore in November for three days. I decided to use this opportunity to organise a District seminar for club presidents and Community service directors, with Dr. Gabriel Minder as the Key-note speaker and then District Governor (DG) as the chief guest. In my opening remarks, I enumerated the details of Out-reach Eye Screening camps done, number of spectacles distributed and free cataract surgeries done by the District AB committee during the Rotary year 2002-3. At the end of his address, Gabriel offered to extend financial support from his club to implement a Matching Grant project[1] to support 1,000 cataract surgeries, provided a few clubs of our Rotary district participate in the project under the umbrella of District AB committee with their financial contribution. Later in the evening Gabriel also explained me the process of obtaining support from the special fund – Donor Advisory Fund for Blindness Prevention (DAF-BP) established by Past R.I. President Frank Devlyn (1939-2020) during his term as R.I. President (2000-1). Further Gabriel introduced me to Jorge Amaral, member of Rotary Club of Senhora-da-Hora, Portugal who was equally passionate in supporting eye-care projects through TRF’s Matching Grant programme. When this project was completed we had supported 1060 free cataract surgeries of economically underpriviledged population. Thus, two decades ago I was initiated into developing and implementing AB projects with international partners and TRF by Gabriel.
India hailed as Blindness capital of the world is home to over 12 million blind people inspite of the fact that it was the first country to launch National Blindness Control Programme[2] (NPCB) in 1976. VISION 2020: The Right to Sight[3] was launched by World Health Organisation (WHO) and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) in 1999. This project sought to promote a world in which is nobody is needlessly visually impaired, where those with unavoidable vision loss can achive their full potential. It is based on VISION 2020 programme, R.I encouraged the clubs to take up AB projects from the turn of the Millenium to help in bringing down the burden of blindness due to cataract and refraction as these two form nearly sixty five percent of the preventable blindness.
Having been the President of my home club during 2000-1 and subsequently the District AB Chairman during 2002-3, I had initiated several outreach eye screening camps and supported free cataract surgeries. Hence, I had a fairly good understanding of the ground realities in the area of eye-care and how possible blindness can be prevented by right interventions. I had even presented papers in a couple of International Rotary AB Conferences, one in Malaysia during October 2003 and the other in Singapore during May 2004.
It was at the Singapore AB conference that I met Dr. Lau of Rotary Club of Singapore and Roger Biggs of International Resources for Improving Sight (IRIS) an UK based NGO. They requested me to join hands with them to support cataract surgeries of poor Cambodians by providing consumables and sending two ophthalmologists from Bangalore to perform surgeries. As 2004-5 was Rotary’s Centenary year, I developed a project to support 300 cataract surgeries in Cambodia and travel cost of two ophthalmologists to Cambodia. When I sent this proposal to Gabriel, he readily agreed to financially support the project. This project involving five Rotary districts from different countries – Cambodia (camp site + local para-medical staff), India (2 Ophthalmologists + consumables), Singapore (2 Ophthalmologists + Coordination), Switzerland (Financial support) and USA (2 Ophthalmologists) was implemented during November 2004 and 308 poor Cambodians were operated for cataract over two weeks. I presented a completion report of this project to Gabriel when he was our guest at the Rotary Centenary year celebration held at Bangalore on 23rd February 2005.
Having done a couple of AB projects with Gabriel and Jorge, I decided to visit them during 2006. As part of our Silver Wedding anniversary celebration, I suggested Hema that we undertake a tour covering eight European countries – Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland during April 2006. Gabriel was so happy to receive us at the airport and spent three days taking us around to several places of interest in Geneva. So also was Jorge Amaral when we visited him at Porto[4] for a couple of days. Needless to mention that we attended their respective Rotary club meetings during our stay. This visit enabled me to raise funds from these two clubs for another Matching Grant project to support 2000 cataract surgeries in 2006!
Gabriel had been supporting everyone of the AB project proposals that I was sharing with him over a decade; even after 2014, when he informed that he is retiring from Rotary projects because of advancing age and health conditions, when I shared with him a major project proposal that I was working on, he confirmed his support. As TRF entered its centenary year in 2016, Gabriel was entering his eightieth year! Having got highly impressed with Gabriel’s compassion towards humanity, I thought it’d be only appropriate to bring out a Coffee-Table book covering Gabriel’s contributions to humanitarian projects that he had supported across twenty one countries during 1996-2015. When I shared this idea with my son Hari who is a writer and had interacted with Gabriel a couple of times when he was in Bangalore, he readily agreed to join hands with me to bring out such a book. In a short period of less than four months we managed to bring out Do Good in the World with a message from then Chairman of TRF Kalyan Banerjee, a Past President of Rotary International. As Hari had to give a talk in Amsterdam around that time, he too joined me at Geneva when the book was released on Gabriel’s 80th birthday, celebrated at his home club – Rotary Club of Ferney-Voltaire!
I felt immensely satisfied that in my own humble way I could express my gratitude to this great soul!
[1] Though established in 1917 by Arch Clump, then R.I. President, the Rotary Foundation (TRF) started supporting Club and District Service projects with matching grants only since 1965. Under this Grant programme, any Rotary club can host a service project to meet the community needs after identifying one or more Rotary clubs outside its country as International Partner club for the project to raise funds. 50% of such funds raised were matched by TRF as a grant. At present, these terms have undergone substantial changes and the programme is called Global Grant.
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3562965/
[3] https://www.iapb.org/about/history/vision-2020/
[4] Porto is Portugal’s second largest city and is the commercial and industrial centre for the zone north of the Mondego River
August 26 , 2024 | Ravi 84