Rotary International Theme 2024-2025	THE ROWEL Rotary Club of Durham		Rotary International President: Gordon McInally Rotary District 5160 Governor: Clair Roberts Durham Rotary President: Peggi Whitman _____________ Editor: Phil Price Publisher:  Jen Liu
	April 29, 2025	Harvest Festival  2025 will be held on September 21, 2025

The Meeting Opening We met at the Durham Veteran’s Memorial Hall for our annual Student Award Banquet. In the absence of President Peggi, the meeting was called to order by President Elect Tom Knowles.  Tom then asked Steve Plume to lead the pledge, which he did.  Jim Patterson presented the invocation. Following that Tom asked Larry Bradley to lead us in a song.  He led us in singing “God Bless America”. Tom then turned the meeting over to Larry Bradley for the presentation of scholarships and awards.

Introduction of Visitors

The following visitors from the Paradise Club were introduced:

Pam and Brian Gray

Daniela Mekech

Jenn Brocks

Mickey Rich

David and Kim Liles

I heard a rumor that Paradise will be starting an evening club.

Dinner

We then had dinner.  The chicken was cooked by Jen Liu in our barrels.  The salads and cooky for desert were obtained by Diana Sellend.

Outgoing Interact Officers

Janelle Thorpe and Miguel Heras are the outgoing President and Secretary of Interact. Miguel Heras was also our Student of the Month for April.

Larry Bradley then introduce Parker Thomas who is our Student of the Month for May.

Larry then talked about the criteria used for selecting scholarship winner.  It is no just grade average.  A lot of consideration isgiven the their community involvement.  The scholarship winners this year are:

Kendal Beynon

Zachariah Zwinger

Our Next Meeting

Our next meeting, on 13^th.  It will be at President Elect Tom Knowles’ home.  It is located at 9285 Sarah Ann Court in Durham. It will be a club social celebrating our 80^th Anniversary.

Membership

Bring guests who you think you can interest in becoming a member.  Your dinner and your guest’s dinner will be paid for by the Club.  Also, bring a guest to one of our occasional social gatherings.

District 5160 Governor, Dan Geraldi is asking each club member to bring at least one guest to a meeting this year.

Go to the following Rotary International web site for information on membership development:  https://my.rotary.org/en/learning-reference/learn-topic/membership .  From this website there is access to membership development and other related information.

The Rotary Foundation Donations

You can make a difference in this world by helping people in need. Your gift can do some great things, from supplying filters that clean people’s drinking water to empowering local entrepreneurs to grow through business development training.

The Rotary Foundation will use your gift to fund the life-changing work of Rotary members who provide sustainable solutions to their communities’ most pressing needs. But we need help from people like you who will take action and give the gift of Rotary to make these projects possible.

When every Rotarian gives every year, no challenge is too great for us to make a difference. The minimum gift to The Rotary Foundation is $25.00.   An annual $100.00 gift is a sustaining member.  Once your donations accumulate to $1,000 you become a Paul Harris Fellow.

If you have any questions, ask Steve Heithecker.

It is possible to learn more about The Rotary Foundation on the Rotary web site. 

Your gift can be made online or by sending Jessica Thorpe a check made out to The Rotary Foundation to Durham Rotary, P.O. Box 383, Durham, California 95958.

To: All Rotarians in District 5160

It's time to thank this year's Rotary Presidents and Leaders and Welcome their successors.  Please join us as our District Family comes together on Saturday, July 12, 2025, from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM, for our annual Awards and Installation as District 5160.  The event will be held in Chico, at the beautiful Lakeside Pavilion, 2565 California Park Drive, Chico.  This event will celebrate the club's successes for 2024-2025 and ring in the new Rotary year through the installation of next year’s presidents.  Registration is now open. Please use this personal link to register for this event.
 
Register NOW for the District Awards and Installation Event. Do not forward this is personalizedjust for you.

Saturday, July 12, 2025
Lakeside Pavilion, 2565 California Park Drive, Chico, CA 95928
$50 per person
5:30PM-8:30PM
(5:30-6:15PM No Host Cocktails and Social Hour)

For questions please contact Awards and Installation Chair Rene Matsumoto at crmmats@gmail.com.

Thank you,
Dan Geraldi
District Governor 5160
2024-2025
Joy Alaidarous
District Governor 5160
2025-2026
____________________________ri

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A hidden ‘army’ is on the frontlines of immunization in Pakistan

What it takes to manage 400,000-plus polio eradication workers

By Etelka Lehoczky

You may never have seen a community health worker. You may not even have heard the term before. But these individuals, many of them volunteers, play increasingly important roles in health care systems around the globe. And they’re essential to Rotary’s health initiatives — especially the fight against polio and other diseases.

Community health workers are usually women. They have expansive personal networks that enable them to identify and connect with undeserved people living around them. They often go from house to house, providing basic medical interventions and advice. In many countries, they’re the main workforce administering polio vaccinations.

Another common focus of their work is maternal and child health, but even that can involve immunization support, says Svea Closser, a medical anthropologist and a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

“They will do some basic checks, prenatally, and often accompany women to the hospital when it’s time to give birth. Then they’ll follow up after the baby is born to encourage the mother to get the baby vaccinated,” says Closser, who has studied community health workers in Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and other countries. “And besides working with the polio campaigns in almost every country, they will also provide additional support for other vaccines: getting people to the places where the vaccines are being given, allaying parents’ fears about vaccines, things like that.”

Administering vaccines and educating people about the need for them are among the most important parts of a community health worker’s job. That’s particularly true in Pakistan, one of only two countries where the wild polio virus still circulates.(The other is Afghanistan.)

More than 400,000 community health workers are deployed across Pakistan, including in the most remote regions. It’s a squad that’s second in size only to Pakistan’s real army, says Israr Ul Haq, who has a key role in overseeing the vast group. He’s a social and behavioral change specialist for UNICEF, one of Rotary’s core partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

Ul Haq recently talked about the demands of finding, training, and managing nearly half a million community health workers. In Pakistan, they’re divided into frontline workers and social mobilizers.

Q: What do frontline workers and social mobilizers do?

A: Frontline workers go from house to house to vaccinate. Social mobilizers take the message of the importance of polio vaccination — and not just polio vaccination, but also the health and well-being of children and mothers — tothe community.

Q: Do you need to find workers who live in every community, all over Pakistan?

A: Yes. It is very important for people to have social and emotional attachments to the workers who end upat their doorsteps. Social mobilizers should be well known in the community, so we have to pick f Q: Why not?

A: It’s like, “The people from within us would never harm us.” We need to winpeople’s trust. We need for people to understand why we stress the importance of polio vaccination more than anything else. That social buy-in is veryimportant. After 28 years of this program, more than 95% of people open their doors to get their children vaccinated.

Q: What qualifications do you look for when recruiting health workers?

A: We predominantly work with females. We have a conservative society where men from other families are not allowed to go inside people’s houses. Access to mothers is very important, and it’s next to impossible in some areas for men to talk tothe mothers. But in far-flung areas where it is very difficult for females to travel, it’s very difficult to get females to do this work. And then we end up getting males from within those societies.

Q: Are there other challenges in recruiting workers in remote areas?

A: The workers should be educated enough to read and write, but it depends on the literacy rate in the area. In areas where we have low literacy rates, we have taken on older females who could not read and write but were known in theircommunities.

A health worker marks a child’s finger after vaccinating him at a community hall.In Pakistan, community health workers are the backbone of the fight against polio. Songal Gadap, Karachi, Pakistan. 3 August 2022.

© Rotary International

Q: What skills and information do the workers learn?

A: We do an orientation on polio, polio vaccination, and routine immunization. Then they are trained in the basics of human dialogue and community listening. We spend a lot of time training people in how to listen. We are also training themin a package of key family health care practices.

We’ve recently started a training approach we call the “golden triad,” which is between the person in charge of an area, the frontline worker, and the social mobilizer. They’ll do some exercises, they’ll build trust, and they’ll ensure that they actually help each other achieve their jobs. This training is now going to be every six weeks, so practically all our social mobilizers will be retrained and refreshed regularly.

Q: Are the workers paid? If so, what do they earn?

A: They are paid around US$150 per month.

Q: How many vaccination campaigns do the frontline workers implement each year?

A: On average, six to eight campaigns will be conducted per year, but not all are conducted across the whole country. The number across the whole country may vary between three to four per year, whereas the remaining are smaller campaigns or outbreak responses in limited geographies. [About] 45.2 million children were vaccinated in the last major campaign.

— April 2025

{Note that the following may not be the complete article.  See the complete article on Rotary International’s web page.}in

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