Facing the challenges of COVID-19, Rotary clubs and partner organizations are finding new ways to support access to education

by Arnold R. Grahl

Recognizing that education is a pathway out of poverty, Rotary and other organizations have made significant progress in increasing access to learning in communities around the world.

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic is threatening to erase many of those gains. More than 91 percent of students worldwide have been impacted by temporary school closures, according to the United Nations. By April, close to 1.6 billion young students were out of school.

Some experts fear school closures and the loss of some family incomes could keep children out of school indefinitely. “We have worked so many years to get kids in school, get them enrolled, and get them to stay in school,” says Carolyn Johnson, a Rotary member from Maine, USA, who helps Rotary clubs design grants that support education. “This is going to put those efforts back years.

“Parents who were already on the edge about sending their kids to school are just going to throw up their hands and not do it,” she adds. “They are literally starving and need the money their kids can bring in working.”

Mary Jo Jean-Francois, Rotary International’s area of focus manager for basic education and literacy, believes that the pandemic’s impact on education will continue long after the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.

“Many kids are at a high risk of never going back,” she says. “That is a huge concern for the education community.”

Education is no easy task

The UN Sustainable Development Goals, a blueprint for creating a more just world, has named “quality education” as its fourth goal. One target of that goal is ensuring that by 2030, all children have the means to complete a “free, equitable, and quality primary and secondary education.”

It’s a monumental goal. Even in the best times, educating children is far more complex than just getting them into a classroom. Are the teachers regularly trained? Do the children have access to proper nutrition? Are they physically healthy and well enough to learn? Does the school have adequate sanitation? Is there a safe, reliable way for teachers and children to get to school? Are there issues at home? Can parents help with homework? Does the family’s need for income mean the child is working instead of being at school?

The school closures, job losses, and need for physical distance have further complicated things.

Fortunately, Rotary has a history of tackling the world’s most challenging issues. Members, some with years of experience in education, are addressing the needs that lie ahead.

In Guatemala City, Guatemala, Rotary clubs are partnering with clubs in the U.S. and Canada to help children and their families who live off what they find in the city’s huge garbage dump. The project is just one example of organizations pivoting to meet the challenges imposed by the pandemic, including supporting remote learning.

Opportunities for the poorest children

Safe Passage, or Camino Seguro, was founded 20 years ago by a teacher from the U.S. to offer tutoring, nutritious snacks, and care for the poorest children, as well as a drop-in center for children who worked at the dump. Supported by Rotary clubs that have supplied resources and teacher training, the program has kept growing and now includes several schools for children in kindergarten through eighth grade.

Trae Holland, executive director of Safe Passage, says the program uses a learning model that is student-centered, is based on inquiry, and that emphasizes experiences and participation.

“Research is really clear on this,” says Holland. “For marginalized and at-risk populations, you can’t just put a child in a classroom and lecture them. They have to experience the learning themselves.”

Additional services provide nutrition and counseling to children and their families. Mothers can learn crafts and entrepreneurial skills. And an adult education program teaches parents so they can help the students learn at home.

When the pandemic reached Guatemala City in mid-March, officials closed the garbage dump, and Safe Passage had to reinvent its programs overnight.

“Our immediate emergency response included a triad of needs — food, medicine, and a way to communicate with families,” Holland says.

Three main needs

To supply food to students and their families, Safe Passage connected with Esther Brol, a member of the Rotary Club of Guatemala La Reforma, who has been coordinating a massive food distribution program throughout the city with her network of Rotary clubs and the United Way. The Rotary clubs raise money to buy nutritious food and pack the items for delivery. The food bags have reached 40,000 people so far, including more than 400 families who work in the garbage dump.

Other Rotary clubs donated money so Safe Passage could buy rechargeable food cards that families can use at grocery stores.

To help people access health care even with clinics closed, Safe Passage created a telemedicine program — the first of its kind in the city. Cooperating pharmacists will accept photos of written prescriptions that are sent to parents via smartphone. Families have formed small groups to share smartphones with others who don’t have one.

But the biggest change has been communication with families and its effect on education.

“We lost our most important asset, which was face-to-face contact with our students and hands-on learning,” Holland says. “It’s easily the most challenging thing we’ve had to do, reinventing our curriculum into a new form using the tools our families had access to.”

Teachers use data plans funded by Rotary club donations to record their lectures on smartphones to send to the families. Children receive homework packets with their food deliveries that include experiments they can do at home. Students can use WhatsApp to send questions about their homework to the teachers. Instructors use voicemail to answer questions, and send photos of solutions to math problems.

“It’s not optimal,” Holland says. “But the pride the teachers have taken in being able to evolve so quickly with the tools we have is immense.”

Remote learning and technology

Like many schools worldwide, the pandemic forced Safe Passage to address an issue it’s been debating for years: how to best integrate online or remote learning into its education plans. Most remote learning involves technology like tablets. But the area’s lack of internet access, as well as security concerns like theft, make distributing technology for students to learn at home a daunting task.

Holland says students will be at a disadvantage in today’s workplace if they don’t have access to digital tools. At the same time, students benefit most when technology is integrated into the entire curriculum, not just provided through a mass distribution of laptops.

“Blended learning is a combination between technology and face-to-face classroom learning,” says Holland. “It’s not a bolt-on solution. If you see technology as this cool thing you just bolt on to an existing curriculum, you are in big trouble.”

Jean-Francois agrees.

“A lot of grants will include purchasing laptops or tablets. But education is a lot more complex,” she says. “We need to use this time and lean into developing teachers in new ways we haven’t thought of before. We can’t just assume that if we give them a tablet and instructions, they are going to know how to use it, and we shouldn’t expect they are going to know how to effectively teach children with it.”

With the unpredictability of the pandemic, many schools will be making the same kind of decisions in the coming year. But Johnson, the Rotarian who helps clubs design education grants, cautions against moving too quickly to “reinvent education.”

“We need to figure it out, but figure it out one step at a time,” says Johnson. “You have to know what people are able to accept and use — cognitively, socially, and emotionally. Determine that, then move forward.”

by Ryan Hyland

Rotary and its GPEI partners celebrate a monumental achievement, say global eradication of wild polio is possible with the continued dedication and persistence of Rotarians

The World Health Organization (WHO) on 25 August announced that transmission of the wild poliovirus has officially been stopped in all 47 countries of its African region. This is a historic and vital step toward global eradication of polio, which is Rotary’s top priority.

After decades of hard won gains in the region, Rotary and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) — WHO, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Gavi, the vaccine alliance — are proclaiming the milestone an achievement in public health. They offer it as proof that strong commitment, coordination, and perseverance can rid the world of polio.

The certification that the African region is free of wild poliovirus comes after the independent Africa Regional Certification Commission (ARCC) conducted thorough field verifications that confirmed no new cases and analyzed documentation of polio surveillance, immunization, and laboratory capacity by Cameroon, Central African Republic, Nigeria, and South Sudan. The commission had already accepted the documentation of the other 43 countries in the region.

The last cases of polio caused by the wild virus in the African region were recorded in Nigeria’s northern state of Borno in August 2016, after two years with no cases. Conflict, along with challenges in reaching mobile populations, had hampered efforts to immunize children there.

Now that the African region is free of wild poliovirus, five of WHO’s six regions, representing more than 90 percent of the world’s population, are now free of the disease. Polio caused by the wild virus is still endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean region.

The African region’s wild polio-free certification was celebrated during a livestream event. Speakers included Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, Bill Gates, Rotary International President Holger Knaack, Nigeria PolioPlus chair Dr. Tunji Funsho, and representatives of other GPEI partners. The celebration was followed by a press conference.

In the program, Knaack spoke about people needing good news during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. “The challenges ahead are formidable,” Knaack said. “That’s why we must recognize this great achievement and commend all the people who played important roles in reaching this milestone. It took tremendous effort over many years.”

An achievement decades in the making

Not detecting any wild poliovirus in Africa is in stark contrast to the situation in 1996, when 75,000 children there were paralyzed by the disease. That year, at a meeting of the Organization of African Unity in Cameroon, African heads of state committed to eradicating the disease from the continent.

To bolster the effort, also in 1996, Rotary, its GPEI partners, and South African President Nelson Mandela launched the Kick Polio Out of Africa campaign. Using soccer matches and celebrity endorsements, the campaign raised awareness of polio and helped more than 30 African countries to hold their first National Immunization Days. Mandela’s call to action helped mobilize leaders across the continent to increase their efforts to reach every child with polio vaccine.

Since 1996, countless Rotary members from across Africa and around the world have raised funds, immunized children, and promoted vaccinations, enabling the GPEI to respond to and stop polio outbreaks. More than 9 billion doses of oral polio vaccine have been provided throughout the region, preventing an estimated 1.8 million cases of paralysis. Each year, about 2 million volunteers help vaccinate 220 million children against polio multiple times in the African region.

Rotary members have contributed nearly $890 million toward polio eradication efforts in the African region. The funds have allowed Rotary to issue PolioPlus grants to fund polio surveillance, transportation, awareness campaigns, and National Immunization Days.

Dr. Tunji Funsho, chair of Rotary’s Nigeria PolioPlus committee, noted Rotarians’ tremendous contributions to polio eradication efforts in Africa: “From raising funds and immunizing children, to providing ‘polio plusses,’ such as soap and health kits, Rotary members have shown resilience and steadfast dedication to our top priority of ending polio.”

Rotary members have helped build extensive polio infrastructure that has been used to respond to COVID-19 and, in 2014, the Ebola crisis, as well as to protect communities from yellow fever and bird flu.

Challenges still ahead

The GPEI’s challenge now is to eradicate wild poliovirus in the two countries where the disease has never been stopped: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Additionally, routine immunization in Africa must also be strengthened to keep the wild poliovirus from returning and to protect children against circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus, which is rare but continues to infect people in parts of the African region.

To eradicate polio, multiple high-quality immunization campaigns must continue to be given priority. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s necessary to keep children vaccinated against polio while also protecting health workers from COVID-19 and making sure they don’t contribute to its transmission.

Global health officials and experts say that sustained fundraising and advocacy are still crucial, not only to protect gains in Africa, but to reach the ultimate goal of a world without polio. Rotary members still have a critical role to play in keeping the African region free of wild poliovirus and eliminating the virus in the two countries where polio remains endemic.

As Knaack said, “This is a big step in our journey to a polio-free world, but the fight is not over yet. We still need the support of our Rotary members, donors, and heroic effort of health care workers to finish the job.”

Visit endpolio.org to learn more and donate.

25-Aug-2020

COVID-19 forces lockdown on public transportation in Manila. Members bring vans, accommodations for hospital and lab workers.

It didn’t take long for members of the Rotary Club of Makati West to take action once the deadly coronavirus entered the country. Shortly after the local government announced the first case of COVID-19 in January, the club in Makati City, Philippines, called a series of emergency meetings to quickly assemble resources and direct aid.

"The pandemic was a battle cry for our club,” says club president Enrico Tensuan. “We are Rotary, and with that comes problem-solving. We focused our efforts on how to bring immediate assistance to frontline health workers.” A surge in cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, led to a government-mandated lockdown starting 15 March. On the island of Luzon, home to half of the Philippines’ population, the new rules closed most businesses and shut down public transit.

As a result, many health workers and other essential employees faced daunting commutes to their jobs — up to two hours each way on foot, Tensuan says.

In response to the need for safe transportation, club member Elmer Francisco — chief executive and chair of Francisco Motor Corp. and 1111 Empire Inc., which manufactures jeeps and other vehicles — donated 10 vans to transport frontline health workers to hospitals in and around Makati and the capital city, Manila. Francisco coordinated with officials at the Department of Transportation to obtain permits to operate the fleet and plan the most convenient routes for riders.

Since March, the vans, which carry up to 30 passengers each, have operated 24 hours each day from four designated pickup spots and local hospitals, including the Philippine General Hospital, one of the country’s biggest health care facilities.

The club paid for the fuel, and members handed out snacks to exhausted passengers. In addition, the initiative paid the salaries of 17 drivers, all of whom had temporarily lost their public utility jobs because of the transit shutdown. The club expects the project to operate at least until the end of May.

“The dedication of these frontline workers and our drivers is awe-inspiring,” Francisco says. “Walking two hours each way is simply unforgiving. They are already risking their lives fighting COVID-19. This was necessary to keeping them safe.”

Helping lab employees shelter near work Members of the Makati West club also worked to provide lodging for medical professionals. They helped secure 30 days of accommodations at area motels for nearly 50 lab technicians and workers at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, which conducts COVID-19 tests. The employees work long hours and the nearby facilities provide much-needed relief, Tensuan says.

The club planned to pay for the rooms, but local officials, inspired by the club’s actions, funded the workers’ monthlong stay. Members prepared bags of toiletries and snacks for institute workers and motel employees. “They were small bags with just a few things, but they brought big smiles. At times like this, even the smallest of gestures can make a big difference,” Tensuan says.

The club also raised funds for Fashion for Frontliners, an effort by a group of fashion designers in the Philippines who have produced thousands of items of much-needed personal protection equipment (PPE) for hospital workers. And club members have donated thousands of dollars’ worth of PPE, including masks, gloves, and gowns, using Francisco’s fleet of vehicles to deliver the equipment to hospitals. Tensuan, who leases properties, personally donated three laundry machines to the Philippine General Hospital so that workers can wash their clothes and PPE.

“I’m proud of how our club responded so far,” Tensuan says. “But we have a long way to go. We will use our club’s resources for as long as the virus is a threat.”

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A need to connect with different age groups is woven into our genes

by Diana Schoberg photography by Frank Ishman

It’s nearly Valentine’s Day. Seated around a table are five older adults and four children under age four, the decades between them bridged by the heart-filled sheets they’re coloring together. One boy holds up his creation. “Look at mine!” he says. Everyone at the table claps, and Bob Husslein offers some grandfatherly words of encouragement: “In the lines, too!” One by one, the kids show off their artwork. “I can’t believe you did that all by yourself,” Husslein says to a little girl. “Are you going to give it to your mommy?”

The art room at St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care on Milwaukee’s south side is a homey hodgepodge of donated craft supplies: cups of paintbrushes, stacks of colored paper, and bins of beads organized by color. The room is open to participants in the center’s adult care program who want to do crafts, and when the children who attend day care join them, the room buzzes with energy. “In the time I’ve been volunteering here, I can see the difference in how they feel and work with each other,” Husslein says.

“I help them paint if they need help with painting,” says George Murray, one of 200 adults who take part in the center’s program. “Some of them get frustrated and upset. You just have to calm them down. You have to show them they matter to somebody. They look up to an older person.” And, he adds, the benefits go both ways: “They show you stuff you don’t know. Some of these kids are pretty smart.”

Among the adults coloring valentines is Edna Lonergan. She’s a member of the Rotary Club of Milwaukee, a Catholic nun, and the founder of St. Ann Center, which brings together young and old to spend their days under one roof. On one side of the center, the children’s day care is furnished with pint-size tables and chairs and filled with artwork, including a mural of fairies. On the other side, adults — frail elderly people as well as adults of all ages with disabilities — socialize, take part in activities, and receive therapy. In between, a sunlit atrium brims with cacti, ferns, and palm trees (a staff massage therapist doubles as the gardener). A fireplace burns cheerfully at the entrance, and the walls are painted to evoke a European village. “I wanted it to be colorful and nonclinical,” Lonergan says, “a place where they could play together and dance together.”

Lonergan is a gerontologist by training. In 1983, she opened an adult day center in the basement of the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi convent in Milwaukee. As the program grew, she realized that many members of her staff were single mothers whose children often needed a place to go when they weren’t in school. “So I said, ‘Why not bring them?’ And magic happened. The adults wanted to do things with the kids. They wanted to have tea parties and teach them how to fish,” she says. “They had a sense of purpose.”

As Lonergan observed the camaraderie between the groups, she began looking for other places that provided intergenerational care. She saw things like children singing for adults at a nursing home, but never found a program that matched the bonding she was witnessing. So she decided to create something new. St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care opened in 1999.

Since then, Lonergan’s idea of an intergenerational model of care has been lauded by the White House, presented to the United Nations, and featured in the New York Times. “A lot of people say to me, ‘You think outside of the box,’ ” she says. “I really don’t. I bring other people’s boxes into mine.”

Scientists think that this need to connect across generations may be baked into humans’ DNA — that grandparents, in particular grandmothers, played a critical role in our evolution. The reason women live so long beyond reproductive age, some anthropologists theorize, is that the care they provide for their daughters’ children frees up their daughters to produce more children sooner. “You can argue that older people connecting with younger people is something that goes back to the beginning of humanity,” says Marc Freedman, author of How to Live Forever: The Enduring Power of Connecting Generations.

But things changed as society became more industrialized. Today, kids go to day care or school, spending their days with classmates their own age. Young and middle-age adults go to work. And after retirement, many older adults live in age-restricted housing and spend their leisure time participating in activities geared specifically to them. “We have lost the extended family,” Lonergan says.

The two groups that experience social isolation the most are older adults and teenagers, says Donna Butts, executive director of Generations United, a U.S. nonprofit founded in 1986 by leaders at the National Council on Aging, the Child Welfare League of America, the Children’s Defense Fund, and AARP. “Younger people may have 100 friends on whatever social media platform they’re using, but when it comes to actually touching somebody, or being able to share the trials and tribulations of growing up, they don’t have anybody they’re that close to,” Butts says.

A survey by Generations United and the Eisner Foundation — a nonprofit focused on intergenerational programs —found that 53 percent of American adults regularly spend time with few people who are much older or younger than they are, aside from family members. The figure is even higher for people ages 18 to 34, with 61 percent reporting few younger or older acquaintances. Grandparents often live hundreds of miles away from their grandchildren, and there aren’t many places to go to meet people across the age spectrum.

This is where Rotary can help.

The Boys & Girls Club in Gig Harbor, Washington, was buzzing. Its tables were lined with people — older folks on one side, teens on the other, 52 participants in all. Cards on the tables listed potential conversation starters: “Do you have dogs?” or “Do you like to travel?” Each senior-teen pair had five minutes to get to know each other before the teen moved along to another older person and everything started again.

You may have heard of speed dating. This is the intergenerational equivalent.

“It turned out to be amazing,” says Kathi Melendez, who initiated the March 2019 event called InterGenFest, a partnership between the Rotary Club of Gig Harbor North and the Gig Harbor Interact clubs. Melendez and her husband, Louis (both have since transferred to the Rotary E-Club of District 5020 International), worked closely with two Interactors to make it happen. After the speed-meeting part of the event, the young people answered questions that the seniors had about smartphones, and the older people advised the teens about job interviews.

While talk of a “generational divide” is perpetual — epitomized, most recently, by the catchphrase “OK boomer” — this sort of program helps people better understand each other and work together. “It’s kind of like Rotary Youth Exchange,” Melendez says. “The more you know about the other type of person, the better you understand them. The older people don’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s a teenager wearing torn pants.’ Now they know there’s more to the teen than what they wear. A lot of the young people don’t have a chance to be around seniors. The program gave them all an awareness of other people’s needs and feelings.”

In Vienna, Austria, Rotaractors felt ignored by Rotarians. Rather than complain, they examined their own behavior and realized they weren’t doing much to include Interactors — their clubs’ future members — in their activities. So in 2016, they launched a mentoring program between Rotaractors and Interactors that has since expanded to include mentorship between Rotarians and Rotaractors. It has also taken on a humanitarian project: building housing for Bosnian families affected by the Bosnian War.

“At first we thought Rotary clubs would sponsor the project and Interactors and Rotaractors would build the houses,” says Albert Kafka, a member of the Rotary Club of Wien-Oper and the Rotaract Club of Wien-Stadtpark. Kafka was honored as one of six People of Action: Young Innovators during Rotary Day at the United Nations in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2018 for the program. “But in fact, Rotarians also joined the housebuilding. These kinds of projects are much more common now.”

According to Generations United’s Donna Butts, “Almost anything can be stronger if you use an intergenerational lens.” But, she adds, you must keep in mind two key points. First, make sure that the programs are reciprocal. “It’s the connection that matters,” Butts says. “They’re both giving and receiving.” Second, it’s important to prepare. “You can’t just throw older and younger people together because it’s magic,” she insists. “Magic takes work.”

Generations United created a multigenerational workforce workbook that could help clubs that are grappling with how to better integrate members of different ages. Rotary clubs could apply those recommendations, Butts suggests. “Any committee a Rotary club might form should intentionally have younger and older people on it because of the different perspectives they bring,” she says. “We have a tendency to stereotype or box people in. That doesn’t help anybody.”

One of the keys to bringing generations together is proximity, and that’s where a place like St. Ann Center — with its balance of both formal intergenerational programs, such as dances and music classes, and informal moments of laughter and greetings — fits in. “Sister Edna has been visionary,” Butts says.

Lonergan has worked with groups in Taiwan and China that are interested in learning more about the model. While she was giving a speech at an event in Singapore, a number of people got up to get their friends and bring them in to hear what she had to say. “This has really taken hold, and people want to hear more about it,” she says.

Rosemarie Alloway has been a nursing assistant for 20 years, the past five at St. Ann Center. She has seen the benefits of spending time together for adults and children alike. When the kids come up for stories and games, she observes how the mood of the adult participants changes: “They look forward to that time.”

Her daughter, three-year-old Alexis, is one of those children. “Now when we go to a restaurant, she’ll go up to an older couple and introduce herself,” Alloway says. “Her speech is clearer. I think the kids learn more.”

Research shows that children who engage in activities led by adult care participants improve their motor and cognitive skills; in addition, they have higher personal and social development scores than children who are not involved in intergenerational programs. Lonergan has also noted that children participating in the program are learning to trust people with disabilities. “A lot of bullying occurs in schools because children are afraid of that which is different,” she says.

In the St. Ann Center atrium, children and adults swat red balloons back and forth over a net. Kids shriek joyfully, and music, punctuated by the occasional sound of popping balloons, blasts from a boombox. Alexis is off to the side, sitting and stomping on her balloon, trying to pop it. Her mom is at work, but she is surrounded by a team of surrogate grandparents, coloring together, playing together, and enjoying one another’s company. Just as they were born to do.

• Photos in this feature were taken before COVID-19 regulations on social distancing.

• This story originally appeared in the July 2020 issue of The Rotarian magazine.

Young at heart

Holger Knaack has a fresh vision for the Rotary of the future. With a little help from his friends, things should go swimmingly

Holger Knaack is vacuuming.

The Rotary Club of Herzogtum Lauenburg-Mölln in Germany has wrapped up its annual Christmas bazaar in the cloister of the 12th-century Ratzeburg Cathedral. Two days of selling handicrafts, mistletoe, and homemade cakes and cookies have netted the club some 8,000 euros, which this year will go to a German nonprofit that supports children who are critically ill. As the club members break down booths and put away tables and chairs, Knaack grabs the vacuum cleaner and, head down in concentration, tackles the crumbs, dirt, and bits of tinsel that litter the floor.

At this moment, Knaack is president-elect of Rotary International, preparing to take office on 1 July 2020. But at the same time he’s a regular Rotarian, a 27-year member of his club, pitching in like everybody else. “He just wants to be one friend among friends,” says club member Barbara Hardkop.

There’s a German phrase: man holt die Leute ins Boot. It means getting people on board to work together toward a common goal. In the coming year, Rotarians will find that Holger Knaack is not one to stand on the sidelines while others do the work. But equally important for Knaack is the philosophy that working hard doesn’t mean you can’t also have a good time. As he spends this year getting people on board — especially to carry out his highest priority, investing in young people — he will also be doing his best to make sure everyone is enjoying themselves.

“It’s a basic principle with Holger,” says his longtime friend Hubertus Eichblatt, a fellow club member. “When we get together, it has to be fun.”

Holger Knaack is an atypical Rotary president, and not just because he wears jeans and eschews ties much of the time. He’s the organization’s first German president, and he came to that position in untraditional fashion. Unlike many of his predecessors, he didn’t rise step by step through the ranks of Rotary offices. He served as club president and district governor, but he had held only one Rotary International post, that of training leader, before becoming director. And he remembers being at a Rotary institute where people asked him what other district offices he had held before becoming governor. “I said, ‘None. None.’ All of them were very surprised,” he recalls.

What Knaack is most known for is his involvement in Rotary’s Youth Exchange program. That experience is deep, broad, and extraordinarily meaningful to him and his wife, Susanne. They have no children of their own, but they have opened their home — and their hearts — to dozens of students. “The Knaack house is always full of guests, especially young people,” says Helmut Knoth, another friend and member of Holger’s club. “They’ve had hundreds of guests over the years.”

Shortly after joining his Rotary club in 1992, Knaack helped out with a camp for short-term Youth Exchange students in northern Germany. He was immediately hooked. “I thought it was a really great program,” he says. “This is something, you’d say in German, wo dein Herz aufgeht: Your heart opens. Whenever you talk to the young people, they’ll tell you, ‘It was the best time in my life.’ Sometimes I think they are surprised about themselves, about what they are able to do, and about the possibilities that are open to them through Rotary.”

The opportunities opened for Knaack, as well. He became Youth Exchange chair for his club, and after serving as governor of District 1940 in 2006-07, he was asked to chair the German Multi-District Youth Exchange, a position he held until the day before he started his term on Rotary’s Board of Directors in 2013. Along the way, he notes, he always relied on other people. “You develop a vision together, and then let’s go ahead,” he says. “Everybody’s going a little different way; there’s never just one road. But the goal should be the same.”

Young people seem to intuitively understand Knaack’s way of doing things. “Holger has a vision, and he is executing on that vision,” says Brittany Arthur, a member of the Rotaract Club of Berlin and the Rotary Club of Berlin International. “And you recognize that this vision is not new for him. Holger and Susanne have had dozens of Youth Exchange students. Do you think they did all that so that in 2020 he could say, ‘We need to invest in youth’? This is who they are.”

Arthur also sees Knaack as unusual in his willingness to invest in “potential, not experience.” In 2012, as an Australian Ambassadorial Scholar in Germany, she had a brief exchange with him at a club meeting. That led to her speaking about her “Rotary moment” at a Berlin peace forum sponsored by 2012-13 RI President Sakuji Tanaka. After her presentation, she thought she was done. But Knaack, who had organized the forum and was now putting together a Rotary institute, had other ideas. “I had just finished speaking to hundreds of Rotarians,” she recalls. “I was feeling so great, and he said, ‘Do you want to help with the institute?’ and I said, ‘Yes!’”

Like other Rotarians, Arthur perceives the depth of Knaack’s persuasive personality. “He’s super funny and nice, but he’s dead serious when it comes to certain things. Which is why he’s such an interesting leader: He can show up on so many different levels when you need him.”

Holger and Susanne Knaack love to travel, but they have lived their entire lives not far from where they were born: she in Ratzeburg and he in the nearby village of Groß Grönau, about 40 miles northeast of Hamburg. Their upbringings were remarkably similar. Each was born in 1952 and lived over the shop of the family business: Susanne’s father and grandfather were sausage makers, and Holger’s family bakery was founded by his great-great-great-grandfather in 1868. “We were very loved,” Holger remembers. “Everybody took care of you; everybody always knew where you were.”

Hubertus Eichblatt also grew up in Ratzeburg, where his sister and Susanne, whose maiden name was Horst, were childhood friends. “The Horst family had a very open house, and it’s exactly the same with Holger,” he says. “Friends are always coming in and out.”

Holger and Susanne live in the home that once belonged to Susanne’s grandmother; next door, Susanne’s sister, Sabine Riebensahm, lives in the house where the two grew up. About a decade ago, after her husband died, Holger’s sister, Barbara Staats, moved into an apartment on the top floor of that house. The two homes have a total of nine guest rooms, and what with Barbara’s 12 grandchildren, dozens of current and former Youth Exchange students, and various other friends, at least one of those rooms is usually occupied.

Every morning, everyone meets for coffee in a cozy nook off Holger and Susanne’s living room, where floor-to-ceiling windows offer views of the Küchensee, one of four lakes that surround Ratzeburg. They often lunch together as well, followed by more coffee. Then Holger has a ritual: He folds his long frame onto a little sofa for a nap while Susanne, Barbara, and Sabine continue their chat. “He likes to hear us talking while he’s napping,” Sabine says.

The four share duties, including shopping and cooking. “When someone needs something, you just shout,” Holger says. “I think this is the perfect way to live: together. The secret to anything is to ask: What’s our goal? This is exactly our goal, how we live right now.”

One Saturday in December, Holger, Susanne, Barbara, and Sabine are preparing boeuf bourguignon to serve at a dinner party for 23 close friends the Knaacks will be hosting the next day. They’re simultaneously planning the menu for Christmas, when they’ll have 15 people — 16 if a young Egyptian woman who is studying in Germany, the daughter of some Rotarians they met at a Rotary institute in Sharm el-Sheikh, takes them up on their invitation.

Helmut Knoth calls the Knaacks’ hospitality “a stroke of luck for Rotary. At least once a year we have a party there, in their beautiful garden,” he says. “When the weather is nice, we go swimming. In winter, there’s a traditional event for Holger’s birthday. We meet at the rowing club and hike around the lake.” All the birthday gifts are donations to the Karl Adam Foundation, which Knaack founded to support the rowing club. (Ratzeburg is world-famous for its rowing club, whose members formed the core of the German teams that won gold at the 1960, 1968, 2000, 2004, and 2012 Olympics. The club’s co-founder and longtime trainer, a local high school teacher named Karl Adam, is considered one of the best rowing coaches of all time and developed what’s known as the “Ratzeburg style.”)

Looking through family photo albums, the Knaacks talk about childhood vacations to the seaside — Holger and his family to the island of Sylt on the North Sea, and Susanne and her family to the Baltic Sea coast. A few kilometers from their home, Holger’s family also had a small summer house with a large garden where they would spend weekends. The forests and meadows were his to explore. “It was a perfect childhood,” he says.

Holger’s boyhood home was situated about 500 meters from a small river, the Wakenitz, that formed the border with East Germany. “For me, that was really the end of the world,” he remembers. In the summer, he and his friends would test their courage by swimming across the river. On the other side was a swamp, a minefield, and watchtowers manned by East German guards. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he says, “the first thing we did was to explore the other side by bicycle. All the watchtowers were open. I had never seen our own village, or our own house, from that perspective.”

As a young man, on holidays and weekends, Holger worked as a driver for his family bakery. After finishing secondary school he learned the trade, working in another bakery for two years for his Ausbildung, or apprenticeship. “So I can bake a lot of things,” he says cheerfully. “And I still like to bake. You have to love what you do in order to be very good. Whatever marketing techniques you may use, it’s all about the quality. Quality is about loving the product and trying to make it the best you can. But you have to take your time. That’s the secret to many things.”

After completing his Ausbildung and another year of internship in a large bread factory in Stuttgart, he went to the city of Kiel to study business administration. At the first student assembly, he caught sight of his future wife. “I saw Susanne on the 20th of September 1972,” he says. “I remember that quite well.”

Holger didn’t make the same impression on Susanne, perhaps because there were 94 men and only three women in their class. But they soon got acquainted, and on weekends, they would drive home together to each work in their family’s business. Before returning to Kiel on Sunday evenings, they would load up the car with bread from the Knaack bakery and sausage from the Horst shop. “Our friends always knew to come over on Mondays,” Susanne says with a laugh.

They graduated in 1975 and got married the next year. Each of them continued to work in their own family’s business. At the time, the Knaack bakery had several shops and about 50 employees. After taking over from his father in the late 1970s, Knaack decided to expand the company. He also decided that he wanted to know exactly where the grain used to bake his bread was coming from. So he turned to his friend Hubertus Eichblatt, a farmer, who started a cooperative with other farmers. Knaack also worked with Günther Fielmann, Europe’s largest optician, who invested in cultivating organic grain on his own farm, Hof Lütjensee. Together Knaack and Fielmann built their own mill and marketed organic baked goods —something new 30 years ago. “Holger was always very innovative,” Eichblatt says, “very forward-thinking about those kinds of things.”

Another of Knaack’s innovations was to move the baking of the bread into the shops. Before that, bread was baked in the factory and the loaves were trucked to the shops. Knaack’s idea was to continue to make the dough in the factory, but then to freeze it in portions that were distributed to the shops to be baked. His motto was Der frische Bäcker – “the fresh baker.” Today, almost every bakery in Germany does it that way.

Knaack kept expanding the business; eventually there were about 50 shops and the factory with hundreds of employees. He received an offer to buy his company from an internationally active firm that was investing in bakeries. It was a very good offer, and Knaack took it. Still a young man in his 40s, he pursued other business ventures and took up golf (and was quickly tapped to be president of his golf club). He had been an active member of Round Table, an organization for people under age 40; at 39, he joined the Rotary club in the nearby town of Mölln (remaining a member there even when a new club was chartered shortly afterward in Ratzeburg with many of his friends as members). And before long, he found his calling with Rotary Youth Exchange.

Medieval Ratzeburg, with its ancient cathedral and half-timbered burghers’ houses, is situated on an island surrounded by four glacial lakes. The northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein is dotted with such lakes; winding roads lead through rolling green countryside past farms and villages built in the characteristic regional style of brick architecture. But the students who have stayed with Holger and Susanne have found something much deeper than a picture-postcard experience of Germany.

Juraj Dvořák was one of the first students the Knaacks hosted, in 1996. After returning home to Slovakia, the 16-year-old sent a card to Holger and Susanne, who invited him back for another visit. But when Dvořák’s father died of a heart attack, the young man told the Knaacks he couldn’t come after all. Holger and Susanne, along with Dvořák’s mother, insisted the visit go on as planned.

“I stayed one month with them, and they did everything to help me,” Dvořák recalls. “Since then we have been close friends. If I had not met Holger and Susanne, and if they had not mentored me in many aspects of my life, I would not have achieved what I have.” Dvořák now heads a private equity company in Vienna, but he’s not talking about material success. “I went from zero to somebody, not in terms of money, but in terms of a healthy personality.”

He and Holger “always had deep discussions,” says Dvořák, who still visits every year. “He told me that money is not the most important thing, that I have to enjoy my work and I should also enjoy life. He told me I should travel and see the world. And he took me to many meetings with his friends, Rotarians. I didn’t understand why at the time, but when I got older, I realized it was an absolutely unique chance to learn how to behave with people you don’t know. He grew me up.”

About Holger and Susanne, he says: “They have a big heart and a strong responsibility for the people they are mentoring. They are different from other people. They are championship league people.”

The Knaacks take that responsibility to mentor students seriously. “The major goal of Youth Exchange is to dive into another culture, to learn everything you can about that culture,” Holger says. “And the amazing thing about Youth Exchange is that parents send their kids around the globe and trust that Rotarians will treat them like their own children. It’s something that makes us unique. No other service organization does it this way.”

Paula Miranda spent three months with the Knaacks, who were her first hosts during her exchange year in 2008. She arrived in Ratzeburg from her home in Argentina in January: “I remember it was 4 p.m. It was already dark in Germany, and I was like, oh, my God, where am I? And they welcomed me with a German meal.”

When Miranda turned 19 a month later, Holger and Susanne organized a birthday party with some of her new friends from school. “They made barbecue asado like we do in Argentina,” she recalls. “They wanted to make me feel at home, and I really appreciated that. My year wouldn’t have been the same without them. I really love them.”

Alois Serwaty, a past governor of District 1870, first met the Knaacks 25 years ago at a German Multi-District Youth Exchange conference. “Both Holger and Susanne have an uncomplicated and open manner that appeals to and motivates young people,” he says. “When you meet them, you recognize right away that they like young people. Holger’s attitude is that Rotary must remain young and that working for and with young people keeps you young.”

Dvořák agrees: “I was with Holger in December, and he has not changed in 24 years. He’s still the same, maybe just some wrinkles. This Youth Exchange program gives him energy.”

A phrase you hear often among German Rotaractors is auf Augenhöhe begegnen — to meet someone at eye level. “That means everyone is equal, on a level playing field,” Susanne says. “It doesn’t make any difference if someone is a director or a driver. You discuss something and come up with a solution without the other person feeling like he’s received an order.”

According to his friends and family, Holger has a real flair for this. “If he can’t do something himself, he can delegate really well,” Susanne laughs. “He can recognize who would be good at something. It’s a talent of his.”

One example, she says, is the success he had working with Rotaractors on the Rotary institute in Berlin. “They said, ‘We’ll do the breakout sessions,’ and instead of saying, ‘You can’t do that,’ he said, ‘Go ahead.’ He trusts people to succeed. But he’s still in the background keeping an eye on things. It was the same for the convention in Hamburg,” where Knaack and Andreas von Möller were co-chairs of the 2019 Host Organization Committee. “There were lots of Rotaractors involved there too.”

One of her husband’s main goals, Susanne says, is to continue to bring Rotary and Rotaract closer together. “He’s excited about what he wants to accomplish.” And when he’s excited about something, “he’s able to get others excited as well,” adds Susanne’s sister, Sabine. As Brittany Arthur noted, “You feel like you’re investing in his vision.”

Over cappuccinos in the sunny cafe of Ratzeburg’s Hotel Seehof, with its views of the sparkling Küchensee, Knaack’s friends Hubertus Eichblatt, Helmut Knoth, Jens-Uwe Janssen, and Andreas-Peter Ehlers — like Holger, all members of the Rotary Club of Herzogtum Lauenburg-Mölln — agree that he possesses a certain genius for marshaling volunteers. Ehlers remembers how it was when he served as district secretary during Knaack’s year as district governor. “Before that time,” he says, “under other governors, it was always ‘somebody should do this’ or ‘who is going to do this?’ But Holger would say, very specifically, ‘Hubertus, I’ve been thinking about it, and you’re the perfect person to do this. Here’s how I envision it. This is just right for you, Hubertus, I would really love it if you did this. It’s great that you’re going to do this!’ The way he puts it to you, you can’t say no. And you do it gladly, because he doesn’t hand it to you and then walk away. He comes back in a month and asks, ‘Hubertus, everything going OK? Can I help with anything?’ ”

Eichblatt laughs at this depiction, but stresses that Knaack is successful because his enthusiasm is infectious — and because he sets the example: “He exemplifies these positive characteristics, so it’s relatively easy for him to convince people to do things.”

As they chat about Knaack’s good qualities, they echo what many people say — that he’s never in a bad mood. But close friends that they are, they insist he’s not perfect. “We have to find a weakness,” muses Eichblatt, before settling on a benign character flaw. “He’s very fashion-conscious. His glasses!”

The mention of Knaack’s signature eyewear elicits an immediate reaction from the group. “He’s the only one who wears glasses like that,” Ehlers says. “And if they break, no problem: He has another pair!”

“They’re his trademark,” Knoth adds. “I’ve only ever known him to wear these glasses. And he seldom wears a tie. Jeans, always. He looks youthful. He is youthful!” The old friends nod and laugh as they finish their cappuccinos.

Knaack’s philosophy — that no matter how hard you work, you should also have fun — applies especially to Rotary. “Traveling around, talking with people, is really fun for him,” says Susanne, a charter member of the Rotary E-Club Hamburg Connect. “Rotary is fun for him — and it’s just as much fun for me.”

Knaack wants everyone to enjoy Rotary — and to be proud to be part of it. “All of us love this organization, and all of us should feel we ought to do something to make Rotary stronger,” he insists. “It’s not hard to do more: be more involved in your club, more interested in your friends, more involved in projects and programs. Ask yourself: Is our club involved in youth service? Can we come up with better ideas for fundraising? And the club also has a responsibility to make people feel good, feel welcome, feel proud. It has to feel special to be a Rotarian.”

As he thinks about the year ahead, he notes that a Rotary president gets invited to lots of events, including district conferences, and sends a representative to most of them. But Knaack plans to attend — if only virtually — the conference in District 1940, whose governor this year, Edgar Friedrich, is a member of the Rotary Club of Herzogtum Lauenburg-Mölln. “I think you’re allowed to make an exception for your own district, especially if the district governor is from your own club,” Knaack says. “Your Rotary club is really important. Whatever office you have had in Rotary, and however important you were, at the very end, you’re always a member of your own Rotary club and happy to be among your friends.

“That’s why we need to take care of our Rotary clubs, and our friends in our clubs. It doesn’t matter if you were president. At the end, it’s important that you’re among friends.”

• This story originally appeared in the July 2020 issue of The Rotarian magazine.

With help from a Rotary Foundation global grant, a group of women in rural Costa Rica are using ecotourism to enrich their families’ futures

by Diana Schoberg Photography by Ricardo Morales Portillo

Drive east from the small city of Turrialba in the mountainous central region of Costa Rica, and after about an hour you will find yourself traveling down a bumpy gravel road. Cross a narrow bridge and you will find the even smaller town of Mollejones, which is where Karen and Evelyn García Fuentes grew up on a coffee farm. The farm belongs to their father, who had inherited the land from his grandfather.

When Karen and Evelyn were in their late teens, they left town and went to college. Moving to the city is the dream of many rural teenagers the world over. But after college, the sisters decided to return to Mollejones. Finding work close to home was difficult, but Karen had heard about a business in Costa Rica that raised butterflies for export. Karen set to work on learning what it would take to launch a similar enterprise. “We wanted our own project,” Evelyn says.

At the beginning, their father didn’t believe in the idea — and the butterflies terrified their mother. But Karen worked hard and focused on the business. Evelyn joined her, and their mother now works with them too. Another sister is handling the marketing and social media, and their father has given over more and more of his coffee farm to the butterflies. “The business has united the family,” Karen says.

The traditional perception of rural farmers is that their kids need to study so they can eventually leave. But the García sisters came back home. “We broke that cycle for our farm and our community,” Karen says.

The midmorning sun beats down on the García sisters as they smile and pose next to a colorfully painted sign that says Hogar de Mariposas: Home of the Butterflies. Karen McDaniels, a visitor from the United States, snaps their photo. “We’ll use these in your brochure, OK?” she says, before climbing a flight of earthen steps and walking a muddy path to see the butterfly sanctuary.

A member of the Rotary Club of Denton, Texas, McDaniels has come to Mollejones to inspect firsthand the impact of a Rotary Foundation global grant championed by her club in partnership with the Rotary Club of Cartago, Costa Rica. The grant has three components that address business training, aquaponics, and an eco-hotel. Among other things, the grant provides support for the García sisters and other local women who recently launched a tourism cooperative to attract visitors to experience the area’s rainforests, waterfalls, butterflies, and birds, as well as its traditional way of life. Rotarians partnered with the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center; based in Turrialba, the organization, known as CATIE (pronounced “KAH-tee-ay”), has been working with the women for years.

At the sanctuary, hundreds of butterflies flutter about. Like a suitor trying too hard, they’re almost aggressively friendly, landing on visitors’ shoulders, hands, and bags. A gaudy orange and black butterfly even latches on to the lips of Eliécer Vargas, a professor of sustainable tourism at CATIE. “She fell in love with me!” he jokes as the butterfly gives him a kiss.

According to town leaders, until the late 20th century, Mollejones was a coffee and sugarcane town. But when commodity prices began to plummet two decades ago, half of its population left to find new ways to make a living. That’s when the idea for community-based tourism took root. The village lies near the Río Pacuare, where you will find some of the planet’s most celebrated whitewater rapids. In 2011, Mollejones hosted the World Rafting Championships, and the following year, a few of the residents went to CATIE for help strengthening their tourism industry. Soon after, Vargas and his students became involved.

Full of ideas, energy, and one-liners, Vargas is the primary conduit between the Rotarians and the women. He’s the perfect complement to the more reserved and no-nonsense McDaniels. Born in Saudi Arabia, McDaniels was educated in Switzerland and the United States. She spent most of her career working around the world for 3M; after retirement, she founded two nonprofits — one in Cambodia and another in Indonesia — to help the people she had met while living in those countries. When the children of the waste pickers she was working with in Indonesia grew sick from drinking tainted water, she struggled to find assistance for them. Someone suggested she contact a Rotary club there. The Rotary Club of Jakarta Cilandak stepped in, and McDaniels was hooked. 

In 2017, McDaniels joined the Rotary Club of Denton, where she spearheaded the ecotourism global grant. Vargas, who had never worked with Rotary before, wasn’t sure what to expect. He didn’t even know if the Rotarians would follow through on their promises. “Then I met Karen,” he says. “She demands, and she delivers. She walks the talk. And after meeting the Rotary team, I realized that she pulls in people who want to make a difference.”

Angie Montoya Fernández’s father had been a coffee picker, but that’s a seasonal job. He didn’t want to travel  to work in the capital city of San José, a couple of hours away, because he wanted to remain with his family. Instead, he and his wife learned English and became tour guides. “When I grew up, I wanted to be a tour guide too,” Montoya says.

As she talks, Montoya stands at the entryway to Guayabo National Monument, Costa Rica’s largest pre-Columbian archaeological site. A map of the landmark stands behind her, and to her side, the path to the ruins runs through a rainforest filled with ferns, vines, and epiphytes.

About 20,000 people visit the monument annually, and Montoya and her family are some of the freelance guides who show them around. To support other small, local entrepreneurs, Montoya’s mother, Rosa Fernández, had the idea to offer those visitors things to do while they’re in the area. Now, when people call to arrange a Guayabo tour, they also have an opportunity to book other options, such as a farm tour, lodging, or a cooking class. “I love the pre-Columbian history, but we need to move people to other places, too,” Montoya says.

That’s where the women’s tourism cooperative, called RETUS — Red de Emprendedoras del Turismo Sostenible de Turrialba, or Network of Women Entre-preneurs of Sustainable Tourism in Turrialba — comes into play. “The challenge for big tour operators is to trust a small tour operator or small provider,” Vargas says. “With RETUS, we hope this will give the local women a chance.”

The tourism cooperative got its start as an outreach project with Vargas’ graduate students at CATIE. “I wanted my students not just to read about sustainable tourism, but to do it,” Vargas says. He didn’t have money in his budget for outreach, but he could muster up some for research. So his students, who are studying at the center through a joint master’s program with the University of North Texas in Denton, began working with people who lived in the surrounding towns and villages. In Mollejones, for example, they held workshops where residents talked about what is unique about their community. The students transformed those conversations into experiential tour ideas that showcase the community’s heritage.

Vargas identified six women who were already working in tourism. “I call them the madrinas,” he says — the godmothers. These were women who may have been single mothers, or who raised a group of kids, or who learned English even though they had no education. Like Rosa Fernández (one of the madrinas), they went on to greater achievements and served as examples of what other women could accomplish.

Vargas told the madrinas that he wanted to help them form a tourism network, but it was up to them to choose the women who would be part of it. He told them to think of themselves as businesswomen and to envision what they wanted to happen in their communities and how they could help make that dream a reality. “I told them bring the women, but don’t tell them this is a project,” Vargas says. “Tell them this is a movement: ‘Don’t be a part of RETUS because you want to help yourself. Be a part of RETUS because you want to help women just like you.’” Three of the original madrinas decided they wanted to be involved, and they ended up with 18 women participating in some of the early phases of the tourism cooperative.

What those women were most eager to learn were business skills, things like administration, accounting, and marketing. Exactly the kinds of things Rotarians are experts in.

Marielos Salazar Cabezas slaps a ball of clay between her hands. Behind her, the muted tones of the buckets filled with mud contrast with the bright prism of paint bottles scattered throughout her pottery studio. A few times each year, Salazar heads into the nearby mountains to dig up soil that she strains and drains until the clay separates. The process can take up to a year before it’s the consistency she needs to craft the pots, bowls, piggy banks, Nativity scenes, and other unique artifacts that line her studio’s shelves.

Salazar met two of the madrinas at a craft fair, and they invited her to join the tourism cooperative. “I like the interaction,” she says. “I believe this is a great opportunity. We’ve got a lot of support.”

Some of that support came during the training workshops made possible by funding from the global grant; most of those classes were held in the boardroom on the third floor of CATIE’s administration building. During the financial portion of the training, Salazar learned how to calculate what she should be charging for her creations. Now, she starts with 2 kilos of clay and logs the time she spends working on a piece to determine the cost of her labor.

Salazar writes McDaniels a receipt after selling her some pottery. On the first day of class, all of the attendees had received a receipt book and a cost of goods sold financial sheet, among other things. “We explained the receipt book, how it works, and why it’s important,” McDaniels says. “Now they can get their clients’ names and contact information to follow up with them by email.”

The women in the cooperative had told McDaniels that they wanted to learn English, so each day of the workshops would begin with English games and exercises led by Cathy Henderson, a member of the Rotary Club of Denton-Lake Cities and a real estate agent who teaches English as a Second Language in Denton. “I’d have perfume samples, sprays, lip balm, and lotions for prizes,” Henderson recalls. And candy: A particular favorite was Life Savers mints. The women were paired up with Texas Rotarians to continue practicing over WhatsApp.

“These are phenomenal, hardworking women,” says Vanessa Ellison, a member of the Rotary Club of Denton Evening, who trained the women in marketing and social media. “They have a lot of cultural knowledge that would be attractive to tourists. We were simply there to help them put that out there.”

As McDaniels walks through the studio, Salazar tells her how the project benefited the women involved and the community. She can now afford to hire a woman to help clean twice a week, so now that woman has work too — and the benefits of the workshops and the global grant are evident elsewhere as well.

When Vargas and his students conducted a sustainability assessment in Mollejones a few years ago, they discovered that the tourism projects themselves were sustainable except for one thing: People were feeding tilapia to the guests who had booked a meal. And the tilapia was coming from other countries. Vargas and his students looked into a local source for tilapia, but the work it entailed to transport the fish wasn’t feasible for the three or four fillets that hosts needed at a time.

Vargas had some experience with aquaponics — a system that combines raising fish with hydroponics, the science of growing plants in nutrient-enriched water — and he thought it might be the solution. He proposed the idea to the Rotarians, who included four aquaponics systems in the global grant, one for each of the three communities where they were working and a fourth at CATIE. Texas and Cartago Rotarians, as well as local volunteers, pitched in to construct the systems. “We were happy to get the opportunity to go into the rural communities in person and meet people and help them,” says Gloria Margarita Davila Calero, a Cartago Rotarian.

Given that it takes a fine balance between the number of fish and the number of plants to keep both alive, this phase of the project started small. “We want the technology to work,” Vargas says. “We don’t want to create false expectations.” The women in the cooperative were told that this was a research project, not a giveaway, and that they needed to sign on for one year to see if the system could be perfected. When that phase concludes later this year, the women could train other residents who might want a system of their own.

Brian Glenn, a retired fire battalion chief and the president-elect of the Denton-Lake Cities club, helped get this phase of the project started. He had become an expert in the science of water pressure and hoses during his career, and that knowledge translated well to the aquaponics systems. “It was on a different scale from what we used in the fire department, but the same hydraulic concepts apply,” he says. Plus Glenn knew how to swing a hammer from part-time jobs over the years, so that skill came in handy too. Once the variables are worked out, he says, Rotarians plan to make a kit with the materials needed to start an aquaponics garden, which Rotary clubs could then sponsor.

María Eugenia Brenes Araya received one of the pilot systems. At her home in Guayabo, she and her daughters Idali and Alicia are wearing matching shirts with the RETUS logo on the front and their names on the sleeves. The family offers a homestay, a cute two-bedroom unit at the back of their house. Guests can learn about the aquaponics garden and the family’s huerta, a traditional vegetable garden made of rows of mounded earth. In the front of the house, there is a permaculture garden, which takes a more localized, ecologically conscious approach to farming. “I started with a little idea, and when I went to the training with the Rotarians, I found I had other ideas to implement,” says Brenes, who is the cooperative’s treasurer.

Like mother, like daughter. Since they were already providing guests with somewhere to sleep, Idali, 18, had the idea to serve them a good meal. Now she’s thinking about starting a catering service and offering traditional gastronomic tours. Like the García sisters, she hopes that, rather than move to a distant city, she has found a way to stay close to home.

At a table overlooking the gardens, McDaniels, Vargas, and others sit down to one of Idali’s lunches. In the distance, the towering mountains provide a breathtaking backdrop. The meal, featuring produce from the family’s backyard, is equally spectacular. This could be the beginning of a brilliant career.

As she approaches a sky-blue house on the CATIE campus, McDaniels breaks into a grin. “It’s beautiful!” she exclaims. This was the first house built on the campus, in 1942, and since then, it has had various functions: employee housing, a Spanish school, student housing. But it had fallen into disrepair. Water leaked, and there were bats. “When I stayed here last year, you’d wake up with termite dust on you,” says Lynne Corvaglia, a student from Toronto who is the house’s resident manager.

Vargas had long dreamed of turning the dilapidated structure, which he calls the Sustainability House, into something more. In the early phase of Rotary’s involvement, McDaniels had stayed here as she toured nearby towns with the Cartago Rotarians. She saw an opportunity to rebuild and repurpose the house as an ecolodge for tour groups and as a place for RETUS members to meet and train, as well as welcome their guests. “Karen is like that,” Vargas says. “She’s a businessperson. She connects things.”

The Rotarians made renovating the Sustainability House the third component of their global grant. In July, Texas Rotarians and Interactors joined the Costa Rican Rotarians, RETUS, and local volunteers in a renovation blitz. Today, the high ceilings that had shed termite dust are repaired. Plywood was removed to reveal the original shiplap walls. Large open windows original to the house provide a view of the experimental gardens outside. The rewired house has high-speed Wi-Fi, an accessible bathroom, and an outdoor kitchen and patio lit with Christmas lights, and there are plans to hire someone to work from the house and promote the ecotours now being offered in nearby towns. “It’s going to help get clients for every single woman who works in RETUS,” says Marielos Salazar, the potter, who is also the group’s secretary. “This is a great opportunity, and we have to work together to make this grow.”

Marjorie Moya Ramírez, who has led the tour through Mollejones that began at the García sisters’ butterfly garden, now welcomes McDaniels and others to her family’s home. A veteran, with her sister Luisa, of Rotary’s three weeklong business workshops, Moya shows off the bags that she, her sister, and her mother sew and sell. Like the other women in the cooperative, Moya refers to her various enterprises as “projects,” a word that hints at the different way she and her associates view the economics of their situation. “When you talk to these women about money,” Vargas explains, “they say that, for them, it’s about their families and the needs of their community. The traditional model of maximizing profits has its limits in the communities we work in. We have to talk about social entrepreneurship.”

The day ends at the Mollejones community center with a traditional tico (that is, Costa Rican) meal of casado: rice, beans, meat, and salad. Some local children have joined the group, and one girl tells McDaniels about her plans to study tourism in college and then return home to pursue her career. As Karen García said earlier in the day, the cycle of sons and daughters eventually leaving this small town to search for work elsewhere has been broken.

After the meal, everyone holds hands and sits in a circle, singing a song about children helping children. As the sun sets behind the mountains, some of the girls rise and begin performing traditional dances. Their skirts swirl about them in a blaze of color, and the girls smile broadly, mariposas hermosas — beautiful butterflies — floating above a garden of song, their futures made brighter with a lift from Rotary.

• This story originally appeared in the May 2020 issue of The Rotarian magazine.

Rotary announces $35 million to support a polio-free world

News Release

Contact: Michelle Kloempken, (847) 866-3247, michelle.kloempken@rotary.org

EVANSTON, Ill. (17 January 2017) — Rotary today announced $35 million in grants to support the global effort to end polio, bringing the humanitarian service organization’s contribution to $140 million since January 2016.

Nearly half of the funds Rotary announced today ($16.15 million) will support the emergency response campaigns in Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin (Chad, northern Cameroon, southern Niger and Central African Republic). Four cases of polio were detected in Nigeria in 2016, which had previously not seen a case since July 2014.

With these cases, funding is needed to support rapid response plans in Nigeria and surrounding countries to stop the outbreak.

While significant strides have been made against the paralyzing disease, with just 35 cases reported in 2016, polio remains a threat in hard-to-reach and underserved areas, and conflict zones. To sustain this progress, and protect all children from polio, experts say $1.5 billion is needed.

In addition to supporting the response in the Lake Chad Basin region, funding has been allocated to support polio eradication efforts in Afghanistan ($7.15 million), Pakistan ($4.2 million), Somalia ($4.64 million), and South Sudan ($2.19 million). A final grant in the amount of $666,845 will support technical assistance in UNICEF’s West and Central Africa Regional Office.

Rotary has contributed more than $1.6 billion, including matching funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and countless volunteer hours since launching its polio immunization program, PolioPlus, in 1985. In 1988, Rotary became a spearheading partner in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative with the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and was later joined by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Since the initiative launched, the incidence of polio has plummeted by more than 99.9 percent, from about 350,000 cases a year to 35 confirmed in 2016, and no cases in 2017. 

About Rotary

Rotary brings together a global network of volunteer leaders dedicated to tackling the world's most pressing humanitarian challenges. Rotary connects 1.2 million members of more than 35,000 Rotary clubs in over 200 countries and geographical areas. Their work improves lives at both the local and international levels, from helping families in need in their own communities to working toward a polio-free world. To access broadcast quality video footage and still photos go to: The Newsmarket.