World Community Service

Rotary provides an extraordinary opportunity to meet humanitarian needs around the world. The Rotary Foundation has established a system of humanitarian matching grants which allows our local Rotary Clubs to meet the needs of the poor in foreign lands. Rotary International also provides a network of Rotary Clubs in over 170 countries, which can oversee grants received by beneficiaries in their own countries.

The matching grant program provides that each dollar raised by a local club, such as our own, will be matched with a dollar by our District 6900 in Georgia. Those two dollars will be matched with two more by the Rotary Foundation, producing a grant four times the amount of funds raised locally. These grants are non-competitive up to $50,000, so virtually any grant initiated by a local club, for truly humanitarian purposes, will be approved by the Foundation.

Recent examples of grants sponsored by the Thomasville Rotary Club providing school furniture and kitchen equipment for a new boarding school offering free education for native Indian children from remote mountain regions of Mexico.

Another grant provided school busses for orphan children in Tula, Russia. Their new orphanage had only one four-passenger car for almost 300 children. The busses were needed to take children to school, athletic events and field trips. The children were very excited about receiving the busses.

Other grants provided wheat combines for a particularly impoverished region of Moldova in Eastern Europe which had only one combine. In their first year, two wheat combines provided by the Thomasville and Bainbridge clubs provided 170,000 metric tons of wheat.

Our most recent grant included sending mattresses, blankets, pillows and cloths for 640 orphan children in five orphanages in Tinali, India. The orphans were largely tsunami victims but included Gypsies, children rescued from work in mines, girls rescued from prostitution and true orphans.

Matching grants for the current year involve providing a maternity clinic for a woman's prison in Russia, which will help reduce the exceptionally high infant mortality rate in Russian prisons. The grant will provide all medical equipment and supplies necessary for this new maternity clinic in the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. This grant will be overseen in Russia by the nearby Ekaterinberg Rotary Club, since all grants must be hosted by a Rotary Club in the receiving country which will then distribute the funds to ensure that they are spent exactly according to the grant budget.

The Thomasville Rotary Club has also co-sponsored a clean water grant, with the Moultrie Rotary Club serving as the primary International Sponsor. In the country of El Salvador, water is not in shortage, so instead of providing water wells, it is necessary to provide water-sealed latrines to avoid contamination of the drinking water springs and streams where the villagers bathe. This grant to provide 30 latrines in strategic locations, will markedly improve the water quality for the village of El Balsamar, El Salvador. Again, one of the Rotary clubs in the capital city, the San Salvador Sur club, is the host club and will be approving the installation of latrines by the villages Environmental Planning Committee and a team of construction workers.

This project was brought to us by a young Peace Corps volunteer from Georgia who will be living in that village for the next two years and who helped to organize this Environmental Planning Committee which ultimately decided that the latrines were the best solution to their clean water problem.

The grant for the woman's prison was brought to us by a prison ministry that travels to dozens of prisons across Russia each summer during the warm summer months to meet the humanitarian, spiritual and emotional needs of the inmates, who otherwise have little hope. The prison ministry was asked by Russian prison officials in Moscow to provide medical equipment for this particular women's prison which was among their priority needs.

Most of the grants for our club come to us from indigenous mission organizations, many of which are Christian organizations serving a broad range of needs of the poor in their respective countries. Rotary can play a small part in encouraging and enabling that work in the countries where the needs are the greatest.

For next year, there are several potential grant opportunities, and we hope to find other clubs within our district to make it possible to submit them all. One would help to equip a new orphanage in New Deli, India run by the Hope Foundation, a U.S. based charity. Another is to provide beds, clothing, educational equipment and material for an additional 740 orphan children who have been taken in by the Harvest India orphanages that we helped last year. Both of these could be accomplished with conventional matching grants.

An even greater need exists, however, to provide a charity hospital in a suburb of New Delhi, comprised of 20 poor villages with over one million population. This is the only hospital in that suburb, and the only hospital within a ten to twenty kilometer radius. A fifty year old Indian evangelical charity organization, serving much of India, has built the hospital and has begun to equip it with its first surgical theater, x ray equipment and a few crude beds, but the opportunity exists to fully equip the hospital, much like a U.S. local hospital, to provide for a broad range of needs. The hospital serves the poor at little or no cost, as well as serving those who could afford to pay for treatment. The ongoing work of the charity hospital would be supported by a combination of fees for service and donations. But a Rotary in the amount of $200,000 to $400,000 could provide most of the essential medical equipment needed to establish the work of the hospital. By increasing the hospital to 50 beds, it could attract a range of doctors and interns to meet all of the local needs.

Since this grant would involve hundreds of thousands of dollars, it would require the use of a much larger Health, Hunger and Humanity grant program which would provide ten-to-one matching. These grants are competitive grants, but it is hard to imagine a greater need than serving the medical needs of the poor in India. So we should proceed with confidence. For this HHH grant, we would need to cooperate with several clubs in South Georgia and possibly North Florida to both fund and draft the extensive proposal require for this large grant. Fortunately, we only need to come up with 10% of the grant. This would be the first of its kind for our club, and all volunteers and donors for the project are welcomed.

The coming year offers another opportunity to reach out to the poorest of the poor in the rest of the world. We thank Rotary and thank God for the opportunity to be a part of this vital work of Rotary International.