Imagine Rotary! Imagine it accommodating and fulfilling all of your service desires and let's continue growing as a team!
I have been working on a schedule for the year so all Rotarians are confident with the dates and times! As of now I will be sending out weekly notices and a calendar link. This link will be on the website and continuously updated. Please be sure to review and set your calendars for upcoming meetings! If you have any speakers to request or suggest please reach out via call of text anytime, 219-608-8361 or president@mcrotary.org.
Our next meeting on 9-8-22 from 12p-1p will be held at:
The Salvation Army
1201 Franklin St, Michigan City, IN 46360
This will be a lunch meeting catered by Sweet Lou's!
This meetings speaker is Jim Welborne, Long time Rotarian and recent club president. The topic will be discussing his journeys through India administering Polio vaccines! Jim will give us all great insight and knowledge on how polio was in the past and how it is very different today. This information should give us many ideas to consider dealing with a post pandemic community now.
Please join us for this event and be sure to mark your calendars for the upcoming events!
We are continuing our new monthly process for September as follows:
1st Thursday (7a-8a) TBD
2nd Thursday (12p-1p) Salvation Army 1201 Franklin St.
3rd Thursday (12p-1p) Salvation Army 1201 Franklin St.
4th Thursday (5:45p-7:30p) Hokkaido Sushi Restaurant
Please follow the 2 links below for registration. It will guide you through the new process we are using for upcoming meetings to confirm who will or will not be in attendance, including any guests!
Please be sure to RSVP, come enjoy lunch and hearing from our own club past president Jim Welborne's time traveling and administering Polio vaccines! I look forward to seeing you all on Thursday from 12-1!
Please read the entire text message and follow both links. 😊
Members of the Rotary Club of Michigan City and local citizens gathered at the former Elston Middle School to celebrate the legacy of Rotary service to the community. Stretching across the school lobby wall is the giant mural donated in 1925 by local Rotarians. “The painting is both a historic and artistic treasure" says Kirk Roger, President of the Michigan City Historic Society. The mural is painted on three panels with the center panel measuring 32ft x 10ft. It is a mostly accurate representation of the area at the mouth of Trail Creek just a few years after the first settlers arrived in 1833. By 1840 Michigan City was a busy shipping port for commerce between the east and the developing Middle West. Even a wagon pulled by oxen is shown bringing goods to the port. Dock workers, traders, fishermen, and native Americans are all depicted with local teachers, students and citizens having served as models. The most striking feature of the composition is the giant sand dune known as the “Hoosier Slide” which was later sold off for the manufacture of glass.
From 1925 – 1980 the Mural was seen by generations of Michigan City students sitting in the Elston High School Study Hall. As renovation of that school commenced the mural was restored and moved to the entryway of the adjacent Junior High School. In 2004 that school was remodeled as a Middle School and the mural was moved to its current location in the school lobby.
The artist was Robert Wadsworth Grafton who was a nationally recognized prolific painter. He was primarily active in Michigan City, Indiana although he spent much time in Chicago and traveled extensively. He studied at the Chicago Academy of Design and then at the Art Institute of Chicago. Anxious to expand his horizons, he later studied at the Academie Julian in Paris and also in Holland and England. His work included landscapes, murals, and portraits of US Presidents, Indiana Governors and many prominent businessmen.
Thank you, Matt Kubik, for organizing and discussing the mural at our meeting.
The Guatemala Literacy Project is working to reverse the country’s low literacy rates and keep children in school.
When Rotary International President Jennifer Jones visited a primary school in a farming village in Guatemala’s highlands and asked who wants to become the country’s president, the students’ hands shot into the air. Before a Rotary-supported reading program began in the village of Chajalajyá, students would often drop out after a couple years of school. “Reading will change our society,” Principal Vilma Nizeth Moreira told Jones during an April visit to the school. “These are powerful tools we are giving children to eradicate ignorance.” Schools often teach in Spanish, but about 25 languages are spoken in the country, and there are few written materials in local languages.
The Guatemala Literacy Project has worked for 25 years to improve reading rates. In 1997, Joe and Jeff Berninger, brothers from Ohio, were volunteering as English teachers at a Guatemalan school that had no books. The two launched a project to solve that. The day the books arrived, there was a huge celebration, and a Rotarian dentist volunteering nearby heard the noise and asked what was going on. “He said this would be a perfect project for Rotary,” says Joe Berninger, now a member of the Rotary Club of Pathways, Ohio, which coordinates the project.
With his play, Visions, a Rotarian has turned his addiction into art and provided new roles for former addicts.
In the winter of 1989, Robert Lo Bue experienced an awakening: He wanted to join the theater.
Lo Bue was working on the assembly line at an automotive plant. Nearing 40, he had no acting experience to speak of and a long history of drug and alcohol abuse. No matter. He auditioned for a production of The Passion Play near his home in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, and landed the part of Young James the Apostle.
His Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor was not pleased. "He said, 'No way. You got a wife in recovery and you just came out of rehab and you got a baby daughter. Your son is in counseling from both of you using. Your plate is full,'" Lo Bue recalled in his booming Jersey brogue. "I said, 'What do you mean? I want this. I need this!' He just kept screaming, 'Your plate is full!'"
Lo Bue heeded the warning and bided his time. A year later, he landed his first role. "I came out on stage in a black ski mask and stabbed someone," he says. "That was it. I must have invited 40 people to that production." This troupe, the Bergen County Players, encouraged members to create their own material. Lo Bue was no more a writer than an actor. But he knew he had a story to tell — the story of addiction. At its heart was an account of Lo Bue's lowest moment.
"I was in the county jail, with assault charges pending. A bunch of inmates went after the biggest guy in our cell and tried to shove his head in the toilet. When they were done with him, they were gonna do me." Lo Bue got on his knees and prayed for help. "Then ... something happened. I felt a great surrendering inside me." Unexpectedly, the situation calmed. He was able to sleep.
This episode became the basic template of Visions: a series of raw, unfiltered vignettes showing addicts hitting bottom and finding grace. "The play is for people in the early stages of recovery," Lo Bue, seated at the kitchen table of his current home in Teaneck, explained. "They don't have the greatest attention spans, so you've got to show them what they know: those bottoms. Boom, boom, boom."
Please follow the 2 links below for registration. It will guide you through the new process we are using for upcoming meetings to confirm who will or will not be in attendance, including any guests!
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