This past Tuesday, the members of the Rotary Club of Carbondale-Breakfast did a very foolhardy thing. They elected me Vice President (President Nominee). And how will I get a post out of this? Easy Peasy! (And, by the way, breakfast is usually not served at meetings, so don’t show up hoping to score some eggs and bacon.)*
Each November is Rotary Foundation Month, and that’s when the Rotary Foundation’s programs are highlighted. Last week, a member of the other Carbondale Rotary Club (it meets at noon and lunch is served) came and spoke about her trip to inoculate children against poliomyelitis (polio). She had spent two weeks in Togo on the West African coast along with 40 other Rotarians from the U.S., Canada, and France.
In the 1970s, Rotary International (RI) began the seemingly impossible task of eradicating polio throughout the world. The effort began in the Philippines and then extended to other countries. Immunization worked and the polio rates in those areas plummeted.
In 1988, RI, the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the Global Polio Initiative. When that program began, there were 125 polio-endemic countries and only 71 polio-free countries. Today, there are but three polio-endemic countries (Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan); the other 193 countries are considered polio-free. The initiative is heavily supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Rotarians who donate to the Polio Plus campaign through 2018 will have their donation matched twice by the Gates Foundation; a $100 donation will be matched with a $200 donation from the Gates Foundation.
The Gates Foundation web-site gives this information about “End Polio Now – Make History Today,” its joint effort with RI, “The estimated cost of the initiative’s 2013-18 Polio Eradication and Endgame Strategic Plan is $5.5 billion. Funding commitments, announced at the Global Vaccine Summit in April, total $4 billion. Unless the $1.5 billion funding gap is met, immunization levels in polio-affected countries will decrease. And if polio is allowed to rebound, within a decade, more than 200,000 children worldwide could be paralyzed every year. Rotary and the Gates Foundation are determined not to let polio make a comeback.”
Melinda French Gates earned two degrees from Duke University. As an undergrad, she majored in computer science and economics. She became a member of Kappa Alpha Theta’s Beta Rho chapter. After she graduated in 1986, she entered Duke’s MBA program. In 1987, she was hired by Microsoft and ultimately became Microsoft’s general manager of Information Products.
In 1994, she married Bill Gates and their oldest child was born two years later. In 1996, at about that time, Melinda Gates left Microsoft and since then has devoted herself to philanthropic and non-profit endeavors. In 2005, she, her husband, and musician Bono, were named Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year. One of her most recent honors is as one of Glamour magazine’s 2013 Women of the Year.
The Gates Foundation is the largest private foundation in the world. It was created in 2000 from three smaller family Foundations, the first of which was founded in 1997.
Kappa Alpha Theta husband Bill Gates in a Rotary International’s “We’re This Close” campaign PSA.
* P.S. I didn’t say that the reason I am a Rotarian is that when my husband was club president, his vice president was a woman and they decided the way to get two additional members was to bamboozle their spouses into joining. His reasoning was that I was already helping with the club’s projects, so why not become a member. A P.E.O. sister was the first female District Governor in our district and she, too, was lobbying for me to join so that there would be an additional married couple in the club (she and her husband were both club members).
(c) Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2013. All Rights Reserved.
