Renée Riley-Adams exchanges club banners with a member of the Rotary Club of Ubatuba, São Paulo, Brazil.
By Renée Riley-Adams, Rotary Club of Ashland, Oregon, USA
My husband and I recently traveled to Brazil on vacation to visit my brother. The one-hour Rotary meeting I went to while there remains one of my most treasured memories from the trip.
Though I understood perhaps only ten percent of what was being said, it was the welcome I received that made the experience so worthwhile. There is a magic in knowing that I share the same values as the people I met. The hearty handshakes I received and the kisses on my cheek spoke volumes of the shared fellowship that is Rotary around the world.
Ubatuba is three and a half hours by car from São Paulo, where Rotary’s International Convention will take place this June. In my broken Portuguese, I could make that connection, along with another question that brought smiles to their faces: “How long have you been in Rotary?” Whether the answer was one year or twenty, I could tell these people were dedicated.
With 14 members, the Ubatuba Club was much smaller than my Ashland Club of 110 and met in the …read more
Source:: Rotary International Blog
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