With the help of Rotarians, kids with disabilities have a league of their own.

The ball skips through the infield. The batter, Hillary Barber, takes off for first base. She rounds first and second at top speed, laughing all the way, the sun glinting off the spokes of her wheelchair. She crosses the plate with an inside-the-park home run.

Catching her breath, she says this is “the best.” Hitting homers? No. “Running.” Running the bases.

Hillary, 20, doesn’t run the way most players do. She has never walked. Still she’s a star in her Miracle League, a 21st-century version of the old ballgame.

In 2000, civic leaders in Conyers, Ga., built a baseball diamond for children with special needs. The idea was inspired by a seven-year-old named Michael who cheered his brother’s Little League team from his wheelchair. He became the town’s superfan, but he dreamed of fair territory. “I want to play,” he said. With help from local businesses, charities, and the Rotary clubs of Rockdale County and Conyers, Michael and dozens of other kids with disabilities began playing a game they called wheelchair baseball.

On opening day, a boy who’d been in a coma the previous week threw out the first rubber-coated ball. The rules were new. In what soon became known as Miracle League Baseball, each player batted once every inning. Nobody struck out – everyone was safe on every play. The field was safe too: The diamond was cushioned, rubberized, and completely flat to suit wheelchairs and walkers. Each player had a buddy – a volunteer who helped swing the bat, field the ball, push a wheelchair, and give a high-five or fist-bump when they scored a run together. The league’s slogan: “Every Child Deserves a Chance to Play Baseball.” At first, 50 kids were playing in Georgia. Soon the roster reached 250, then 1,000. New leagues sprang up until there were 270 in the United States. Today the sport has spread to Puerto Rico and to countries including Canada, Mexico, and Australia – an international pastime that has included more than 200,000 players.

“Every Miracle League is special, but they’re all a little different,” says Dan Haren, who runs Dan Haren Field in Scottsdale, Ariz. – a park named not for him but for his son, a major league pitcher.

“From his Little League days in Southern California till he graduated from Pepperdine, I missed a total of five of his games,” Haren recalls. Along the way, he noticed some families who had children with disabilities. “We’d hop out of the car and see parents spending 10 minutes unloading their child from a van.”

In 2008, Dan Haren Jr. signed a $45 million contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks. When their grandson was born, Haren and his wife moved to Arizona to help out. Haren remembered the children who couldn’t play the game the way his son did. “The blind kids, and the ones with cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy. They loved baseball too, and their families had the same dreams we did – maybe not sending a son to the major leagues, but playing the game. Sharing the game. What’s better than cheering your child as he comes around third base? Kids need to hear that.”

With contributions from the Diamondbacks, the Rotary Club of Scottsdale-Sunrise, and several of Dan Jr.’s teammates, the Harens built a $2.3 million showplace next to Scottsdale’s Cholla Park, complete with wheelchair-accessible dugouts and batting cages, cushioned outfield fences, and a two-story scoreboard.

Last spring, when his son joined the Los Angeles Dodgers, Haren stayed in Scottsdale, scheduling games for 200 players, pairing players with buddies, even serving as stadium announcer. “People ask me if we’re a sport or a charity,” he says. “I say we’re more than that. Baseball’s the magnet, but we’re about relationships.” Miracle League players and their on-field buddies – mostly teenagers who may receive community-service credit from schools and churches – often stay in touch between games. “One mother told me that we gave her child the first friend he ever had.”

Each league faces the challenge of accommodating players of varied abilities. Many have added advanced divisions that count runs, outs, wins, and losses. Some use regulation hardballs. “We’ve had autistic kids hit ’em over the fence,” Haren says. “And some of them are very numbers-minded. They get after me if I forget balls and strikes.”

Children with autism “are in a league of their own,” says Steve Madey, who gave them exactly that in Hartsdale, N.Y., home of the Miracle League of Westchester. “They may lack attention span, but some can really hit. They can run.” Working with the Westchester Jewish Community Services, Madey invented Spectrum Ball, a program designed for players on the autism spectrum. “It’s been a hit so far.”

On Father’s Day in Hartsdale, with star-spangled bunting hanging from the outfield fence, Daniel Avolio swings a bat with help from his teen buddy. Daniel, 7, is autistic and has epilepsy. “The game’s structure helps,” his father says of Spectrum Ball drills that focus on one task at a time. “He’s learning to catch and throw. To wait, to self-regulate and even socialize. And it’s fun. Late in the week he’ll say, ‘Baseball’s coming.’”

Ryan Maldonado, 15, sports baseball pants with fashionable stirrup socks. He’s been fully dressed, ready to go, since daybreak, but now he has to wait out a distraction: When a ball bounces off a player’s foot, the game stops until his buddy calms him down – a familiar Spectrum Ball timeout. Then Madey cries, “Play ball!” Ryan swings and misses four times before slapping a humpback liner over second base. He lopes around the diamond, crosses home plate without slowing down, runs to the bleachers, and gives his dad a Father’s Day hug.

The rest of the day’s tripleheader features highlights worthy of SportsCenter. There is Hillary zooming around the bases. There is Avery Schaefer holding court in the dugout. Avery uses a wheelchair and struggles to speak, but he has plenty to say. “The Yankees are going to miss D.J. when he retires,” he says of Derek Jeter. “They already miss Robinson Canó – that’s two Gold Gloves and six All-Star selections they let go by the wayside.” Rolling to the plate, he takes a one-handed swing. “I don’t always connect, but when I do, watch out.”

And there is Chase Sadowski, taking a walk. Seven-year-old Chase has steel braces on his legs. Cerebral palsy kept him in a wheelchair until his family discovered the Upsee, a harness that allows him to stand while strapped to his father’s legs. With his feet in special sandals mounted between his dad’s shoes, the boy’s hands are free to swing a bat. Father and son take the field with stiff-legged steps, moving in tandem as if Chase were piloting a giant robot.

“Daddy, c’mon,” he says. “I’m up!”

When the day is over, there is no final tally of runs, hits, and errors, but the league standings are official. Everybody is tied for first. — Kevin Cook

See photos from a Miracle League ballgame (by Alyce Henson):

Eat your way through São Paulo, Brazil, South America’s culinary capital and the site of the 2015 RI Convention.

Which is the better city, Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo? That is the great debate that dominates Brazilian life, and probably always will.

Rio is the global poster child for beachfront hedonism, with its mountains and jungles and beautiful people in skimpy clothing. This is something paulistanos grudgingly admit. They then invariably ask, “Where in the Marvelous City can you get a decent meal?”

Because São Paulo, its concrete towers peering from a plateau over the coastal plain, is a monument to fine living, a tropical version of New York. Its busy denizens pride themselves on being the business heart of the world’s seventh-largest national economy, and they argue with justification that Sampa, as the city is known, is the culinary capital of South America.

Aside from the sheer concentration of wealth in São Paulo – its central skyscraper canyon, the Avenida Paulista, contains 1 percent of the nation’s GDP in its milelong stretch – part of the city’s gastronomic greatness stems from having the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. This legacy of the early 20th century, when Brazil was hungry for immigrants and post-feudal Japan was suffering famine, has left an entire area of the city center, known as Liberdade, full of Japanese shops, festivals, and amazing sushi restaurants.

A few blocks away from Liberdade – if you stroll past the hulking cathedral, or Catedral da Sé, and the crumbling art nouveau facades of apartment blocks built when the center was still surrounded by tea plantations – you come to São Paulo’s ground zero: the 16th-century Jesuit mission, an oddly rural-looking relic standing on a small square and dwarfed by high-rises and grandiose century-old office buildings. The monks who ran the mission are long gone, replaced by bakers who sell a mean bolo, or cake, to be savored with Brazilian coffee in a small courtyard out back.

But to really leap into São Paulo’s exotic gourmet heart, start at the Mercado Municipal, the vast Victorian market hall that looks a little like a London railway terminal from the outside. For Rotary convention goers, it’s an easy cab ride across the Tietê River from the Parque Anhembi convention center. Inside, you’ll find a labyrinth of stalls selling all varieties of Brazilian spices and fruit, cured meats, and salted cod. (At the Porco Feliz, you can pick up an entire pig, or order a capybara, the largest rodent in the world.) Upstairs is a huge balcony packed with cafes where you can down sandwiches and ice-cold draft beer, called chope, and contemplate the bustle below.

“To really leap into São Paulo’s exotic gourmet heart, start at the Mercado Municipal, the vast Victorian market hall that looks a little like a London railway terminal from the outside.”

If you’re looking to go upmarket, São Paulo has some of the world’s highest-rated restaurants. At the top is D.O.M., in Jardim Paulista, frequently cited as one of Latin America’s best – if not the best. Its chef, Alex Atala, made Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people last year. He harvests his ingredients from sustainable sources in the Amazon, making frequent trips to seek out plants and fish with unpronounceable names, and helps small farmers produce organic crops profitably. The result is a home-grown Brazilian haute cuisine that has been much imitated, but not yet rivaled.

Figueira Rubaiyat commands one of the most impressive settings in the city, on Jardim Paulista’s glitzy Rua Haddock Lobo. In its garden, tables cluster around an enormous banyan tree whose branches snake out over diners like diplodocus necks before disappearing through the glass roof. Most people go for the Brazilian or Argentine beef dishes, but the lamb is among the best I have ever eaten, and the selection of meaty Amazon fish is as good as anything outside Manaus.

The city’s Japanese master chefs have also gone upmarket: At tiny Aizomê, sit along the wooden bar and watch as they prepare dishes ranging from traditional sushi and sashimi to Japanese-Brazilian fusion cuisine, such as grilled oysters with passion-fruit glaze.

But in São Paulo, eating downmarket doesn’t mean missing out. Regional cuisines are well represented, especially the northeast’s homey seafood-rich dishes. By far the most renowned spot for this is Mocotó in Vila Medeiros, a 40-minute drive north of the city center but worth the trek. It began life as a hole-in-the-wall kitchen set up by José Oliveira de Almeida, a migrant from Pernambuco in Brazil’s drought-plagued northeast. His home cooking – including his trademark meat and bean broth, made according to a secret recipe – has attracted such a lively crowd over the years, he was forced to expand into a full-scale restaurant that Newsweek listed as one of the 101 best eateries around the globe.

Mocotó also boasts the world’s first and only sommelier of cachaça – Brazil’s most celebrated native drink, originally distilled on slave plantations from pulped sugar cane. Leandro Batista will give you a tour of the best brews from the country’s vast range: His top tip is the Havana brand, which rivals single-malt Scotch for smoothness and price, but a close second-best, and one to bring home, is Weber Haus, with a hint of vanilla bean that gives it the softness of a good Sauternes rather than a spirit.

Once your belly is full and your wallet more or less depleted, it’s time to sample the city’s other passion: soccer. Futebol, as they call it here, is more than a national obsession; it’s more like a religion, and São Paulo is the place where it all began. Charles Miller, the son of a Scottish railway engineer and an Anglo-Brazilian mother, was born here in 1874 and studied in Britain, where he became a footballer for the now-defunct London Corinthians. When he returned to his native city, he brought with him two leather footballs, a pair of football boots, and a book of rules. The sport quickly caught on, and Brazil went on to become the most decorated national team in history, with a record five World Cup titles under its belt and an undisputed roster of some of soccer’s greatest players.

The name Corinthians is now associated with one of the most lucrative clubs in the world, whose fans are so devoted that it offers funeral services for die-hard supporters, complete with a coffin in the team’s colors and a violinist to play its anthem. It is no coincidence that São Paulo was picked to host the opening match of the 2014 World Cup in a spanking-new stadium built for about half a billion dollars, which is the new home of the Corinthians.

If you plan to catch a game, you can choose from a host of teams, including São Paulo, Palmeiras, and Portuguesa. Down the road, the team of Santos, from the dock city of the same name, was the club of footballing legend Pelé.

São Paulo Rotary Convention Promo (EN) from Rotary International on Vimeo.

You can combine the city’s loves for fine dining and football at Morumbi stadium, located in one of the swankier areas of São Paulo, also called Morumbi. There you can trade in the bleachers for a spot at Koji, a wonderful little Japanese restaurant whose salmon-belly sushi with a citrus twist is enough to distract even the most ardent fans from the game. It is also one of the few places in Brazil’s dry stadiums where spectators can enjoy a drink.

“You can combine the city’s loves for fine dining and football at Morumbi stadium, located in one of the swankier areas of São Paulo.”

For more football, visit the Museu do Futebol under the bleachers of the Paulo Machado de Carvalho stadium (Pacaembu), an impressive 1940s arena wedged among the green slopes of Higienópolis. With a lively layout and a wry sense of humor – despite dealing with Brazil’s holy of holies – it captures the essence of the beautiful game. Highlights include a room full of sepia photos of Brazil from the time when football first arrived, and a display of objects that the nation’s street kids – some destined to become multimillionaire soccer legends – use in kickabouts, from dolls’ heads to rolled-up socks and even rocks. It also has hilarious audio of radio commentators narrating the most famous goals (spoiler alert: most end in an ecstatic scream of “Goooooooooool”) and soccer personalities describing their most abiding memories of the game. One renowned commentator describes how, as a boy, his family (like most in Brazil) was so superstitious that he had to sit in the same chair during every World Cup match while his father held a rolled-up magazine under his armpit for luck.

There’s not a lot left of historic São Paulo, a once-elegant city built in the colonial European style that has been swept away by the frenetic pace of expansion and redevelopment. As British novelist James Scudamore described it in his 2010 novel, Heliopolis, “Town planning never happened: there wasn’t time. The city ambushed its inhabitants, exploding in consecutive booms of coffee, sugar and rubber, so quickly that nobody could draw breath to say what should go where. It has been expanding ever since, sustained by all that ferocious energy.” Walking through the city, you sometimes get an odd whiff of nostalgia for a place you’ve never been, a faint echo of the 1950s-era skyscrapers of the New York of black-and-white photos.

The city is easy to navigate – the extensive metro is clean and safe, and cabs are plentiful and reasonably priced. Avoid buses at all costs – they are generally packed, chaotic, and move too fast for their own safety.

To get away from the bustle of this city of 20 million souls, head to São Paulo’s equivalent of Central Park. A leafy sweep of lakes, lawns, and tropical trees with impossible names, Ibirapuera Park, in the central Vila Mariana neighborhood, is where paulistanos go to unwind, have a picnic, or jog along paths that weave through the greenery. It is beautiful after dark, too, when the heat of the day is gone and the fountain on the lake is lit red and orange to look like flickering flames.

One treasure that escaped the city’s wild redevelopments is the magnificent Museu Paulista, built in 1895. It was once home to the Natural History Museum and now presents the history of the city. It looks out on a park that gently rolls down a hillside, past fountains and pools, to a vast stone monument to independence from Portugal.

But if you really want to escape, grab a cab and ask for the Instituto Butantan. Looking like a small slice of Belle Époque Europe dropped into the tropical woods of São Paulo’s western suburbs, this is one of the city’s most bucolic and unusual sites. Built more than a century ago as a medical research facility after an outbreak of bubonic plague, it houses a huge collection of venomous snakes. (Fortunately, because it is still a research center, it is also Latin America’s largest producer of antivenoms, antitoxins, and vaccines.) You can wander rows of rattlesnakes, cobras, king snakes, and massive tropical boa constrictors, as well as a collection of giant tropical spiders that will make your skin crawl. A sign on the edge of the leafy park warns you not to enter the forest – and having seen what’s in the cages, you won’t want to.

São Paulo has a thriving music scene, and it moves to the beat of the samba. In the city center, the Bar Você Vai Se Quiser on the trendy Praça Roosevelt has long been a magnet for music lovers. At Bar Favela in Vila Madalena, an all-female lineup called Samba de Rainha plays to a packed house on Sundays. Or grab a bite at the nearby Grazie a Dio! dance bar and watch the locals hit their rhythm. After dark, it’s best to stay away from the old city center near the Sé, but the restaurant and bar areas such as Jardim Paulista and Pinheiros are safe to stroll.

One of the best ways to cap off a day in São Paulo is with a caipirinha, the delicious cocktail of cachaça, freshly squeezed lime, and sugar. And one of the liveliest streets to enjoy one on is Rua Aspicuelta, in the bohemian neighborhood of Vila Madalena, which thrums with bars and restaurants, and whose sidewalks overflow with young paulistanos after dark, doing what their city is famous for – living it up. — James Hider

From Australia to India and back, Monica Saville embarks on a polio journey.

For Monica Saville, Rotary’s polio eradication campaign is personal. Saville, who survived the disease as a child in Australia, has helped raise money to fight polio and vaccinated children in India. A member of the Rotary Club of Epping, she is a regional Rotary Foundation coordinator and a past governor of District 9680.

THE ROTARIAN: What was your own experience with polio like?

SAVILLE: I was raised about 300 miles from Sydney in Junee, a small rural community that had a lot of sheep and wheat. In 1951, when I was 11, a farmer died of polio. The whole town was reeling. We were a fairly isolated place. Just after that, I was at school one day feeling very sick. Flu-like symptoms, aching back – I will never forget the pain. I went home, and my mother called the doctor. He checked my arms and legs, and then he said, “Put your chin on your chest,” and I couldn’t do that, because my neck was paralyzed. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t eat very well and couldn’t talk properly. He told my mother, “You need to take her to the nearest large hospital,” which was 25 miles away in a city called Wagga Wagga. There was no treatment, but I was able to go home after three weeks, and I went back to school after another three weeks.

Mine is a good-news story in that I’m now 74, and I’m fit and well. But for millions of other children, it’s been either death or lifelong disability.

TR: How did you become involved with Rotary’s fight against polio?

SAVILLE: I had put the whole childhood episode behind me until I became a Rotarian in 1993 and learned that the eradication of polio was Rotary’s most ambitious project. You know how you feel compelled to do something? I felt a huge need to vaccinate children against polio.

I was in Andhra Pradesh, a very poor part of India, in 2010. We started off early in the morning in a bus; then we transferred into jeeps. Along the way, we were vaccinating children. The Indian parents ran out to meet us, and the children were terrific. It must have seemed strange to them – these were isolated communities – but they knew their parents wanted them to have these two vital drops.

Then we transferred into an old boat and went out on a lake with rocky shores. It was night, we’d been vaccinating all day, and we had only the light of flashlights and phones. I remember thinking, “If we start to sink, I should keep my shoes on,” because the shores were so rocky. We’d pull ashore, scramble over the rocks, and vaccinate children. One family jumped in a coracle and frantically paddled out to us so their children could be vaccinated before we went away.

TR: What are Australian Rotarians doing these days to help end polio?

SAVILLE: We have a project for World Polio Day on 24 October, the Ribbon of Gold. The idea is that clubs can put a yellow strip of tape on the ground at their local shopping centers and people can line up coins on it – Australian one- and two-dollar coins are gold-colored. And at the international convention in Sydney, our prime minister announced that the Australian government would give $100 million to help eradicate polio. For a small country, that’s a large amount. – Anne Ford

Polio still lurks in three countries. Our local experts explain why.

We are tantalizingly close to ending polio. Of the disease’s three strains, we haven’t seen a case of type 2 since 1999 or of type 3 since 2012. All the polio cases in the world now stem from only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. If we can end polio in these three nations, we will shut the door on the disease forever.

Technological advances have facilitated our progress: We can target our vaccines to specific strains and use mapping software to help ensure that health workers reach children everywhere. We’ve received funding commitments from everyone from governments to international institutions to nonprofits – and you. One of the biggest remaining challenges is security; violence in all three of the endemic countries threatens to keep the vaccine away from children.

In late July, the leaders of Rotary’s polio eradication efforts in these countries – Tunji Funsho, chair of the Nigeria PolioPlus Committee; Aziz Memon, chair of the Pakistan PolioPlus Committee; and Mohammad Ishaq Niazmand, chair of the Afghanistan PolioPlus Committee – came to Evanston to discuss their progress, challenges, and opportunities.

NIGERIA

A Rotary volunteer monitors polio vaccinations in Kano.

Of the three remaining endemic countries, Nigeria is closest to stopping the transmission of polio. As of 6 August, it had only five recorded cases in 2014, compared with 42 at the same time last year. And four of those five cases were clustered in the northern state of Kano. Routine immunization coverage jumped from 36 percent of children in January 2013 to 55 percent in December 2013. “Routine immunization is what will get us there,” Funsho says.

Strengthening the health care infrastructure is key to achieving broad acceptance of the polio vaccine in Nigeria (and all the endemic countries), where other childhood diseases such as malaria, diarrhea, and respiratory illnesses are at the forefront of people’s minds. In May, Rotary began funding health camps, where doctors and nurses supplied by the government meet primary health care needs – and administer polio vaccine. The camps have been a “game changer,” Funsho says. “It’s a magnet to draw people out of their homes to get the OPV [oral polio vaccine].”

While the country has never been closer to ending polio, violence in northern Nigeria threatens to impede progress. Boko Haram militants have killed thousands of people, including polio vaccinators, during their five-year insurgency, and are behind the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls that made headlines earlier this year (as of press time, they still had not been released). For several months in 2013, health workers couldn’t vaccinate children in Borno State at all. But recent military action by the Nigerian government drove the insurgents out of cities, Funsho says, and immunizations have resumed: In March, 12 percent of Borno’s children could not be reached, down from 45 percent in July 2013. Rotary and its partners are implementing techniques to reach children in volatile places, such as concentrating health teams at the borders of unsafe areas and sending in many teams at once to vaccinate as quickly as possible when security analysts say it’s relatively safe.

PAKISTAN

Police escort health workers in Karachi, where militants have murdered vaccinators. Polio cases are on the rise in Pakistan after the Taliban issued threats against immunization efforts, but recent military action may make it easier for vaccinators to reach children.

The fight to end polio has reached a critical moment in Pakistan. More than half the country’s cases are in North Waziristan, a Taliban-controlled area bordering Afghanistan, where militants banned all health workers in 2012. The result was an explosion of cases in the country, from 58 in 2012 – when eradication seemed within reach – to 93 in 2013, and 104 already this year as of 6 August. But in June, Pakistan’s military launched a massive operation to flush the Taliban from the area, and vaccinators have since reached 350,000 children who were previously inaccessible. The fighting produced an estimated 1.5 million refugees, who have fled to other parts of the country and into Afghanistan. “That area is now free,” Memon says. “It’s a blessing and a challenge because displaced persons are a big issue, a human issue.”

To reach these and other children, Rotary and its partners are using a multipronged approach that includes health camps; vaccinations at transit points such as bus stations, railways, and airports; permanent immunization facilities; and, following a model successful in India, polio resource centers in high-risk areas, which involve local activists in educating their communities. The Pakistan PolioPlus Committee has established eight of these centers so far.

Rotary and its partners are piloting a cell phone project to help keep better health data on children in the country. In nine districts in Pakistan, 572 midwives received cell phones pre-loaded with software that allows them to track pregnant women and the birth and immunization of their children. The information is shared with the World Health Organization and UNICEF and entered into their databases. Rotarians also partnered with Coca-Cola Beverages Pakistan to build a reverse osmosis water filtration plant near a school in Malir, in Karachi, battling polio at its source: drinking water contaminated by human waste.

“Rotarians are fully committed, and risking their lives in these troubled areas,” Memon says.

AFGHANISTAN

Health workers have received letters of safe passage from the Afghan Taliban, which has supported polio eradication. Only one case of polio endemic to Afghanistan has been reported in the last 18 months; the rest of the country’s cases are genetically related to poliovirus from Pakistan.

As Pakistan goes, so goes Afghanistan. “We are interconnected,” Niazmand says. Only one case of polio endemic to Afghanistan has been reported in the past 18 months; the remaining cases, including eight this year as of 6 August, are genetically related to poliovirus from Pakistan. (The most recent case was carried over from Pakistan to Afghanistan by a child displaced by the military action in North Waziristan; an estimated 100,000 refugees from Pakistan have entered the country since June.)

Unlike the Pakistani Taliban, which has repeatedly attacked health workers, the Afghan Taliban, which is loosely related, has for years cooperated with Rotary and its partners to eradicate polio. Vaccination teams received letters guaranteeing safe passage, and case counts decreased from 37 to 14 from 2012 to 2013. But in March, the Taliban temporarily halted vaccinations in Helmand Province, where they accused health workers of spying on their leaders. Two National Immunization Days have been canceled, depriving an estimated 655,000 children of the vaccine. “The challenges are the same in all our countries,” Niazmand says. “Insecurity is the biggest challenge. It’s the challenge for the program. And it’s the challenge for those vaccinators who are the vanguards, who are the real heroes for the program.” Another challenge: the transition period around the recent presidential election (the run-off was held on 14 June, and as of press time, the race was still contested) and uncertainty about whether the new government will provide the support necessary to complete eradication.

Niazmand and other Rotarians in the country represent Rotary in all national-level polio eradication forums. (At press time, there was only one active Rotary club in Afghanistan.) Rotary has also directly paid for the vaccination of 18,800 people on average per month traveling from Afghanistan to India. And, like in other countries, Rotary and its partners are holding health camps and working to improve the primary health care system to win local support and reach more children. “When you constantly say ‘polio, polio, polio,’ that is creating a kind of polio fatigue,” Niazmand says. “Serving other health needs is an incentive to the communities.” — Diana Schoberg

Did you know that the proportion of college students who admit to academic cheating has held around 75 percent since 1963?

CHEATING INCREASES when rules are ambiguous and when strict supervision is lacking, studies show. Researchers at Duke University and elsewhere found that although many people will cheat a little, only a few will cheat to the maximum degree possible. Close oversight can eliminate cheating, a solution documented since fourth-century India, where spies were positioned in government departments to ensure that nobody cheated the king.

ROSIE RUIZ faked winning the women’s 1980 Boston Marathon, infamously skipping most of the race. Columbia University professor Charles Van Doren feigned brilliance before a 1950s TV quiz-show audience of millions until he confessed to getting answers in advance. The scandal was so notorious, Robert Redford made the 1994 movie Quiz Show about it.

ALL-TIME top cheat in a Ponzi scheme: Bernard Madoff, who cost investors US$65 billion. Until the 2008 market crash, Madoff thrived by paying off early investors with capital raised from later entrants. The Ponzi scheme was named for a Boston immigrant who cheated investors out of millions from 1919 to 1920. Charles Ponzi served 10 years in prison and was deported. Madoff got 150 years.

TOP TAX CHEAT: Walter Anderson. Indicted in 2005, the telecommunications executive hid income in off-shore accounts, cheating the U.S. government out of $200 million in the nation’s largest personal tax-evasion scheme. The top spot on the 2014 IRS Dirty Dozen list of tax scams went to tax fraud through identity theft.

THE IRS whistleblower statute entitles you to up to 30 percent of the money collected if you supply information about large-scale tax cheats.

NEW CASINOS spend more than $10 million on surveillance, according to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the mid-1990s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology students formed a campus club to provide training in card-counting, which is not considered cheating. They then targeted blackjack tables in Las Vegas, profiting more than $5 million. Their system crashed after casinos identified team members and circulated their MIT yearbook photos around the globe.

INJURIES IN professional soccer can lead to penalties for opponents. Research shows that male players are likely to fake injuries more often than females. More than 70 percent of fans disapprove of players who fake injury.

THE PROPORTION of college students who admit to academic cheating has held around 75 percent since 1963. A 2012 study by the Josephson Institute of Ethics found that the percentage of high school kids admitting to cheating on an exam dropped from 59 to 51 percent in two years. In that study, students overwhelmingly disagreed with the statement “My parents/guardians would rather I cheat than get bad grades.” – Kate Nolan

How can Rotary and the Peace Corps work together to make the world a better place?

Rotary clubs and Peace Corps volunteers have worked together for decades on projects to promote literacy, clean water and sanitation, and health. Our two organizations have a presence in more than 60 of the same countries, and many Peace Corps volunteers join Rotary clubs to continue their service once they return home. In May, we made our connection formal, signing a letter of collaboration to explore how to share resources and expertise to boost the impact of our development efforts. Based on this agreement, one-year pilot programs will be set up in the Philippines, Thailand, and Togo, which will provide a model for how our organizations can team up to create lasting results. “This provides a formal basis on which to take our work to the next level,” says Rotary International General Secretary John Hewko.

Read more about the collaboration between our organizations:

• 5 QUESTIONS FOR PEACE CORPS DIRECTOR CARRIE HESSLER-RADELET

• SOCCER BALLS OPEN THE FIELD FOR MALARIA EDUCATION IN TOGO

• TODAY DENVER, TOMORROW THE WORLD

A child’s future well-being is determined by age two. What his mother knows can improve his chances.

Minutes after giving birth in the Shivgarh district community hospital in India, new mothers walk down a dark hallway to the maternity ward, a small room crowded with four narrow metal-frame beds. Stained sheets cover the thin plastic mattresses. In this grim setting, a colorful poster taped to the wall features a beaming mom snuggling her baby, along with the message, “In the first hour, a mother can change the fate of her child.”

Simple drawings illustrate basic steps that will give the babies a healthy start in life. Sushma, one of the new mothers, recognizes these practices from the women in her village, Rampur Khas. Whenever they meet, on the verandas of their homes or in the fields where they work, the women remind one another of what they can do differently so fewer of their children will die.

Sushma prepared for delivery by buying a new razor blade to cut the umbilical cord, preventing infection, and cotton clothes to keep her baby warm, lowering the risk of hypothermia. Minutes after giving birth, she held her son and began breastfeeding with her antibody-rich colostrum, or first milk. “I know I am doing all I can,” she tells me at her home. “I know what I do can make a difference.”

For decades, efforts to improve the lives of children started with getting them into primary school. But the frontline emphasis is shifting to the 1,000 days from the beginning of a woman’s pregnancy to her child’s second birthday. This is the most critical period in determining lifelong health, when vital micronutrients fuel cognitive and physical development. Stunting that begins in these first 1,000 days can have an irreversible, long-term impact on the ability to learn and work. UNICEF estimates that 25 percent of children under five years old are stunted, or significantly below the median height for their age.

Clean water, adequate nutrition, and proper sanitation are essential to prevent stunting and improve the health of young children. And, in my reporting around the world, I’ve seen that changing the behavior of expectant and new mothers like Sushma is equally important. Worldwide, this approach has helped reduce the under-five mortality rate by nearly 50 percent in the past two decades.

I see the effects everywhere I travel. In Guatemala, women no longer eat last at every meal, as tradition dictated. In Uganda, expectant mothers now routinely go to a clinic or hospital for prenatal checkups and delivery. In Chicago, they are trading junk food for fresh fruits and vegetables.

Behaviorial change is particularly important in India, which, as a nation, doesn’t lack for resources. India was the star of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, when new strains of wheat and rice turned a country plagued by repeated famines into a surplus food producer and emerging agricultural powerhouse. Schools closed during the harvest season so classrooms could store extra grain.

Yet at the beginning of the 21st century, India – for all its advances in agricultural production and high-tech industry – ranked among the world’s worst in child mortality, with a rate of nearly 100 deaths of children under five per 1,000 live births. Nearly half of the rest were malnourished and stunted. “The problem of malnutrition is a national shame,” former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said. “The health of the economy and society lies in the health of this generation.”

India passed legislation to fight hunger and began subsidizing food distribution, but these actions alone did little to improve child survival and health. Rather, some of the most effective interventions are proving to be the simplest and cheapest: teaching expectant and new mothers how to care for themselves and their babies.

The Community Empowerment Lab, founded by Vishwajeet Kumar, a doctor who specialized in neonatal and infant health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, helped teach the women in Sushma’s village. The group, known by villagers as Saksham, the Hindi word for empowerment, is based in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where child death rates are among the highest in the nation.

Kumar holds up his right hand and spreads his fingers wide. “There are five secrets to success,” he tells me. “One, love. Two, warmth. Three, food – breast milk. Four, hygiene. Five, care – know the signs when the baby is sick and go to the doctor. These behaviors are all in the mother’s control.”

When Kumar began working in Shivgarh in 2003, nearly all the children appeared stunted. He encountered traditional practices and superstitions that had a devastating impact on newborns. The majority of women delivered their babies at home in unsanitary conditions, scrubbed the infants, and then left them on their own for up to an hour, sometimes more. The ritual was believed to ward off evil spirits, but it also exposed the babies to hypothermia. Breastfeeding didn’t begin for several hours at the earliest, or several days in some instances – a mother’s first milk was considered unclean and discarded.

“Most of the infant deaths were preventable,” he says. “But the communities didn’t think change was necessary. They thought the deaths were fated. We had to break this chain of fatalism.”

So Kumar established Saksham, and he and his team of community health workers went to the caregivers in the villages – the mothers, the mothers-in-law, the midwives, the spiritual leaders – and demonstrated how some changes in behavior, such as using clean tools, swaddling, and breastfeeding immediately, could increase survival rates. The main message: These are things you can control to improve the health of your newborns. Your children don’t have to die.

When the workers encountered resistance to change, they explained the benefits again and again. Sushma’s older relatives, particularly her mother-in-law, were skeptical, Sushma says. “But after discussing the changes one, two, three, four times, she accepted.  She could see that the babies were healthy, that the mothers were healthy.”

Word of mouth carried the message from village to village, to thousands of pregnant women. Songs proliferated. “Hold your child to your breast. Your child will gain weight, get warmth, grow healthy,” sang the women of Rampur Khas. In the village of Bharjor Khera, women sang: “Everyone will come to your home, your family and neighbors, and ask to see your happy baby. Everyone will come with love.”

Within 18 months, the approach had lowered infant mortality in the villages by half. “Saving the lives of newborns became the goal of the community,” Kumar says. “Reducing infant mortality was a way of coming together. It was empowering.”

Saksham reversed the direction of conventional development thinking, which views the recipients of innovation or aid as the last link in a long chain. Kumar’s group treated the communities as the first mile. That’s where the work, particularly behavior change, should start, he says. “It has to be supported socially,” he adds.

Once more newborns survived at birth, Kumar extended his behavior-change efforts to improve what mothers and children eat, and how they keep their environments clean, to lower the rates of stunted growth. His team monitors new pregnancies in the villages and gathers moms-to-be for nutrition education and hygiene awareness.

Saksham’s success prompted new government programs that sent health workers into the communities and that provided a monetary incentive for women to give birth in hospitals or clinics. By 2012, as these campaigns spread across the country, India’s under-five mortality rate had decreased by almost 40 percent. But this has strained the country’s health infrastructure.

This stress is evident at the Shivgarh hospital, a hulking facility that can barely contain the demand. A small ambulance fleet is overwhelmed; pregnant women arrive on wagons pulled by bicycle rickshaw drivers or on the backs of motorcycles. Inside, wheelchairs and gurneys are scarce. The delivery room has just two beds. Babies are sometimes born in the hallway, the bathroom, or outside the hospital. The four beds in the maternity ward afford only a brief respite; new moms often head back home – again on rickshaw wagons or motorcycles – after an hour or two of recovery.

So Kumar is turning from the communities to the facilities, to make them partners in behavior change by improving services for newborns. During the first phase of Saksham, he says, “90 percent of the births were at home and 10 percent in facilities. Now it’s reversed. This is the opportunity to embed this behavior change, to have the facilities become centers of information.”

He again holds up his hand. “You don’t just want to know that these five essentials of newborn care, of behavior change, are important, but why. Then you get motivation. The mothers think, ‘I want to improve. I want our children to survive and do well.’” — Roger Thurow

HOW TO SAVE A LIFE

Rotary Foundation Global Grants fund efforts to support maternal and child health, along with Rotary’s other areas of focus. Here are four examples of how these sustainable projects are providing better care in the critical 1,000-day period, from pregnancy to a child’s second birthday.

TRAIN MIDWIVES In Malawi, about 675 women in 100,000 die in childbirth, a rate almost 100 times higher than in the United Kingdom. The Rotary clubs of Limbe, Malawi, and Currie Balerno, Scotland, are working to lower the number of maternal deaths by training 150 midwives to work in rural health clinics. The grant project also provides space at the clinics where women can wait to deliver their babies. Too often expectant mothers arrive too late, having already suffered debilitating injuries such as obstetric fistula, caused by prolonged and obstructed childbirth.

PREVENT HIV/AIDS IN CHILDREN The risk of HIV transmission to unborn children is low – if women are tested early in their pregnancy and receive appropriate prenatal and postnatal care. One project, launched by the Rotary clubs of Los Altos, Calif., and Sinkor, Liberia, is helping Liberian women to get this testing and treatment. The Rotarians aim to reduce the number of new HIV infections in children in Liberia by 95 percent over two years in 23 health clinics run by Save the Children.

EDUCATE MOTHERS ABOUT NUTRITION Japanese and Palestinian Rotarians are working to prevent malnutrition, anemia, and rickets in young children living in Jabalia, one of the poorest areas in the Gaza Strip. These conditions are often described as “invisible starvation” because the signs – changes in hair color and weight – are difficult to detect, especially in infants. Because security issues prevent Foundation-funded travel to Gaza, the Rotarians enlisted the Japan International Volunteer Center and Ard El Insan, a Palestinian nonprofit, to implement the project, with support from the Rotary Club of Bethlehem, Palestine, the host club. The effort funds the training of 30 community health workers in nutrition, child health, and counseling skills. The instructors are visiting the homes of expectant and nursing mothers to teach them the importance of providing only breast milk during the first six months, and to check for signs of malnutrition and other severe conditions in their young children. They also are holding health education sessions in the community, which include cooking demonstrations.

CREATE HUMAN MILK BANKS Infants in neonatal intensive care units in India often can’t get the breast milk they need to thrive. To reduce the number of deaths and long-term health issues among prematurely born children, the Rotary clubs of Pune Pride, India, and Bethlehem, Pa., started a program at a Pune hospital to collect, store, and distribute milk donated by lactating women. About 15 babies benefited during the project’s initial stage, and the figure is expected to increase to 100 babies per day within seven years.

As a three-year conflict rages on, children battle an old enemy: polio.

Inside the sprawling Zaatari refugee camp in northwestern Jordan, near the Syrian border, a biting wind whips around homes cobbled together from tents, cinder blocks, and shipping containers. In this desert labyrinth, a gritty layer of sand covers everything. Syrian families began arriving here two years ago, fleeing war and persecution. Over two weeks, the United Nations set up a refugee camp. What started as a few tents has become a temporary home to nearly 100,000 people. The residents have made Zaatari an informal city, selling whatever they can – fruit, falafel, electronics, wedding gowns – along a makeshift shopping district nicknamed the Champs-Élysées.

Only a few miles away from Zaatari, the violence in Syria rages on. As the uprising-turned-civil-war enters its fourth year, three million Syrians have escaped to neighboring countries. More than half are children. The conflict in Syria has become one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century.

In late 2013, 35 cases of polio were confirmed in the country, which had been polio-free for 14 years. Health authorities confirmed the virus was imported from Pakistan. In camps like Zaatari, where thousands of people live in congested conditions, stopping an outbreak of disease is critical, and the flare-up triggered an urgent response from aid groups. To immunize children as quickly as possible, Rotary and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, along with local health authorities, conducted large-scale campaigns throughout 1,200 fixed sites, such as health clinics and schools. Three hundred mobile teams targeted hard-to-reach areas, which involved vaccinators entering Syria and the refugee camps just outside the country’s borders. In three days, 19,000 children received drops of polio vaccine.

Photographer Jean-Marc Giboux traveled to Jordan and made his way into the Zaatari camp, where he documented the immunization campaign. “There’s so much emotion within the walls of this camp. These people have been going through hell, and when something like polio reemerges, it’s a new wave of mayhem.” — Megan Ferringer

Photography by Jean-Marc Giboux:

People are volunteering less. Here’s what you can do about it.

Sit on your hands. That’s what I told myself as my son’s kindergarten teacher asked a roomful of moms and dads, “Who wants to be the room parent this year?”

The silence was interminable. Room parent is a volunteer position that involves organizing class celebrations and other activities. As an involved parent, I wanted to support my child’s teachers, but I had just started a new job and didn’t have time for another commitment.

Just keep your mouth shut and sit on your hands.

The tension rose. I couldn’t take it anymore. I opened my mouth to speak – but the voice that finally broke the silence was not mine. “I’ll do it!” shouted another mother, raising her hand just in time. The rest of us applauded, relieved.

Since you’re reading The Rotarian, I know you can relate. Every service-driven individual has had a sit-on-your-hands moment. We all want to make the world better; we all want to help our communities. But there are times when the demands of work and family force us to cut back on volunteering.

In 2013, Americans cut back in record numbers. The volunteer rate declined to 25.4 percent, the lowest it has been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking it in 2002.

The reason for the dip is unclear, and it may be more of a blip than a long-term trend. Still, it’s a reminder that we can’t take volunteers for granted. An organization that depends on this kind of service can’t afford to get complacent about recruiting new people to relieve the old standbys.

To attract volunteers, it helps to understand their motivation. People seek out service opportunities for three main reasons, says Nina Eliasoph, vice chair of sociology at the University of Southern California and author of three books on volunteering. First, the practical: “to help people in need,” Eliasoph says. Second, the emotional: to interact with others. “There’s something emotionally important about volunteering. You develop a camaraderie with the other volunteers,” she explains. Third, the intellectual: to understand, and to improve, the world. We’ll get back to this one later.

The first two reasons come as no surprise to Rotarians. In the more than 100 years since Paul Harris came up with the idea, Rotary clubs have been founded on service and fellowship. Even so, clubs sometimes fall short on volunteers. That’s why some have extended the notion of fellowship beyond their own members.

When the Rotary Club of Tallahassee Sunset, Fla., set out to build wheelchair ramps for the elderly and people with disabilities, it foresaw one minor problem: “A lot of our members have never held a hammer in their life,” says club president Tonya Chavis. “We have enthusiasm, but not much expertise.”

So the club got together with some engineers from the Georgia Tech Alumni Association of Tallahassee/Thomasville. “These are guys who know how to swing a hammer,” Chavis says. The local nonprofit Ability 1st, which provides services to people with disabilities, came aboard too, and this year, a roller derby team and Tallahassee Rotaractors will help out. (In addition to teaming up on service projects, Rotarians and Rotaractors in Tallahassee hold a joint happy hour and other social events throughout the year.) The result was a workforce of 20 volunteers, 12 of whom were Rotarians. They constructed a ramp in a single day and plan to build more.

“We are a small club, and our membership is young and active. If we are going to make a difference, we must be creative,” Chavis says. “As president, I am pursuing these partnerships to improve networking opportunities, find potential Rotary members, and create a greater impact.”

That brings us back to the third reason people tend to volunteer. Our desire to change the world often goes beyond holding a coat drive for needy children to asking why those children lack winter clothing in the first place and what we can do about it.

Such questions can be overwhelming. “This may be where the decline is coming from,” Eliasoph says. “Volunteers need to feel like they can make a difference.”

One way to foster that feeling is to choose a single service project and make a long-term commitment to it. This is especially true of international projects, which take a while to establish and sometimes unravel in the early stages of planning. “Having a partnership that goes on for decades is more effective, and better for both sides,” Eliasoph says.

Technology has eased communication between clubs partnering on international service efforts. It also has connected projects in need of volunteers with people looking to help. “Thanks to technology and the groundswell of social media, people have become catalysts in their communities through online organizing and virtual volunteering,” says Tanisha Smith, national director of volunteer services for Volunteers of America.

Clubs looking for volunteers, in-kind resources, and contributions can use a new tool, Rotary Ideas (ideas.rotary.org), to find support for their projects. And anyone – Rotarians as well as the general public – can browse the site for efforts that interest them and match their skills. Another tool, Rotary Showcase (www.rotary.org/showcase), lets clubs upload photos and videos of completed projects, track a project’s impact, and see how much work Rotary clubs are doing locally and globally.

Meanwhile, a Rotarian named Chuks Onwuneme has developed a mobile app called Personify.It, which links people with volunteer opportunities. Nonprofit groups across the United States are already using the app, which bills itself as “the Airbnb for social good” and is open to individuals as well.

“Each club will be able to use this to publicize its specific needs, or to organize its projects and volunteers,” says Onwuneme, a member of the Rotary Club of Queen Anne (Seattle). The app opens to a list or a map that shows opportunities and events taking place near the user’s phone.

I have another theory about why people volunteer: It’s about our sense of self. Sure, it’s satisfying to help those in need and to be among friends. But it’s just as satisfying to think of ourselves as the sort of people who do those things. It simply feels good to be a volunteer.

Back in my son’s kindergarten classroom, once the room-parent drama had settled, I was left with a nagging sense of neglected duty. I wandered to the back of the room, where the teacher had posted sign-up sheets for weekly volunteer jobs. Before I could talk myself out it, I had committed to helping with lesson prep every Friday morning.

I didn’t have time for it – as volunteers, we never do. But I have no regrets. Those mornings in the classroom – cutting bright green leaves out of construction paper while sneaking glances at my son – were some of my favorite mornings of the year.

Next time my busy life seems to argue against volunteering, I’ll remember that. — Kim Lisagor

In the wake of catastrophe, Rotarians are there for the long haul.

It could be a case of time passing, or it could just be that she is given to looking for comic relief, but one of the first things Bonnie Sirower recalls about the determined efforts of Rotarians after Hurricane Sandy is a moment of unintended humor.

Sirower, who was serving as governor of District 7490 (New Jersey) when Sandy ravaged the East Coast two years ago, knew that as soon as the torrential rains subsided, residents would need to start pumping floodwaters from their homes. At her first opportunity, and working in darkness, Sirower posted an urgent message on the Rotary District Governors Facebook page: “Desperately need pimps!” That, she says, prompted Kevin Hilgers, from Grande Prairie, Alta., to comment that he knew things were bad – he just didn’t realize how bad!

That anecdote became material for Sirower’s first stab at a comedy act earlier this year, at a Rotary Club of Paterson fundraising dinner. But the line that really stands out in her memory is something that she heard more than once, and from more than one of the Rotarians who dropped everything and stepped up to help in the wake of the storm: “This is why I joined Rotary.” Although providing assistance after natural disasters is not an official part of Rotary’s mission, anytime a disaster strikes anywhere in the world, Rotarians will be among the first to respond and the last to leave.

HAITI EARTHQUAKE

ON 12 JANUARY 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated the Maryland-size country of Haiti, causing at least 230,000 deaths, injuring about 300,000 people, and initially displacing 1.5 million.

The response from Rotarians matched the natural disaster in its immediacy and, some might say, in its intensity. Within hours of the quake, Barry Rassin – a past RI director based in the Bahamas and past governor of District 7020, which covers parts of the Caribbean, including Haiti – had accepted the current district governor’s request to coordinate a disaster relief effort, and was in direct contact with assistant governors throughout the district. “All assistant governors in our two zones are equipped with satellite phones,” Rassin says. “That enabled us to communicate right away and find out what was needed.”

Those phone calls launched a campaign that brought in $18 million worth of supplies. Within days, 169 planeloads were dispatched from the Bahamas and Florida. Then 69 containers of essentials – water, canned food, and clothing – were shipped. Construction is nearing completion on a new school and orphanage, the final two rebuilding efforts in a disaster recovery plan that has included nearly 80 separate projects funded by Rotarians.

One of the first people Rassin talked to by satellite phone was Claude Surena, a Rotarian doctor who not only headed up the relief effort of all Rotary clubs in Haiti but also, as president of the Haitian Medical Association, was put in charge of disaster relief for the entire country. “Claude was the key contact for us, and he was the perfect person for that job,” Rassin says. “He and his wife, Yolene, had 100 people basically living in their house.” Surena downplays his role, instead noting “the support from Rotarians throughout the world” and the helpfulness of club disaster relief committees, which each club in the district had in place because of the region’s risk of hurricanes.

“Being prepared for hurricanes is one thing, but the earthquake was a shocker,” Rassin recalls. But he agrees that the district’s disaster plan helped in rapidly accessing and raising funds. In 2007, an initiative by Past District Governor Dick McCombe led to the creation of a Haiti Task Force to serve as a conduit for Rotary Foundation grant projects in the country. The task force also established ROTAH, a Rotary NGO in Haiti that allowed for the duty-free shipment of items into the country, with fewer delays at customs. Rassin relied on the task force and used a Rotary Foundation donor advised fund to quickly bring in contributions from Rotarians in 60 countries around the world.

Four years after the earthquake, Rassin pauses to catch his breath as he notes the sacrifices and contributions of Rotary members who played vital roles in the relief and recovery effort. “One Rotarian, dentist Ted Lazarre, lost his house and his business. He put his wife and child in a car, and once they were safe, went back to his community and started helping his neighbors.” Because the U.S. military had taken control of the Port-au-Prince airport and was turning flights away, Rassin says, Rotarians arranged for a supply plane to land on a grass airstrip owned by Guy Theodore, a Rotarian near Pignon. Each day, Rotarian Caleb Lucien would meet the plane, load supplies into his vehicle, and drive them to wherever they were needed.

Lucien, who founded Hosean International Ministries in Pignon in 1984, has been involved in building schools and orphanages, and is also focused on water and sanitation due to the ongoing cholera outbreak that began in October 2010.“Recovery will probably take another 10 years here,” he says. “You can’t do this overnight, especially in a place like Haiti, where the government is not as stable, and where there has been corruption. There are places that were hit really bad, where people are still living in tents. Communication throughout our district has been key, and will continue to be.” Rassin says he relied heavily on email for communication, and received 15,000 emails related to the earthquake.

When it comes to disaster recovery, Rassin says, people should be mindful that “you are not only rebuilding the infrastructure, you are rebuilding the economy.” During a disaster in the 1990s, he says, so many people sent free rice to Haiti that it put the country’s rice farmers out of business. After the 2010 earthquake, “we tried to buy everything we possibly could in Haiti,” he says. “It’s important to keep everything local, and work with local governments to make sure that building codes are not only met but stepped up a level.”

Robert Léger, a Rotarian in Haiti who has helped with repairing and rebuilding schools, praises the work of Rassin and the other three account holders of the donor advised fund set up to finance recovery efforts: Past RI Vice President Eric Adamson and Past RI Directors John Smarge and Bob Stuart. He recalls how a local Rotary club had requested funding to repair a school: “After analyzing the situation, these four leaders asked to talk to the parents. They said the school would be rebuilt. You should have seen the parents’ faces.”

EAST COAST HURRICANE

WHEN HURRICAN SANDY BATTERED the New York metropolitan area in October 2012, Rotarians there found themselves in an unfamiliar dual role: needing help as well as providing it. About a third of the 27 members of the Rotary Club of Point Pleasant Beach, along the New Jersey shore, were forced to move from their homes, including Sheila Vinton, who was governor-elect of District 7500 when the storm hit. She considered stepping down, but the next person in line, the district governor-nominee, also was displaced. Vinton estimates that two-thirds of the 1,200 Rotarians in the district were affected by the storm initially, and that 100 are still recovering. She is one of them, as she awaits the completion of work on her house, which had to be rebuilt. Immediately after the storm, Vinton says, local Rotarians were directly involved in relief efforts. People whose homes weren’t damaged helped others with gutting and tearing out drywall and sorting through personal belongings to see what could be salvaged. Rotary clubs outside New Jersey sent truckloads of food, water, clothing, and supplies. Individual clubs in the district soon came up with creative ways to provide assistance.

As part of the recovery, “one of our clubs used a district grant to create a tool-lending library,” Vinton says. “Another created pop-up stores where residents could go to ‘shop’ for donated supplies. We received financial contributions from Rotarians around the world. We used these to replace basic appliances for people’s homes, as well as to buy Sheetrock and building supplies. We were able to do a few projects, such as helping to create a handicapped-accessible bathroom in a relief center and restoring a community center to working order.

“I would estimate the Rotary impact to be more than $3 million in District 7500 in terms of service, money, and goods that we have provided,” Vinton says. That is an “impressive” amount, she notes, but “it’s a drop in the bucket compared with the billions of dollars in damage that occurred.” Although Vinton says Foundation grants can help with recovery projects, she advises clubs and districts to get creative and look for other sources of support as well, given the high cost of repairing and rebuilding in the United States.

In neighboring District 7490, Sirower tried to coordinate Rotary’s relief effort while “camped out” at the home of the district secretary. (Sirower didn’t have an Internet connection in her own home for three weeks.) When she was able to use her mobile phone, she recalls, she discovered another kind of flood: 253 new messages.

Sirower, whose disaster relief work earned her the nickname “the Energizer Bonnie,” swears by the three c’s: communicate, collect, collaborate. One week after the storm, she attended the annual Rotary-UN Day and conveyed the urgency of the situation directly to other district governors and Rotary leaders. Working with Peter Wells, the district’s disaster relief coordinator, she arranged for CBS Radio in New York to donate $10,000 in advertising time. Two months after the storm struck, the website for Rotary in New York and New Jersey had recorded 8,400 hits, donations totaled $730,000, and the district had rounded up more than 300 volunteers. “I could not have done it without Peter,” Sirower says.

“The smartest thing we did was to join the local VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster),” she notes. That group was headed by Janet Sharma, a member of the Rotary Club of Englewood, N.J., and executive director of the Volunteer Center of Bergen County, who facilitated conference calls that included 50 organizations.

Sharma says that while Rotary as an organization is better structured to aid in long-term disaster recovery, Rotarians played a critical role in the early relief effort. They were “essential at the beginning, helping us get launched,” she explains. She notes that Rotarians provided funding for communications equipment and start-up fees at the volunteer center that was set up to coordinate the activities of the VOAD.

After the emergency phase of the disaster, Sirower says, she and Wells focused the district’s attention and funding on “things that would benefit the most people.” Rotarians helped rebuild a senior center and restored a firehouse and playground.

“It was the worst of times, but it was also the best of times, because it brought out the best in people,” she says. But she notes that the best of intentions can sometimes create an unintended “disaster in a disaster”: an avalanche of unusable donated goods. Sirower’s neighbor to the south, Vinton, recalls a coordinator who received a phone call from someone who had just sent 15 used mattresses. The reply: “Send them back!”

Rassin encountered a similar problem in Haiti: “People should not just send things they want to get rid of,” he says. “As one Haitian Rotarian put it, ‘Please don’t send clothing that you wouldn’t put on your own kids.’” Sirower, Vinton, and Rassin agree on a simple guideline: Before sending anything, find out what the needs are.

To that end, Rassin says he would like to see Rotary establish “an organization-wide arm that is a conduit of information, so those who want to donate after a disaster know what is needed – to make sure the right things get sent to the right place at the right time.” Although he understands that disaster relief is not an official focus of Rotary, Rassin notes that districts and clubs will always provide support after disasters, and that “we need to come up with more structure so that Rotary can help the clubs do that.”

SRI LANKA TSUNAMI

FEW PEOPLE HAVE GREATER APPRECIATION  for what Rotarians can bring to a region ravaged by disaster than RI President-elect K.R. “Ravi” Ravindran. Nearly 10 years have passed since his country, Sri Lanka, was devastated by what may have been the most destructive tsunami of all time. The tsunami, which also affected 10 other nations, was triggered by a 9.0-magnitude quake under the Indian Ocean that the U.S. Geological Survey estimates was equal to the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs.

“That marked one of the darkest days in the history of our country,” Ravindran says. The disaster killed nearly 38,000 people in Sri Lanka and destroyed two-thirds of the nation’s coastline. “Rotarians responded immediately, rushing food, water, clothing, bedding, medicines, and shelter to all corners of the country,” Ravindran says. After that first phase of emergency relief, Rotary Sri Lanka launched the Schools Reawaken project, a bold undertaking in which District 3220 raised more than $12 million to rebuild 25 schools, $2 million of which came from the Foundation.

“We resolved to turn tragedy into opportunity,” Ravindran says. “We completed the entire project in five years, even though there was a war raging in some parts of the country. Now more than 12,000 children are in schools with all the modern technology to support their education: well-ventilated classrooms, state-of-the-art computer labs, fully equipped libraries and sports facilities. When we embarked on the project, we did not have one dollar – we had only our dream, and we began to live it,” he says.

A key aspect of the initiative, Ravindran says, was “a dynamic website that had every little detail of the project – every cent that was received and from whom, every cent that was spent and on which item or school. Donors knew exactly where their money was going.

“We have to rely on clubs and districts to form their own project committees,” he continues. “The Rotary Foundation, with its support base around the world, is ready to step in and help, provided we can demonstrate our ability to respond to the situation. But we don’t have any programs tailored toward disaster recovery per se. Perhaps we need to look at that more seriously.”

Rassin would welcome that idea. “The reality is that when a disaster hits, we are going to help our friends. It’s as simple as that,” he says. “Rotary International can’t do that, but districts and clubs are always going to help. When there is a crisis, Rotarians are the first ones in to start the helping process, and they stick with it the longest.”

THE ROTARY FOUNDATION & DISASTER RECOVERY

ALTHOUGH THE funding structure that supported disaster relief and recovery efforts after the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake has changed, The Rotary Foundation still has a role to play in long-term disaster recovery.

John Osterlund, the Foundation’s general manager, says that after much discussion, “Rotary as an organization has finally reached the consensus that we are not and should never be a first-response organization.” But, he says, “given our grant programs, there is a nice opportunity for The Rotary Foundation to play a longer-term role in disaster recovery.” And he points out that some clubs and districts have established their own foundations that can fund disaster recovery projects.

“I think we’re at the place where the staff and volunteer leadership, for the first time in a long while, have clarity on what our role is,” Osterlund says. “Separate from the Foundation, there is an incredible amount of organized club-to-club activity that takes place after a disaster. We in Evanston are outside of that, almost completely.”

Although global grant projects must fall within the Foundation’s six areas of focus and meet a sustainability requirement, Osterlund says, “there is a lot of latitude with regard to the specific need that is addressed.” For example, he says, building schools can fit within literacy and education. A review of global grants approved after the new grant-making guidelines went into effect worldwide last year shows 17 disaster-recovery grants in the Philippines in the areas of maternal and child health, literacy and education, water and sanitation, and disease prevention. There also were five grants to Indonesia in those areas, and one to Japan.

“If you accept that we are not a first-response organization and understand that our role is one of longer-term recovery, you gain some time to assess the needs of a community in the wake of a disaster,” Osterlund says. “You are better informed in putting a grant application together. The benefit of time enables you to do it right.” — Paul Engleman

Getting the flavor of Rotaract with Jake Weragoda.

Next time you’re standing in the grocery store, debating between the roasted garlic crackers and the rosemary and olive oil ones, think of Jake Weragoda – and Rotaract. Weragoda is a food technologist at Australia’s largest cracker company and a member of the Rotaract Club of Sydney City. The 2013 Australian Rotaractor of the Year, he’s also chair-elect of Rotaract Australia. We caught up with him at the 2014 RI Convention in Sydney to find out how being a member of Rotaract has shaped his career.

THE ROTARIAN: What’s your best-selling product?

WERAGODA: One product of mine that’s doing well is Shapes Sensations, basil pesto and parmesan flavor.

TR: What’s the process for coming up with a new flavor?

WERAGODA: In the case of caramelized onion and cheddar, for instance, we make some caramelized onions with balsamic vinegar and red wine and put them with cheddar on bread or a cracker. So that’s the gold standard, the real food representation. Now let’s go match that taste on a cracker.

In product development, which is the area I work in, we come up with 40 to 50 prototypes for each flavor. We conduct a lot of internal tastings before we ask consumers to evaluate them and tell us which ones they prefer.

TR: How has Rotaract helped you in your career?

WERAGODA: I’ve been able to practice a lot of skills in Rotaract: project management, people management, speaking, communication, and leadership. It’s a low-pressure environment – it’s not like a workplace, where if you stuff up, you might be costing the business money. So I’ve worked on all those skills in Rotaract and then translated them into the workplace. It helped me get the job. It’s definitely helped me being on the leadership team at work.

TR: How did you first get involved in Rotaract?

WERAGODA: My dad has been a Rotarian since I was three years old. I’ve been to hundreds of meetings and events with him. I’ve helped out with his club’s big Australia Day function every year, and I’ve participated in a heap of the New Generations programs, such as RYLA [Rotary Youth Leadership Awards] and the National Youth Science Forum, a big program here in Australia sponsored by Rotary. So when I moved to Sydney for university, joining the club on campus made sense.

TR: Do you think you’ll eventually join Rotary?

WERAGODA: Absolutely, yes. I’ll be chairman of the Rotaract Australia board in 2015-16. I want to help grow Rotaract at the national level. After that, I’ll see where I am.

TR: What does Rotary need to do to help young people make the transition from Rotaract to Rotary?

WERAGODA: I think the emphasis on attendance, and the related cost and time commitment, are the key things that need to change. We have to shift the expectation that you need to go and spend money on a meal every week. If you’re contributing to the community through projects or advancing what your Rotary club does, then it doesn’t matter if you’re going to every meeting. – Diana Schoberg

In the midst of Syria’s civil war, Michel Jazzar is coordinating National Immunization Days in Lebanon.

Of the four million people living in Lebanon, more than a quarter are Syrian refugees. So when Michel Jazzar heard about the reappearance of polio in Syria in October 2013, he and other Rotarians in Lebanon were quick to realize the impact it could have on their own country, which has been polio-free for more than a decade. Unlike in Jordan, where refugees reside in massive camps, in Lebanon, they live among the general population. “They are moving on the same roads, using the same hospitals, learning in the same schools,” says Jazzar, a member of the Rotary Club of Kesrouan. He helped coordinate Rotary’s participation in recent National Immunization Days in Lebanon, using billboards and television, radio, and newspaper advertising supported by two PolioPlus Partners grants totaling US$50,000. Although Jazzar has been a Rotary member for more than 30 years – he’s also the Rotary representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia – he says the moment that made him a Rotarian was when he administered his first dose of polio vaccine. “A Rotarian is someone who will give a drop of vaccine to a child and will never see this kid again, but who is sure this kid will be saved,” he says. “We are citizens of the world. We believe that humanity is one.” – Diana Schoberg

Michel Jazzar on peace from Rotary International on Vimeo.

Last summer, Chicago hit on a way to get kids to read.

In June, Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon accepted a friendly wager from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel: If kids in Chicago could read 2.4 million books during the summer, Fallon would bring his show to the Windy City.

Public challenges to encourage reading have become as commonplace as elected officials placing wagers on their hometown teams’ sporting events. But the first one I ever heard of was about 20 years ago, when a Chicago newspaper ran a story about an elementary school principal who had “lost” a bet with his students. Terry Murray had promised to spend a day on the roof of Haugan School in the city’s Albany Park neighborhood if the kids read 10,000 books during the school year. The story featured a photo of Murray sitting on the roof, reading a book.

Murray, 71, who is retired but teaches an education course at DePaul University, is quick to point out that he did not invent reading challenges. But he’s certain that the stunt was good for morale in an overcrowded school in a multiethnic neighborhood, where students were taught in seven languages. With weekly tallies posted on a bulletin board and parents required to verify that their children had read the books, the challenge engaged students, families, and teachers throughout the school year.

“I think all learning, whether reading or any other activity in life, is about motivation,” Murray says. “And success motivates.”

But kids are reading less these days. A white paper published in May by Common Sense Media reported that over the last 30 years, reading for entertainment has declined among all kids, especially adolescents. One-third of 13-year-olds and nearly half of 17-year-olds say they read for pleasure no more than once or twice a year. Although reading proficiency has steadily improved over the last 20 years, among fourth graders and eighth graders, only about 35 percent are considered proficient. Among black and Hispanic students in these grades, the proportion is about one in five.

The first reading challenge Murray issued was to his seventh-grade homeroom class when he taught social studies in the 1970s, he says. He brought in some of his paperback books and invited students to read on their own. He also invited those who read a book and liked it to eat lunch with him and tell him what they enjoyed about it.

“I knew if I didn’t screw up the discussions, I could get them to read,” he says. “The first discussion took place a week later, and most of the boys sat with us to hear about the book. The student who took a risk and read the first book seemed genuinely amazed that it held his interest. After that, the books began moving quickly. Within a month, we were meeting almost every lunch to discuss books. That year, the class average in reading went up almost three grade levels – among both boys and girls.”

Murray is aware of reports that some parents are opening their wallets to get their kids to open a book. “If bribery gets kids reading, that’s good, and it may help to some extent,” he says. “But successful readers are ultimately self-directed. I don’t recommend bribes – it’s too easy for parents, who need to invest themselves in their children through time and shared activities.”

Back in the baby boom era, when I grew up, parents were as likely to be concerned that their kids were doing too much reading as too little. My wife, the oldest of seven, recalls that her father tended to view reading as an attempt to avoid chores. My parents were resigned to my older brother being a “bookworm” (their word), though my mother constantly prodded him to “go outside and get some fresh air.”

I got plenty of fresh air as a kid and still found my way to the Hardy Boys, with an assist from the bookworm, who had moved into the sci-fi terrain of Tom Swift. Even though the car Frank and Joe drove – a “sleek yellow roadster” – was no longer roadworthy, and the words they used – “chums,” “sleuthing” – were as outdated then as “bookworm” is now, I raced through all their adventures. By sixth grade, I had moved on to The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, which Sister Thomasina forbade me to bring to school. Soon several copies of The Jungle were surreptitiously circulating among my classmates. (As readers of another popular book learn in the opening chapter, forbidden fruit can be a strong motivator.)

But why some kids turn up their noses at the sight of a book while others can’t resist burying theirs in one remains a mystery that the Hardy Boys probably couldn’t solve, even with the help of Nancy Drew.

Carol Marx, a news anchor on a morning radio show in Chicago, is the mother of two daughters, ages 10 and 12. She and her husband started reading to them when they were babies. Even though they used the same approach with both girls, one turned out to be a precocious reader and the other a reluctant one – until fourth grade, that is, when the reluctant reader got involved in Battle of the Books, a voluntary reading program in which students form teams and compete in reading comprehension contests.

“Competition transformed our reluctant reader into a precocious one,” Marx says.

To help explain reading differences among kids, Murray cites Howard Gardner, who in 1983 advanced the groundbreaking theory of multiple intelligences. The theory has led to wide acceptance among educators and psychologists that separate human capacities exist, from musical intelligence to spatial intelligence. Reading is closely linked to linguistic intelligence, and some kids may simply be wired differently. However, “reading skills, like baseball or anything else, improve with practice,” Murray notes.

So should the kids who took on Mayor Emanuel’s challenge over the summer – and succeeded, with 2.7 million books – have a leg up this school year, now that they’re in the habit of reading?

“You are more likely to read if you can read well,” says Seeta Pai, vice president of research for Common Sense Media. But socioeconomic factors also contribute to differences in reading skill and frequency, she says. “Kids from affluent backgrounds are more likely to have access to reading material, parents who read, the time and leisure to read, and high-quality education that supports the building of reading skills.”

Some people worry that children’s use of electronic devices may lessen their interest in reading, but these tools could possibly draw more kids in. “We don’t know whether other kinds of media and technology, including TV and video, are displacing reading,” Pai notes.

“Even with all the media available, nothing will entertain you as much as what you can find in a book,” Marx says. “I spend lots of time with social media, but more than anything I want kids to understand that they can pick up a book and go to another world.” — Paul Engleman

This Rotarian is a pop and soul singer/songwriter, owns his own indie label, and dabbles in real estate. In July, he added club president to his résumé.

When Nathan Stone starts talking, his enthusiasm for whatever he’s doing at the moment comes through – and, at any given moment, he is doing a lot. Stone, a pop and soul singer/songwriter, owns his own indie label and dabbles in real estate. In July, he added president of the Rotary Club of East Nassau to his résumé. Sixteen years ago, when he was starting out in the music business, a friend invited him to a Rotary club meeting. “I didn’t look like the typical Rotarian,” says Stone, who was then in his 20s. “But there are a lot of people like me who want to do the heavy lifting, even if they don’t yet have the experience or financial resources.” As he heads up his club, he has plenty of ideas for making Rotary more fun. “We work hard, and we achieve great results,” he says. “And I say if we work hard, we’re gonna play hard. Members who like spending time with each other in fun activities will be more likely to work together during tougher or longer-term projects.” That attitude is what makes Stone an asset to Rotary, notes Past RI Director Barry Rassin, a fellow member of the East Nassau club. “With him and others like him,” Rassin says, “we will see a transition to a new, younger Rotary that appreciates the past, builds on it, and produces new ways to grow all aspects of the organization.” – Susie Ma

Through the Rotary Youth Exchange program, Minnesota club members send students packing for adventures abroad.

For several years, Jacob Lundell had been thinking about going abroad. His family had hosted two Rotary Youth Exchange students, one from France and one from Denmark. And at Northfield High School in Minnesota, everyone knew about Youth Exchange: In 2013-14, the school sent 19 students abroad and hosted four, from Brazil, Chile, Japan, and Korea.

Yet it wasn’t until the school’s annual informational session in September of his junior year, as he listened to returned exchange students telling their stories, that Lundell made up his mind. He filled out his application, got accepted, and spent his senior year at a bilingual high school in the Croatian capital of Zagreb.

“Rotary was so popular at our school,” Lundell says. After graduation, “people assumed you were either going to college or going to do Youth Exchange.”

Many Northfield students participate in Youth Exchange as a “gap year” between high school and college. That’s what Carly Davidson did in 2010 when she left Minnesota for Brazil. Before she graduated, she had been thinking about it for some time. “Every year, so many students apply,” she says. “We all know the kids who are going to do a year. Everyone reads their blogs. And seeing all the adventures they were having, and hearing about how great their time was, and how challenging it was, made it appealing.”

The Rotary Club of Northfield is part of District 5960, which, with neighboring District 5950, runs a program known as North Star Rotary Youth Exchange. Although the number of U.S. outbound students from all programs, including those not sponsored by Rotary, dropped by 50 percent from 2004 to 2013, the number of students from Northfield increased by more than 100 percent. (The number of foreign students hosted in the United States from all programs rose from 25,815 to 29,698.)

“When I came on in 2005,” says Rick Estenson, vice chair of the North Star Youth Exchange program and a member of the Northfield club, “we took over a program that had already been built. Our club had probably 10 or 12 applicants. We’ve just been putting icing on the cake since then. Now we’re up to 22 applicants.”

It’s hard to pin down a single reason for their success, but part of it stems from club members who are passionate about the program – Rotarians such as Vicki Dilley, who learned the power of cross-cultural exchanges when she and her husband, Lee, served in the Peace Corps in the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu in the 1980s. After moving to Northfield, they started hosting exchange students.

In 2004, one student asked her, “Vicki, why aren’t you a Rotarian?” Dilley recalls. “And since I’ve joined, I’ve been focused on Youth Exchange. I live and breathe it.” She wants others to have the same opportunity she did in Tuvalu. “So much of the way I think is because of that time,” she says.

The leaders in the local school system share her enthusiasm. “One of the critical pieces,” she says, “is our partnership with the high school, which facilitates so much of what happens. In fact, our principal and our superintendent did a video that talks about how the school and the students benefit from Rotary Youth Exchange.”

Another factor that’s helped the program thrive: the four to six students from overseas who attend Northfield High School every year. “A couple of years ago,” Dilley says, “we had a girl from Japan who was homecoming queen. She was less than 5 feet tall, but she was on the girls’ basketball team. She was a star cross-country runner. She embraced everything. And families will remember Mizuki and say, ‘Oh, we’d love to host!’ There are so many kids who’ve had a powerful impact on the vitality and the success of the program here.”

Estenson says a key innovation has been an annual event that brings in former Youth Exchange students to talk about their year. Each one has a table to display maps, souvenirs, and other artifacts from abroad. Every year, more than 100 people attend the gathering, which the club began hosting in 2007 – and which, in turn, has drawn more people into the club.

“I would make the pitch to any Rotarians wanting to grow their club,” Estenson says. “This is exactly how it works: You get families to host students. They learn about Rotary. They’re invited to meetings. And I’m going to guess we have 25 to 30 members who are there specifically because they sent a kid or they hosted a student, or had a neighbor who did.”

Popularity also comes with challenges. Because the North Star program tries to send one student abroad for every inbound student, and Northfield High School has limited slots for inbound exchange students, other clubs in the North Star districts sometimes end up hosting more students than they can send. Still, the Northfield club remains bullish on the number of young people who can take part. “We have about 120 clubs in our two districts,” Estenson says, “but only 50 to 55 of them participate in the program, sending or receiving. So there’s room for growth.”

“I want clubs to know what their potential is,” Dilley says. “Sometimes you don’t know you can run a four-minute mile until someone runs a four-minute mile. I want them to know how far this can go. Like North Star: Our potential is not sending 65 students out. It is much greater than that. And the more kids we have out there as ambassadors, the better the world is going to be.” – Frank Bures

Find out how Rotary Youth Exchange changed Yoko Sekimoto’s life:

Dealing with challenges makes us more resilient.

A few years ago, I was passing through the northern Nigerian city of Kano when I stopped at a roadside stall for some tea. The proprietor asked me where I was from. I told him.

“I want to go to America!” he told me, smiling. “We are just suffering here in Nigeria. If I go to America, I will not come back to Nigeria again.”

“Not even to see your mother?” I asked.

He laughed. “I will send her some money.”

I thanked him and drank my tea. After I left, I wondered if he was serious or just talking.

As I traveled through the region, I met several people headed north, on their way to Europe. It was a difficult and dangerous journey that tens of thousands of people set out on each year, many of them never reaching their destination. I often marveled at the confidence a person must have to embark on a trip like that, to leave everything behind, to be certain of somehow making it.

Like most people, I’d always assumed these travelers were the most poverty-stricken, the most hopeless. But now I can see that this isn’t the case – at least not entirely. Often, the people who leave their villages are the brightest and most ambitious ones, the ones with the biggest dreams. As one poet from Cameroun wrote after arriving in Spain, “No money in the pockets/But hope in the heart.” Hope, as much as anything else, drives them.

Hope may be our most important asset as a species. Hope is the thing that drew us out of our caves and around the world. Hope is what gets us out of bed in the morning. Hope lets us imagine our lives as more than they are. Yet when we talk about hope, we usually mean the vague feeling that things will get better. But that is not hope.

One of the foremost experts on the science of hope, the late C.R. Snyder, defined it as “a learned way of thinking about oneself in relation to goals” and noted that it is “the essential process of linking oneself to potential success.” Hope is having confidence that you can do what you set out to do, whether that is crossing a desert or getting a job or mastering a craft. “High-hope” individuals, as a result, have more goals overall, more difficult goals, and more success at achieving those goals than “low-hope” people. They are also happier, recover more quickly from physical injuries, and have less work-related burnout. Most important, they see themselves as being in control of their lives.

Snyder believed this is a quality that can be cultivated, and one that develops early in life. Hope is born from struggle – from learning that we can rise to the challenges life presents. And we, in turn, are born to deal with struggle. In his 1994 book, The Psychology of Hope, Snyder cited studies that found that if you give toddlers a choice of two toys, one freely available and the other behind a barrier, they will almost invariably be drawn to the one behind the barrier. And when they achieve a goal, such as figuring out how to get that toy, they become more confident that they will achieve others. This has a protective effect for the challenges that lie ahead. This is how we learn to hope.

When I read this, I thought back to Nigeria, and to other parts of Africa, where there is no shortage of daily struggle. Was that why so many people kept getting into rickety boats to cross the Mediterranean? Was that why my ancestors came from Europe to America, full of hope? Was it because of the hard lives they’d had – the challenges they had already overcome?

If so, this raises some questions for those of us in wealthy countries, where it sometimes seems that our main pursuit is a life devoid of discomforts. Today, the trend among parents is to smooth the road in front of our children. We put rubber bumpers on every surface. We cook special meals. We help write college entrance essays. We don’t want our children to fall, to fail, or to be hurt in any way. We want them to have an easy life.

As the father of two girls, I’ve tried to avoid this, but it doesn’t always go over well. One day we were at a playground, and I was reading a magazine when I heard someone yelling: “Sir! Sir!” I looked up to see who was being called, and saw a man pointing at me and gesticulating wildly. “Sir!” he said. “Your daughter is going to fall!”

I jumped up. There was my youngest (then around three), standing on a platform about as tall as my head. She was holding on to a bar and leaning out over the sandy ground. I could see she was trying to figure out a way down, but kids kept coming up the way she wanted to go. I stood there for a minute, trapped between humiliation and relief. Then I sat back down and watched her finally make her way down by another route.

I worry sometimes about this collective effort to make our children’s lives easier. And I’m not the only one. The writer Luke Epplin notes that children’s films have been taken over by what he calls the “magic-feather syndrome,” in which a character’s greatest liability suddenly helps him magically realize his impossible dreams. “It’s enough,” he writes, “for [the protagonists] simply to show up with no experience at the world’s most competitive races, dig deep within themselves, and out-believe their opponents.” Their only struggle, in other words, is not having what they want. They overcome this by wanting harder.

I don’t want my daughters to feel that is what they should expect. So when my older daughter turned six and we gave her a choice of any movie to watch, I was relieved and heartened when she picked a film made long before convenience and comfort became human rights. I was glad to hear her say she wanted to watch Old Yeller.

The movie had come up in a discussion about rabies. I knew it was a hard one, and I made sure she knew what she was in for. Even when I told her the end, she held firm, so we all sat down to watch it. There was more to it than I remembered. It starts with 14-year-old Travis being left with his mother and brother while his father goes on a months-long cattle drive. Travis has to deal with razorback boars, lecherous neighbors, attacking bears, and the rabid wolf Yeller fights off.

There are no magic feathers. It’s a surprisingly honest film, with none of today’s happily-ever-after platitudes. It felt real in a way kids’ movies don’t anymore. At the end, Travis’ father comes home and pulls him aside.

“Now and then,” he tells Travis, “for no good reason a man can figure out, life will just haul off and knock him flat. But it’s not all like that. … And you can’t afford to waste the good part fretting about the bad.”

That was what I wanted my daughter to hear, and to know. Life is hard. You fall, then you get back up. Then you keep going. Hope is not magic. Hope is hard-won. Hope is not what you have. Hope is what you do. — Frank Bures

How do you get from South Central Los Angeles to mission control? This L.A. Rotarian takes fear out of the equation.

The room was cold and dark, but Olympia LePoint felt sweaty, wired, excited. She and 12 colleagues were in the Rocketdyne Operations Support Center in Canoga Park, Calif., where they had been monitoring every millimeter of the space shuttle’s three enormous main engines for more than 12 hours. To her right was a big overhead monitor with live video from the launch pad across the country in Florida. On her left she kept track of data rolling by on screens, also glancing at information on consoles in front of her, while a loud voice from NASA’s launch control counted down, “10, 9, 8 …”

She’d painstakingly checked the status of every line and weld in the engines, measured the fluid, pressures, temperatures, and more, all to calculate the probability of catastrophic explosion. Mere seconds remained, and it was time to give the go-ahead for launch: “Pressure is good,” LePoint said. “Vibrations are nominal. No hydrogen leaks. Valve timing is good. Liquid hydrogen flow, unobstructed. We are go for launch.”

Then the magic words: “Engines ignite. Liftoff!” She watched, elated, as the 4.5-million-pound spacecraft majestically ascended and accelerated, faster and faster. In just 8 1/2 minutes, the main engines shut down. They had performed flawlessly, and the shuttle, now about 200 miles above Earth, was in orbit. Traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, it would circle the planet every 90 minutes.

The 27-year-old LePoint was by far the youngest person in the room that day in 2004, and one of only three women. This was what she had worked for and dreamed about since she was a child: to be a rocket scientist. She felt exhilarated, not only by what she had achieved but by all the obstacles – and fears – she’d conquered along the way.

LePoint knows about fear. She had to face it and fight it almost daily during her childhood in a rough section of South Central Los Angeles. She worried about the gang violence in her neighborhood, bullying in her school, and not having enough to eat at home. She was smart but afraid she wouldn’t be able to learn or achieve enough to be the first in her family to go to college.

The neighborhood where she grew up with her mother and three sisters was “a war zone,” says LePoint, a member of the Rotary Club of Los Angeles who now inspires others to learn, particularly in math and science. “There were gangs on our street, and I remember one day when I was nine, walking home from the dentist with my older sister, Crystal. We saw yellow police tape near where we lived. We started running to be sure Mom was OK.” (She was.) The four girls had to become tough and street-smart, and they learned about courage from their mother, who had to support them mostly on government assistance. “I remember walking to school with holes in the bottom of my shoes,” LePoint says. Sometimes the school lunch was the biggest meal she would eat all day.

Olympia LePoint explains how to reprogram your brain to overcome fear:

Her mother would often say, “The only way to get out of this poverty is through an education.” Young Olympia wanted to do well in school and make her mother proud – and math became a path to that goal. It started with a lemon tree in the backyard of their home. LePoint would gather the fruit that had fallen to the ground and experiment with making lemonade. Eventually, with help from Crystal, she graduated to lemon meringue pies. “Baking brought a sense of creativity into my life,” she says, “and it offered a little escape from the outside world.” The measurements in her recipes taught her about fractions, and later Crystal showed her how to double the fractions when doubling recipes. In class, when her teacher started talking about what “one-half” and “one-fourth” meant, LePoint gasped in recognition. “That was my first realization that math was used in real life,” she says, laughing. She discovered that she liked figuring out math problems – and was good at it.

She also suspected she was a bit of a science geek. One of her favorite memories is the life-changing day in first grade when she went on a field trip to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “For me, it was like walking into an enormous candy store,” LePoint recalls. She saw jet engines and the JPL Mission Control Room, where she was fascinated by all the high-tech gadgets, monitors, and even the plush red chairs. She studied the pictures on the wall of the people who had worked there and thought to herself, “I want to launch rockets too.”

But more obstacles were to come. In fifth grade she sat next to a troubled boy who’d been recruited into one of the local gangs. “He started wearing a ring with spiked edges that were knife-sharp,” she says. “He would taunt me, and I’d defend myself with my smart mouth.” One day he grabbed her assignment and tore it up. She laughed at him and said, “All I have to do is get another piece of paper and write my answers down again. They’re all in my brain.” Enraged, he punched her with the ring, slashing open the skin under her left eye. She was rushed to the hospital, and after five layers of stitches, her doctor told her she was lucky she didn’t lose her eye.

The incident led to a turning point in her education. Her mother requested that the boy be expelled from school, and when he wasn’t, LePoint’s mom home-schooled her for the rest of the year. Then everything changed when she was accepted into a magnet school for gifted children. She was bused across town and thrust into a world that was completely alien to her. “That was the first time I had ever seen white kids and Asian kids close up, and I was so amazed,” she remembers. She also felt overwhelmed. Academically, she was far behind the other students in her class. She lost her confidence and developed a fear of math. She was ashamed when she failed Algebra 1.

Then LePoint realized something: “If you expect someone to succeed, they will,” she says. “Every one of those kids was expected to succeed, so they planned for college and achieved. In the area where I came from, no one expected success, so kids didn’t shoot for it. It has nothing to do with your DNA, but everything to do with the people around you who are encouraging you.” This insight helped LePoint become more comfortable at school. Some of the kids were mean to her about her clothes and shoes, but she took it in stride. “I thought to myself, when I get older, I’ll be able to afford the things I want. Meanwhile, I’m going to let people know that it doesn’t matter how much money you have; it matters what’s inside.”

LePoint was accepted into college at California State University, Northridge, and began her freshman year in 1993. She chose math as her major, she says, because a professor inspired her: “Mark Schilling, PhD, was the best math professor I’ve ever had. Learning calculus from him, I realized that I not only understood it but understood it quickly. And I could explain it to other people. I even gained enough confidence to become a math tutor.”

But in January 1994, just when everything seemed to be going well, the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake hit. LePoint’s two younger sisters happened to be visiting. In her dorm room, glass broke, and everything flew. After the first tremors stopped, they tried to get out, but an aftershock hit when they were in the stairwell, and the stairs started separating from the wall. “I remember looking back at the bolts as they were being ripped out of the wall and the stairs were turning, as if in slow motion,” she says. LePoint lifted one of her sisters onto her back and grabbed the other, and they jumped from the second story. “Thank God we didn’t break any bones. But sheets of glass were coming down, and there were fires everywhere. Mother came and got us. I lost everything I owned.”

Classes continued in trailers, which helped all the students bond after the earthquake, she recalls: “We were like champions getting through that difficult time, and many became my friends for life.” LePoint continued to excel and graduated in the top five of her undergraduate class of 6,500 students.

After a two-month job search, she was hired at Boeing (then owner of Rocketdyne) as a quality analyst. While working full time, LePoint went back to school at night to earn her master’s degree in applied mathematics. “I learned amazing things, like chaos theory and fluid dynamics – things I could apply to launching the space shuttle,” she says. LePoint adds that she’s thankful for the mentors she had at the company, who inspired her to work twice as hard until she was finally in that cold, dark room giving the go-ahead for launch. She won the 2003 National Black Engineer of the Year “Modern Day Technology Leader” Award, and then the 2004 Boeing Company Professional Excellence Award.

LePoint served on the team for 28 space shuttle launches. She had to face her fears again, though, when she realized her true calling might lie somewhere else. “I loved my job at Rocketdyne,” she says. “I could do the science forever. But I wanted to inspire young people to go into science fields.” She knew there was a deficit in math and science education in the United States. Not only was LePoint one of the youngest people in her division but also one of the few Americans. Many of her mentors had come from other countries. A 2012 global education survey showed that out of 65 countries, students in the United States ranked 36th in math and 28th in science education.

This was the big turning point of her life, she says. LePoint taught math part time at a junior college to work with young people one-on-one while she thought about how to help them on a larger scale. In 2008, worried about her finances, she considered going back into aerospace, but then the economy crashed. “I had to reprogram my brain, and I wanted to help others do that too. I decided I was going to hire myself,” she says.

LePoint had no idea how to start her own business, but she plunged in and began writing a book to help kids get over their fear of math. It was a stressful time, as creditors were calling and she wasn’t sure how she would pay her rent. “But to me, courage means taking action on faith,” she says. She told herself to keep focusing on the writing, and had faith that help would come from somewhere. That’s when her friend Maureen Tepedino invited her to a meeting of the Rotary Club of Los Angeles.

When she stepped into the meeting, LePoint recalls, “I hadn’t felt so uplifted in years. The person who greeted me first on the elevator was Alan Bernstein, who later was elected the first African American president in LA5’s 106-year history. Two people asked me if I was interested in joining, and yes just came out of my mouth.”

It was exciting to be around other businesspeople, she says, and some of them became mentors. LePoint realized that this was the missing piece: “I had the science, I had the corporate experience, I had the passion, but I needed the courage and entrepreneurship,” she says. One person who guided her was Paul Richey, a longtime Rotarian and regional managing director of Focus Investment Banking in Los Angeles. They met over a Rotary lunch in 2008. “She was seeking advice on how to build her business and make it viable,” Richey says. “I had 40 years of experience, 30 of them running offices for large international accounting firms. I wanted to help, and she was willing to listen.”

In 2013, LePoint published her book Mathaphobia – part memoir of her own struggles, part guidebook on how to conquer the fear of math. It is full of easy strategies for people of any age. Retired astronaut Robert Curbeam has said the book is “inspiring, and is needed in American schools.”

Richey encouraged her to promote her work and sign on for speaking engagements. Her 2013 TEDx Talk, “Reprogramming Your Brain to Overcome Fear,” has received more than 110,000 views on YouTube. Now she’s ready to broaden her message: She plans to publish books by other authors on education, health, and emotional and psychological well-being, and to produce a video series.

No matter what her next step is, LePoint is sure it will include helping others face their fears. As she wrote in her book, “If I became a rocket scientist, given such early dysfunction, I am convinced that you can be anything you desire: if you choose to work on removing fear from your life.” — Julie Bain

Rotary is what you make of it. Whether you’ve worn the same hat in your club for decades or are looking to try a new one on for size, we want to know: What’s your Rotary style? 

THE WORLD TRAVELER

You’re best friends with the nurses at the travel vaccination clinic and keep a packed suitcase in your hallway so you can fly out the door at a moment’s notice. The stamps in your passport are your badge of honor. You’ve been taking samba lessons for the past four years to get ready for the 2015 Rotary convention in São Paulo, Brazil, and you take the lead whenever your club has an international project under way.

Favorite Rotary Fellowships: Esperanto, Travel and Hosting, Convention Goers, and Magicians (because you want to learn to apparate)

Habitat: The streets leading to make-up meetings

Hardware: Rotary club banner collection, the biggest carry-on that will fit in the overhead bin, and frequent flyer card

Most recent tweet: Have you registered for Brazil? #ricon2015

If you’re like this, try: Participating in a Rotary Friendship Exchange. Spend weeks abroad without paying a hotel bill and meet other Rotarians along the way.

THE ROTARY BOOSTER

You push all the buttons in the elevator to buy more time to talk to other people about Rotary. You don’t need a Rotary pin – you have a Rotary gearwheel tattoo instead. You’re invited to district conferences and training seminars all over the country to give presentations about the power of Rotary. You can’t talk about how we’re “this close” to ending polio without tearing up.

Favorite Rotary Fellowships: Rotary Global History and Rotary Heritage & History

Habitat: A van with Rotary gearwheel hubcaps and a “Proud Member” window decal that you drive from district to district, sharing the good word of Rotary and The Rotary Foundation

Hardware: A stack of “What’s Rotary?” wallet cards, The Rotarian magazine, and Rotary pins so you can induct anyone at a moment’s notice

Most recent tweet: #WeAreRotary #EndPolioNow

If you’re like this, try: Sharing stories from The Rotarian on social media. Also ask your club to use Rotary’s RSS (really simple syndication) feed as an easy way to get headlines, news, and information from Rotary.org, formatted for your club’s website or news reader.

THE BORN LEADER

You joined Interact after your Rotary Youth Exchange in Brazil, founded the Rotaract club at your college, and applied for Rotary membership at 25. From the time you led your first committee meeting, you felt at home taking the reins. Every 1 July, your email inbox is flooded with messages related to your newest leadership position, and you’re running out of room for all your pins, banners, and patches.

Favorite Rotary Fellowships: Past District Governors, Golf, and Marathon Running (because leadership is a marathon, not a sprint)

Habitats: Training seminars and the International Assembly, your Rotary alumni association, and the head seat at the boardroom table

Hardware: Gavel and book of inspirational quotes

Most recent tweet: Evanston-bound #Rotary

If you’re like this, try: Rubbing elbows with other leaders and diplomats discussing critical social issues at the annual Rotary-UN Day, held every November in New York City. Or hone your leadership skills at a Rotary institute.

THE MENTOR

You have perfect attendance at the local Interact club meeting, run outdoor leadership training events through Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA), and are on a first-name basis with Rotaract leaders. You teach new members the ins and outs of Rotary, and they tell you about the newest fundraising strategies and ideas for attracting even more members. You understand that bringing young professionals into Rotary keeps clubs lively and are always there to guide young people toward their next life-changing Rotary experience.

Favorite Rotary Fellowships: Social Networks, Canoeing, Scouting, and Flying (you like to help people stretch their wings)

Habitat: Orientation events of any kind

Hardware: iPhone 6 Plus – your mentorship sessions happen through FaceTime – and a giant stack of business cards, because if someone needs information about scholarships or Rotary programs, you’re on it

Most recent tweet: Rotary Youth Exchange is not just a year of your life; it’s a life in a year! #becauseYEX

If you’re like this, try: Hosting a New Generations Service Exchange participant, volunteering at a RYLA event, or sponsoring a community-based Rotaract club. Or organize a Rotary Community Corps to take action in your area.

THE WALLET OPENER

When your club holds an auction, you always come away with more than one item. You’re the major sponsor of your club’s big annual fundraiser and will support any race your fellow club members run or cycle in. You put your change in the tip jar at the coffee shop, and at the convenience store, you always leave a penny, never take.

Favorite Rotary Fellowship: Rotary Means Business

Habitats: Charity balls and grade-school craft fairs

Hardware: Pen and checkbook, multiple Paul Harris Fellow pin, and a stash of dollar bills for “happy bucks”

Most recent tweet: The Rotary Foundation is my charity of choice, what’s yours? #MillionDollarDinner #PaulHarrisFellow

If you’re like this, try: Using your Foundation recognition points to match the contributions of a new member to make him or her a Paul Harris Fellow.

THE PARTY ANIMAL

You may miss a regular meeting or two, but you’ll never miss a social event. Your favorite part of Rotary is your club’s annual Oktoberfest fundraiser. You always have an inbox full of invites, and never met a potluck you didn’t like. You’re always willing to bring a dish and a bottle of wine.

Favorite Rotary Fellowships: Beer, Wine, Singles, and Cooking

Habitat: Local restaurants, where you’re dining with your Rotarian friends

Hardware: A beer-can hat with Rotary can coolers, which you wear at Rotary institutes

Most recent tweet: Pub crawl 2nite after #Rotary district conference

If you’re like this, try: Attending a Host Organization Committee event at the Rotary convention. At home, put together a happy hour and invite club members, along with people who aren’t familiar with Rotary so they can see that your club works hard but knows how to have a good time.

THE WORKER BEE

Rain or shine, you’re there to deliver holiday meals or hand out cups of water at the annual Rotary run. You might not make every meeting due to commitments to your children’s after-school activities, but you’ll be the first to pitch in on any service project. You volunteer not only for Rotary but for the animal shelter and the PTA. Your motto is “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.”

Favorite Rotary Fellowships: Cycling, Skiing, Tennis – anything that keeps you moving

Habitats: High school band concerts, softball games, and the golf course (because you recruit volunteers wherever you are)

Hardware: Google calendar, so you can keep track of all your family’s commitments

Most recent tweet: On my way!

If you’re like this, try: Volunteering on a community service project sponsored by a Rotary club other than your own. Find one at Rotary Ideas (ideas.rotary.org), a way for clubs to crowdsource everything from funds to manpower. Or use Rotary Showcase (www.rotary.org/showcase) to browse projects that clubs are doing around the world – and share your own.

Tell us about your Rotary style, and any we might have missed, by writing us at rotarian@rotary.org.

Michigan’s Wayne Koppa takes us on a 5,800-mile, seven-day, coast-to-coast journey by way of his BMW 650 motorcycle.

Last June, when Wayne Koppa, a Rotarian from Grayling, Mich., announced he was raising money to fight polio by riding his BMW 650 motorcycle from coast to coast, he didn’t mean from the East Coast to the West. He meant the “hard way” – from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Key West, Fla. To complete the 5,800-mile, seven-day journey (though he actually covered 13,170 miles in 20 days, starting and ending the ride in Grayling), he rode 12 to 15 hours each day and went through three sets of tires. His efforts paid off: The retired Michigan National Guardsman raised over $34,000, including an anonymous $15,000 contribution in memory of Bob Gandolfi, a past governor of District 6290 who had passed away the month before. With matching funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Koppa’s efforts yielded more than $100,000 for PolioPlus. His district has also come through in a big way: In September, Rotary Charities of Traverse City approved a $250,000 grant to help eradicate the disease.

THE ROTARIAN: What made you decide to do this ride?

KOPPA: Five years ago, I shot off my mouth in a little local pub called Spike’s Keg O’ Nails. I said I could ride my motorcycle round trip from Grayling to Alaska in seven days. This guy at the pub said, “If you can do that, I’ll buy you a fish dinner – the three-piece, not the all-you-can-eat.” Two years ago, I finally did that ride. Before I left, I said to the president of my club, “I should turn this ride into a PolioPlus fundraiser,” and we raised about $3,250. Then last spring, incoming district governor Al Bonney asked me if I had any other rides in mind. I told him about riding coast to coast the hard way, which is on the bucket list for every motorcyclist. He asked if I’d be willing to do it as a fundraiser, and I started laughing, because I knew I would end up doing it.

TR: Can you tell us some tales from the road?

KOPPA: I’d been on the road for about four hours when I stopped for a pasty, which is a hand pie that miners would take to work with them. As I was getting back on my bike, a woman got out of her SUV and said, “You’re the guy riding to Alaska!” She’d read about it in the local paper.

The stretch between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay is like the end of the earth. It’s where you cross the Arctic Circle. I stopped at a small national park, and the volunteer saw the End Polio Now sticker on my motorcycle. She said, “My brother had polio.” In northern Minnesota, I stayed at a motel where a woman told me she and her best friend had contracted polio as children. Her friend never walked again.

TR: What other projects are you working on?

KOPPA: Our club sponsors a 100-mile bike ride, the Black Bear Bicycle Tour, every summer. I also help run the AuSable River Canoe Marathon, the longest nonstop canoe race in North America. It’s more than 120 miles long and has a $50,000 purse. And I’m the chair of a local nonmotorized pathway committee. We’ve built about $1.3 million worth of paved bicycle trails. Even though we’re a small community of 2,000, we’ve accomplished big things. – Patty Lamberti

The executive director of the UN World Food Programme knows we can end hunger if we work together.

The executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme grew up in Lawndale, a threadbare Chicago neighborhood where people sometimes go to bed hungry. The daughter of a social worker and a community organizer, Ertharin Cousin now ranks 45th on the Forbes list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. As leader of the largest humanitarian organization on the planet, she oversees a staff of 14,000 and helps provide assistance to more than 90 million people a year, from the poorest neighborhoods to war zones in over 80 countries.

Cousin, who graduated from the University of Illinois and the University of Georgia School of Law, worked as an assistant attorney general of Illinois before joining the Clinton administration for four years as White House liaison to the State Department. She then served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. In 2012, President Obama recommended her to be executive director of the WFP.

Her typical workday might wear out an NFL linebacker, yet Cousin, based at WFP headquarters in Rome, never seems to slow down. The Rotarian sent frequent contributor Kevin Cook to intercept her in September in New York, where she was a headliner at a United Nations conference on world hunger. Cousin was the star of the show.

“She’s quite a presence,” Cook reports. “Dressed in a bright red ensemble with nail polish to match. I’d spent a week preparing for our talk, but sometimes it was hard to keep up. She knew the road plans of Syrian and African towns I’d never heard of, and gave me the feeling she could run them if she had to.

“Cousin comes at you with a hearty handshake and a smile,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Let’s get going.’ So we did.”

THE ROTARIAN: How urgent an issue is world hunger?

COUSIN: People say, “We’ve always had hunger, and we always will.” But we don’t have to. In 2008, after President Obama was elected, the global community made new commitments to end world hunger. The G20 countries pledged money. The leaders of the world embraced hunger as a priority. That creates momentum. It’s urgent to seize this opportunity now, while the will and commitment are there to do the job. We can achieve zero hunger in our lifetimes: no more chronic malnutrition, no more stunted children, no more wasting food that could keep people alive and healthy.

TR: Is that realistic?

COUSIN: Not if we have to do it alone. The WFP isn’t up to that job. Nobody is. But if the world community works together, yes, zero hunger is realistic. It’s a goal, a reachable goal.

TR: How has your job changed since you became head of the World Food Programme?

COUSIN: If you’d asked me in 2012, I would have told you that climate change was our biggest challenge. Now it’s conflict. Syria, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Iraq – every major conflict brings a health crisis that’s also a hunger crisis. At this very minute, we’re taking food into parts of Syria where there is no food. For refugees fleeing Syria with nothing but the clothes on their backs, we provide food vouchers they can use like credit cards.

TR: You’re working in a war zone.

COUSIN: It’s dangerous. I was in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan; that’s a place where you’re soaking wet and covered in mud, but at least nobody’s shooting at you. Syria is different. Working in a conflict zone is more expensive, for one thing: We’re paying for vests, our blue helmets, specially outfitted trucks. Just recently, two of our trucks were on the road between Homs and Aleppo, and they were targeted by ISIS. Militants fired 20 shots into our truck. It appears it was a kidnapping attempt, and our people got out of there. They’re OK. But you worry. I was watching CNN one night when I saw my country director in Syria helping women and children get out of Homs during a cease-fire, using his body to shield them. I called him on his satellite phone. I said, “I’m proud of you, but could you be more careful? I don’t want to have to call your wife if something goes wrong.”

TR: Your staff members risk more than getting shot. Isn’t the WFP involved in fighting the Ebola virus in Africa?

COUSIN: The World Health Organization asked us to feed a million people over six months in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. If you isolate a population to stem the epidemic, those people will need food and water so they won’t have to leave the isolation area to meet their basic needs. That’s where we come in. If a head of household gets infected, a breadwinner, we may have to feed that person’s family. It’s dangerous, but our people are committed to helping the most vulnerable people in the world. They’re heroic. Sometimes they amaze me. When we sent out a staff email asking for volunteers to work in those three countries, we got 200 volunteers.

TR: People think of your mission as airlifting food to a famine-stricken area of the globe and then flying away.

COUSIN: The WFP began as a pilot program in the early 1960s. Like the U.S. Food for Peace program, which it grew out of, it was about using excess commodities from wealthier parts of the world to support hungry people. Over the last 10 years, we’ve evolved from food aid to food assistance. What’s the difference? Well, food aid is food. It’s about filling stomachs. Food assistance is more diverse. It’s those vouchers we provide for refugees from Syria. It’s helping millions of small-freehold farmers get the food they need all year round, so they don’t eat the seeds they’ll need in the spring. We’re always keeping a watchful eye on potential conflicts – right now that means Yemen and Somalia. We watch the weather too. We track El Niño patterns a year out, to project who’s going to have a good harvest and who’s going to need help.

TR: It sounds like food aid is about tactics, and food assistance is about strategy.

COUSIN: It’s a bigger tool kit. But as I said, we can’t do it alone. We’re only as strong as our partners. We have 2,000 NGO and nonprofit partners, including Rotary. And Rotary, of course, has made great strides all over the world, helping farmers, helping schools – important work that should be knitted up with our work, to make sure we get the best results we can.

We’re only as strong as our partners. We have 2,000 NGO and nonprofit partners, including Rotary.

TR: Is that happening?

COUSIN: No, not enough. We can do better. Too often, organizations do their own thing. They fail to coordinate. Rotary, for example, has been involved in fighting hunger in the U.S. and around the world for a long time. We fight hunger too. Could we work together better? Yes. If you’re providing books to schools in a needy part of the world and I’m delivering meals to a different set of schools, what happens? Your children are hungry and my children don’t have books. How can we get those children the full benefit of education and a full stomach? That’s the challenge. It’s not about the goals we share – it’s about effectiveness. Here’s an example: In 2012, we partnered with the Rotary Club of Dubai to mark the beginning of Ramadan. The club matched every dollar (four dirhams) donated to the WFP through a special Ramadan page on our website. The program paid for a year’s worth of meals for 2,000 schoolchildren in the Middle East. That’s hundreds of thousands of meals. The program grew in 2013, with the Rotary clubs of the United Arab Emirates joining us for a global campaign during Ramadan.

TR: According to Ahmad Belselah, treasurer of the Rotary Club of Jumeirah-Dubai, Rotary and the WFP “have in common a passionate energy and a go-getter attitude.”

COUSIN: We can achieve more together than either of us could ever do on our own.

TR: How can someone reading this interview make a difference?

COUSIN: The WFP is 100 percent voluntarily funded. Most of our funding comes from governments, but governments alone aren’t enough. We’ve been working hard to grow the number of people who help us financially. But whether they donate or not, I hope people will visit our website (www.wfp.org) to learn more about hunger. We need an army – an army of people around the world who care enough to raise their voices, to support the ending of hunger. And Rotarians are strong voices in their communities. I keep hearing elected officials say, “Hunger’s not a priority for my constituents.” If we could get every Rotarian telling them, “Hunger is a priority, and I want you, my elected official, to make it a priority of yours,” that could make a difference. Or telling their fellow Rotarians, “I want you, a business leader in our community, to make hunger a priority.” That’s how leadership starts.

TR: World hunger is such an immense, intractable problem. Is there reason to be optimistic?

COUSIN: I just spoke at the UN, discussing these issues. We had 400 people in the room, people who didn’t know one another and weren’t paid to be there. They wanted to hear about how to make something good happen in the world. We need to expand that number. We need to get 800 the next time, and then 1,600. Let me tell you about a time I was in Bangladesh, where we set up a school food program, a typical WFP program: Children came for the highly nutritious biscuits we gave them, and I got to spend some time with them. I’d ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” They all said doctor or teacher, because that’s who they saw. Other than their parents, who were farmers or fisher folk, the only adults they knew were doctors and teachers. At the end of my visit, there was a ceremony. The children danced, and then they sang “We Shall Overcome.” In English. I cried. And I never cry.

TR: You can’t break down too easily in your line of work.

If we can bring up a generation of kids like that in some of the poorest parts of the world – healthy, working toward a better life – then yes, I can picture a world without hunger.

COUSIN: No. But those children – they believed their lives could be different from their parents’ lives because we were there. And if we can bring up a generation of kids like that in some of the poorest parts of the world – healthy, working toward a better life – then yes, I can picture a world without hunger. Yes, there’s room for optimism.

TR: We’ve heard about some of your 20-hour workdays. Do you ever relax?

COUSIN: (laughing) Don’t tell anyone! I’m an avid reader – that’s a habit my parents gave me. I read lots of books on hunger, poverty, leadership, change management, all related to my work. And I read historical fiction. Bubble gum for the brain, I call it. It’s a way of coming down from the pressures of the day.

TR: Is there anything you want to say directly to readers of The Rotarian?

COUSIN: I think the last line is, Rotarians care. That’s why they’re in Rotary. We appreciate the role that Rotary clubs have played in fighting hunger all over the world for so many years. Now we’re asking them to make their voices heard again. Working together, we can do even more.