By Tom Ganser
Correspondent
Mary Beth Seiser, Governor for District 6270 of Rotary International, was the guest speaker at the Whitewater Rotary Club on Aug. 26. The Whitewater Rotary Club is one of 56 clubs in District 6270 in southeastern Wisconsin that includes more than 3,000 members.
Seiser began by thanking the Rotary “for all the wonderful things that you do in your community.” She described the spirit of this year’s Rotary theme – “Light up Rotary” – as an approach to solving local and global problems built upon pooling the talents of individuals.
“As Rotarians, we look at the problems in the world, we look at our talents and our unique abilities that we all have, and we do something about it. We get together as a club and we get together as a community,” she said.
“Some of us can come up with great ideas, but it takes other people to actually turn those ideas into action. … I’ll light my candle, you light your candle, and together we can light up Rotary and light up our communities.”
As District Governor, Seiser stated that her goal is to help clubs with whatever they do and to do it even better.
She also shared six district goals:
• Increasing membership and keeping all members involved;
• Supporting the Rotary Foundation and its many local and global projects, including current projects in Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, India, Kenya and Peru;
• Promoting international aspects in each club – like the Whitewater Rotary Club’s long time support of the Youth Exchange Program;
• Taking advantage of district seminars, assemblies and conferences to learn new ideas and to share ideas about club successes, and;
• Spreading the word about what Rotarians do. “For too long as Rotarians, we just hid our little lights under a bushel basket. We’ve been modest and humble and shy, but we just can’t do that anymore.”
“The most important goal of all,” Seizer said with a smile and a laugh, “is to have a heck of a lot of fun. Have fun at your meetings and have fun when you’re out in the community.”
Seizer ended by sharing her experiences two and a half years ago when she traveled to India as part of the National Immunization Day trip to eradicate polio and recalled giving immunizations to people in slums and to children held by their mother or father out of train windows.
It was there, Seizer said, that she saw Rotary in the faces of parents, children, and polio survivors.
Winship on El Salvador
On Sep. 2, Jim Winship turned the attention of the members of the Whitewater Rotary Club to the Central American country, El Salvador, based on his first-hand experiences and the research he conducted in writing “Growing Up in El Salvador” that was published in June.
Winship is a professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and also represents Aldermanic District 3 on the Whitewater Common Council.
He spent “two very intense years” in El Salvador from 1970 to 1972 immediately following graduation from Davidson College, working with a city government and in the slums and squatter communities around the capital city, San Salvador.
“It was a powerful experience,” Winship said, “and I didn’t go back for 30-plus years.”
He returned to El Salvador in 2005 for a year as a Fulbright Scholar, working with a small university and starting to do research “on youth and migration, youth as they look to the future” and he has returned to 15 times since, continuing to work with a co-researcher and publishing their findings in Spanish.
Winship decided to write something about youth and migration in El Salvador in English for North American audiences, especially because he believes El Salvador is an “in between country” between fully developed countries like the United States, Canada and Japan and underdeveloped or developing nations.
Warfare in El Salvador from 1978 to 1992 had a profound influence on youth, according to Winship. Children as young as 14 were impressed into military service and over time the future prospects for adolescent Salvadorans changed from “few opportunities” to “no opportunities.”
Winship noted that when he was in El Salvador 1970-72, he didn’t meet anyone who had relatives in the U.S., whereas today a third to 40 percent of Salvadorians live outside of El Salvador.
Many youth from El Salvador ended up living in south central Los Angeles and were harassed by local gangs.
“Then they got into trouble,” Winship said, and many of them were deported to El Salvador without preparing the police or the military in that country for their return.
He criticized today’s media portrayal of El Salvador as inaccurately portraying “gangs as controlling every square kilometer of El Salvador.”
Asked for the solution to the large influx of youth migrants from El Salvador into the United States today, Winship said, “I’m not sure what the short term answer is. I know the long term answer really has to do with the combination of more community policing and taking security in the communities seriously, but also with youth just having a sense of ‘There are reasons for me to stay.’”
“There’s a whole lot of sadness for people who come up here, from being away from family, from being away from the people and the places they know, from their own language, from their own culture,” Winship added.
Winship decided to self-publish ““Growing Up in El Salvador” as a non-profit venture, with all the profits from the sale of the book going to help organizations that support youth and young adults in El Salvador: Glasswing, a non-profit that provides education and inquiry-based afterschool programs for youth, and scholarships at the Universidad Panamericana de El Salvador.
“Growing Up in El Salvador” can be purchased at the UWW bookstore, the Velveteen Rabbit bookstore in Fort Atkinson, or by following a link at www.comingofagebook.com for print and e-book version.
