When you become a member in Rotary, you are assigned a classification relating to your profession. Each new Rotary member or transferee is asked to give a "classification talk" after they have been in our Club for 1 - 6 months to share their life stories and journey with other members in order to develop deeper personal relations with club members beyond your work in Rotary.
On August 27th, McKew shared his upbringing in a family of 5 growing up in Montgomery, NY (near New Paltz in the Hudson Valley), his first connection with Rotary as an exchange student / scholarship winner to Spain where he found his love for the Spanish language, his 23 years as an adjunct professor at UVM teaching Spanish from beginner to advanced level, and his two international service projects – one in the Dominican Republic raising money and then building houses with the funds, and the second for El Camino de Santiago, the network of ancient walking and cycling pilgrimage routes across Europe.
At the conclusion of McKew's talk, he shared the Robert Frost poem, Mending Wall, and it's connection with the 4-way test. Whether you are new to Frost or know this poem well, the famous line is “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” that the neighbor of Frost inherited from his father and refused to question the need for the barrier or ask Is It the Truth?
To read the Robert Front poem in it's entirety, go to: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall
To hear McKew's classification talk, the link is: https://youtu.be/HhiaWMoeX2s