Rotary Changeover Training July 2021

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented us with a new environmental challenge. Every month, more than 120 billion disposable masks and gloves are being thrown out, with some of them polluting our land and water.

 

Our Rotaract club, like many, is concerned about the environment. Emboldened by Rotary’s newest cause, protecting the environment, we decided to do something about this problem. We began a recycling effort which we called our Clean Earth project to collect masks that were littering our streets, parking lots, and other common areas and find a way to reuse them.

 

Medical experts have said that the virus can survive up to three days on an object. We place the masks that we pick up in a locked room for three days. Then we bleach them and wash them with detergent over a period of 24 hours. We dry them in sunlight, then tear them into smaller pieces and mix them with cement. We use this mixture to create planting containers filled with soil, which we plant trees inside.

 

We have also made bricks with the mixture and find it stronger than regular bricks. We are planning to use the bricks to build toilets in rural areas. We are working with other clubs to expand our effort, perhaps creating a recycling center where people could bring their used masks, and we could employ other people to help us turn them into bricks and other products.

 

As much as 13 million tons of plastic makes it way into our oceans every year. Masks often contain plastics such as polypropylene with a lifespan of hundreds of years. Rotary members are creative and innovative, and we are sure that with some thought, other clubs could join us in finding ways to convert glove and mask waste into usable commodities. Let’s protect this planet of ours while we embrace Rotary’s newest cause.

 

 

 

 

The Olympics are coming up and on all our minds. “After a yearlong postponement due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Games are set to kick off July 23 Tokyo, despite the ongoing spread of COVID-19 and lingering concerns in Japan. Though the Olympics will be taking place in 2021 due to the postponement, they will continue to be officially branded as the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.”

 

Join our Rotary Club on Tuesday, August 17th for a special presentation with Author David Sweet to learn more about another unprecedented moment in Olympic history! Below are excerpts from Sweet's book and from Amazon books about his experience.

 

“Imagine you’re a young American who’s celebrated as one of the finest basketball players our country has to offer. You’re going to fly across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time -- destination Munich, West Germany, for the Olympics.

 

But in little more than a week, fellow athletes are murdered steps from your bedroom. A few days later, you are victorious not once but twice in the same gold-medal game — yet an overbearing administrator strolls from the stands and nullifies your victories. The game haunts you to this day -- and you and your teammates remain the only Olympic athletes to reject their medals.”

 

That’s as long as it took to sear the souls of a dozen young American men, thanks to the craziest, most controversial finish in the history of the Olympics—the 1972 gold-medal basketball contest between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s two superpowers at the time.

The U.S. team, whose unbeaten Olympic streak dated back to when Adolf Hitler reigned over the Berlin Games, believed it had won the gold medal that September in Munich—not once, but twice. But it was the third time the final seconds were played that counted.

What happened? The head of international basketball—flouting rules he himself had created—trotted onto the court and demanded twice that time be put back on the clock. A referee allowed an illegal substitution and an illegal free-throw shooter for the Soviets while calling a slew of late fouls on the U.S. players. The American players became the only Olympic athletes in the history of the games to refuse their medals.

Of course, the 1972 Olympics are remembered primarily for a far graver matter, when eleven Israeli team members were killed by Palestinian terrorists, stunning the world and temporarily stopping the games. One American player, Tommy Burleson, had a gun to his head as the hostages were marched past him before their deaths.
 

Through interviews with many of the American players and others, the author relates the horror of terrorism, the pain of losing the most controversial championship game in sports history to a hated rival, and the consequences of the players’ decision to shun their Olympic medals to this day.