On a regular basis, our resident photo pros Warren Smith and Ross Andress submit pictures of what is going on at the weekly meetings. You can always find the most recent pictures at the websites photo journal called "Meeting Sighting" Please note that all the meeting photos for the entire Rotary year are at this location with the most recent on the last page.

Thanks for all the great pictures Warren and Ross! Link to Meeting Sightings. The most recent are on the last page!

Additional photos may be found on the SR Sunrise Facebook Page.

Five Sunriser's mustered their muscles and minds, transforming an overgrown, underdeveloped yard at The Living Room on Cleveland Avenue into a welcoming, nutrition enhancing DIY garden.

Steve Amend corralled the energy of members Jim Kirkbride, Del Raby, Rich Randolph & Doug Shureen.  Hundreds of pounds of rock and soil were transferred from the parking lot to planting areas.  Six wine barrel halves were converted into planters to grow herbs and a new garden area prepped for onsite vegetables, and flexibility exercise.

The Living Room serves women and children without a home, providing shelter, support and  the opportunity to build new sustainable relationships.

The Living Room was Sunrise Rotary's "Fund the Need" beneficiary at our annual Culinary Best Winery Chefs Fund Raising event in 2015.  This year the event is scheduled for Saturday November 12.

K.R. "Ravi" Ravindran

President 2015-16

British writer and Royal Air Force pilot Roald Dahl was also an avid photographer who carried his beloved Zeiss camera on his many adventures. At a time when each photograph had to be laboriously developed by hand, on film or glass plate negatives, he amassed a collection of hundreds of images. In later years, these photographs served as a visual record of his travels, a way to document his experiences and share them with others. Yet he always spoke of his memories as being far more vivid than the photographs could ever reflect. So many events and experiences, he said, were simply impossible to capture; they could not be adequately conveyed in images or words.

Language may fail, and photographs fade; minds are fallible, and details are lost. But some experiences, as Dahl said, never dim; they stand out in our memories, even after decades, as a wall of flame. They rear up forever over the landscape of our past, dividing our lives into what came before and what came after.

That metaphor has stayed with me throughout the past year as I have traveled the world for Rotary. For indeed, this entire year has stood, and will always stand, as a wall of flame in my mind, dividing my life into before and after.

When I think back over these 12 months, I see a bright kaleidoscope of images cascading before my eyes, day after day, week after week. The anxious parents in Chandigarh, India, hovering at the bedside of the child recovering from lifesaving heart surgery. The bright flags of Nepal fluttering over an entire village that had been rebuilt after the devastating earthquake. The feeling of awe in St. Peter’s Square at the Jubilee of Rotarians celebrated by Pope Francis. Joyful gatherings around the world, in so many countries, in so many languages – with friends I had never before met, my brothers and sisters in Rotary.

To serve as president of Rotary International is a colossal undertaking, one that cannot be truly conveyed in images or words. It is a wall of flame that will burn forever in my memory, dancing with light, shifting in shadow. A thousand images jostle together in my mind, a thousand recollections, a thousand emotions. Together, they form a great mosaic; together, they show the bright and glorious work of your hands.

As this Rotary year draws to a close, I am prouder than ever to be part of this great organization: one that makes the world not poorer, but richer; replaces despair with hope; raises up those whom fate has brought low; and is a gift to so many, while allowing each of us to Be a Gift to the World.

Ray Klinginsmith

Trustee Chair 2015-16

At the end of the movie – the cowboy rides away

Western movies were the most popular film genre for several decades, and they were well known around the world. In many of them, after a victorious battle between the good guys and the bad guys, the hero would accept the appreciation of his friends and supporters – and then ride off alone into the sunset.

I won’t be alone due to my Rotary friends, but I will be riding into the Rotary sunset on 30 June, and I can’t avoid the comparison, because my life has been much like a movie for more than 50 years. From the time I was selected as a Rotary Scholar in 1959, good things started happening for me, and they have continued in much the same way as they did in the heartwarming movies of yesteryear.

Due to my Rotary Foundation scholarship to study in South Africa, my life has been an amazing adventure. I never dreamed when I was sailing from New Orleans to Cape Town on a Lykes Line freighter ship in 1961 that I would be the presiding officer at the 2011 Rotary Convention in that same port city of New Orleans exactly 50 years later. But it happened, and I truly have a deep appreciation and passion for The Rotary Foundation.

I also am fortunate that I found a way to utilize my farm heritage with the music and lyrics of “Cowboy Logic” and the wisdom of the Code of the West as recited in the book Cowboy Ethics. It has been a signal honor to play a role in the fantastic story of Rotary as it has emerged onto the world stage. But above all else, I am proud to acknowledge that I am a living, breathing product of The Rotary Foundation – because I was a Rotary Scholar.

The End