Our Speaker for September 13^th was Clark Beek, General Manager of Spaulding Marine Center.  The Marine Center is located in Sausalito and is a charitable organization (501(c)(3)) focused on the preservation of wooden boat works, including education and community events.  The Marine Center includes a working boat works, a nautical museum, and a nautical library.  Clark encourages everyone to visit the center.  At any given time you can see boats being worked on, books, crazy-old tools in use, and look through the library.

Clark talked about Myron Spaulding, who started the boatworks in 1951.  Myron was a concert violinist with a love of sailing.  He was a racing skipper, designer and builder of boats.  He started the boatworks to build his own boat designs. Some of his boats are still in use on the West Coast!  After Myron died in 2000, his wife, Gladys, continued the boat yard and ultimately established a charitable trust that will keep the Center open for years.

Clark also discussed “Freda,” the matriarch of S.F. Bay.  Clark and his crew restored the boat, originally constructed in 1885 and relaunched it in 2014.  Freda still sometimes roams the S.F. Bay and is considered a “masterpiece” of wooden boats.

The Center’s chief charitable purposes include summer camps for kids and general boat-related education and training for kids.  The current summer camp venture is to teach kids sailing on the Center’s boats.  This program was very successful and they intend to keep it going.  Another major endeavor is cooperation with Bay Area Association of Disabled Sailors (BAADS).  Sailing can be very beneficial to individuals with disabilities and is always fun!  Clark spoke in depth about the development of the S/V 14, a small boat specifically designed for disabled individuals.  Among other things, the boat ‘cants’ to allow the seats to swing freely with the boat as it “heels” and “jibes.”  As Clark said, this is a “game changer” for disabled individuals. The S/V 14 was designed by Australian boat designers and one of the prototypes was built and tested at the Spaulding Marine Center. 

On a regular basis, our resident photo pros Warren Smith and Jack Strange 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 Jack! Link to Meeting Sightings. The most recent are on the last page!

My Fellow Rotarians,

On Thursday November 8^th we will be celebrating the 18^th annual tribute to our veterans for Veteran’s day.  The luncheon will began promptly at 11:30am and last until 1:30 pm at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium across from the Santa Rosa Fair Grounds.  This is a change of venue for our Club meeting.  This year the program will be of a panel of veterans relating their experiences.  Music will be provided by the Elsie Allen High School marching band.  This event has been a good one over the years and a chance to say thank you to our veterans and to our very own marching bank.  Both will appreciate your attendance.

We have asked each Rotarian in our Club to buy two tickets for $30 total, inviting a veteran to accompany them.  If you cannot attend please purchase the tickets and give them back so two veterans can be invited in your place.  Thank you in advance for your generous support.  Please make the check payable to the club.

In response to feed back over the years I will be at the check in desk for four meeting 9/27^th,10/12, 10/19 and 10/26 selling tickets and collecting checks.    This shorter collection period means remembering your checks as there are less ‘next week I will bring its’ which has been the traditional response to did you bring your check.

Peter L Treleaven

By Diana Schoberg Photos by Daniela Prado Sarasúa

Ricardo Román was shopping with his wife at a department store in Chile in 2012 when a woman in her early 20s approached him. He didn’t recognize her, he confesses through an interpreter, but there were two good reasons: He had last seen her more than a decade earlier – and her smile had changed drastically.

Surgeons Lena Pinillos, left, and James Lehman, talk with a father about his child.

Román, a member of the Rotary Club of Reñaca, Chile, is the national coordinator of a  program that has helped thousands of children in Chile with cleft lips, cleft palates, and other birth defects – including this stranger who now wanted to give Román a hug.

“She told me, ‘This is my Rotarian smile,’” he recalls, his voice full of emotion. “It was a very gratifying moment.”

An anxious father waits on the floor in a hospital corridor; with so many surgeries, there are often more people than chairs.

The project got its start in 1993 when San Francisco (California) Rotarians, led by Peter Lagarias and Angelo Capozzi, sponsored a medical mission that performed reconstructive surgeries in Chile. That was the beginning of Rotaplast, a program that evolved into a nonprofit organization that has since sent teams to 26 countries.

In 2004, Rotarians in Chile assumed leadership of the program in their country. Over the years, Chilean doctors became more involved and eventually the program expanded to include breast reconstruction for cancer patients.

A mother comforts her child

“It’s a great commentary on Rotary that you’ve got people in a Spanish-speaking country and people in an English-speaking country working together to get things accomplished,” says James Lehman, a plastic surgeon who joined the Rotary Club of Fairlawn, Ohio, USA, after working with Rotarians in Chile.

In February, Lehman and a team of U.S. surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses visited Iquique, a Pacific port city and tourist hot spot about 80 miles south of Chile’s northern border. With financial help from the nearby Collahuasi copper mine, local Rotarians coordinate and pay for the medical team’s food, lodging, and in-country transportation. (Visiting doctors pay for their flights between the United States and Chile; an Ohio-based nonprofit funds the travel of some support staff.)

More than 250 potential patients lined up early on a Saturday morning outside Ernesto Torres Galdames Hospital to try to get a spot on the team’s schedule. They had come from all over Chile, including a family who had traveled from Concepción, 1,400 miles to the south. About 600 children are born each year in Chile with cleft lips and palates, and though the government established eight centers to treat those abnormalities, the long wait list means corrective surgery can lie years in the future. “The demand exceeds the supply of people to take care of the patients,” Lehman explains.

Using four operating rooms – one for cleft lip or palate, one for ear reconstruction, one for breast reconstruction, and one for other issues – the team got to work. Patients were chosen based on need and on the complexity of the surgery. By the end of their stay, the surgeons and their staff had operated on 82 patients. In many cases, however, the complete reconstruction may take multiple surgeries, and some patients return several years in a row to complete the procedure.

The team includes surgeons, nurses, an anesthesiologist, and a speech pathologist, as well as Rotaractors and Rotarians who handle logistics and translation.

But the final surgery doesn’t always signal an end to the relationship between a patient and Rotary. Román, who has coordinated the program since 2004, recalls an occasion involving the young woman he encountered in the department store. At Román’s invitation, she described her transformational cleft lip and palate surgeries at a Rotary district conference in Chile in 2012. Moved by her story, many in the crowd of 300 broke into tears, dazzled by her Rotarian smile.

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