OUR FIRST LIVE PRESENTATION

We had a whole day's polishing and refining of our presentation on Saturday 24th January in Umhlanga Rocks. Nivashni's mom sent us a delicious mutton breyani that she had prepared specially for us - and fortified by this wonderful meal, we made our plans to do our first presentation to the Rotary Club of Empangeni on Tuesday evening 27th January.

We chose Empangeni because they were good enough to invite us - and also because they are Brendan's sponsoring club. We arrived there after a long drive, Jonathan from Port Shepstone, Santosh from Durban and Siyanda doing some low flying from Howick. Brendan and Nivashni (who brought her sister Rekshree along), had shorter drives from Empangeni and Richards Bay respectively.

We were welcomed very warmly by the Rotarians of Empangeni and in particular by their President, Jim Dowe, who has spent time in Hong Kong and told us lots about it - makes our excitement even greater! The meeting started with the induction of a new Rotarian into the club which was a great thing for the GSE members to witness. We were all introduced to the 'newest Rotarian in the world'. Then it was time for us to present and with Brendan having sorted out all the technical stuff, we were ready. Each one of the GSE team did a great job and we were complimented very kindly by the Rotarians and their Anns and partners. A couple of good ideas were suggested for making our presentation even better, one of the suggestions being that we arrange for a rolling photo collage of beautiful and varied pictures of South Africa to roll as a slide show in the background once our presentation has been completed. We are definitely going to do something about that.We then had a great supper and good fellowship and eventually left just before 9pm for our trips home. Before leaving, we had a group photo taken with President Jim which is posted above.

Well, that was a big milestone for us, and now it's last minute preparations and packing. We have been issued with our electronic airline tickets but we are still waiting anxiously for our itinerary. No doubt we will have it anyday now and we can't wait to see what the next month holds in store. We'll keep you posted.

GSE Team to D3450 in 2009

Hi everyone,

As you will soon see, a blog has been set up to share our experiences on our Rotary Group Study Exchange (GSE) trip to Hong Kong. We mean to let everybody who’s interested keep up to date with what we are doing.

The team members are: Nivashni Vandayar, Santosh Beharie, Siyanda Ngcobo and Brendan Gilbert. The team is being led on the trip by Jonathan Brauteseth, a past president of the Rotary Club of Port Shepstone. The team members are so thrilled to have been selected. For those of you who aren’t sure what a GSE trip is all about, here is a quotation that might help:

The Group Study Exchange (GSE) program of The Rotary Foundation is a unique cultural and vocational exchange opportunity for young business and professional men and women between the ages of 25 and 40 and in the early years of their professional lives. The program provides travel grants for teams to exchange visits between paired areas in different countries. For four to six weeks, team members experience the host country’s institutions and ways of life, observe their own vocations as practiced abroad, develop personal and professional relationships, and exchange ideas.

We are so excited! We have prepared our presentation and presented it to the local GSE committee of Rotary District 9270. They thought it was better than just good, but gave us lots of pointers for making it a great presentation. This is the presentation that we will make to Rotary Clubs in Rotary District 9350 (Hong Kong, Macau and Mongolia) while we are visiting them. The presentation is about ourselves, our work, and mainly about our beautiful country, South Africa. We will try to keep this blog updated as much as possible and add as many pics as possible so that you can share with us.

We leave on Saturday 7th February from Durban at 12 noon and then from Johannesburg’s OR Tambo at 4.50pm. We get back on Sunday 8th March.

Warm regards,

The team