A couple of months ago Peter Lie organized a wine tasting evening and shared his detailed knowledge of fine spirits with us. Eager to host a fireside evening of my own I started thinking what drink-related knowledge I could bring to the table. Fortunately I have a fine collection of whisky’s in my drinks cabinet and know a little about the various types of whisky. Could I perhaps host a whisky tasting evening?

As they say in Holland: zo gezegd zo gedaan. A small group of us got together at my place in Houten yesterday  for a night of fine whisky, excellent cheese and pleasant banter. Olena and Peter brought a large number of snacks including an impressive cheese plateau, olives and some tasty bread.

Us Rotarians deserve the best of what life has to offer, and so in that vein I decided to uncork  my oldest 4 bottles. We started with a nice 20 year old Whyte & MacKay blend and then worked our way through successive lowland and highland single malts. The evening concluded with a fine Glenfarclass from 1966.

Peter & Olena: thanks for your pleasant company, and I hope you enjoyed the whisky!

On the Alpe d’HuZes website visitors can pledge money to individual teams and bikers, either a fixed amount or a given sum for every time a biker scales the mountain. Marc’s team received pledges for at least 20.000 euro’s, a very impressive amount. Marc kept us in the loop during the entire event, with e-mails describing the warming up and preparations leading up to the actual day of the climb, june 9th.

I was thrilled to learn that Marc climbed the Alpe d’Huez twice and two members of his team managed 6 climbs in a row. As several people had pledged an amount per climb this increased the total amount of money raised by Marc’s team to more than 25.000 euro’s. A fine contribution to the total amount raised by the Alpe d’HuZes event: more than 20 million euro’s!

Congratulations Marc! That was very impressive, we’re all proud of you.

After a fine three-course meal we relax and listen to Mircea’s presentation of our service projects for the coming year. We have a busy year coming up with many interesting activities. Amongst them are Sophie’s Sri Lanka project, a new eye clinic project and our regular “shoebox” activities. Mircea gives us a nice presentation and brings us up to speed with the work of the community service committee.

The next part of the evening is both happy and sad. Happy because we welcome Peter as our new chairman for the upcoming year, but sad because we have to say goodbye to Laima. Our appreciation for her hard work over the last year is evident when we shower her with gifts; amongst them are a big marzipan cake that we all eat up in no time, and also some Rotary-themed baby clothes that Laima’s child will undoubtedly wear proudly in the first few months of his life.

Then Henriette asks us to put our appreciation of Laima and Peter in words by writing two “elfjes”: short poems similar to a Haiku but containing 11 words. Fortunately I’m sitting next to Kwasi, Vegard and Roberto and our group quickly comes up with a single poem that both praises Laima and pokes a little fun at Peter at the same time. Exhausted from so much creativity we settle down to enjoy each others company and we start Peter’s presidency in high spirits.

Peter, we wish you well and hope you will have a great year as our new chairman!

Watching my little girl learning to walk has been one of my most joyful experiences of my life and my husband’s this last year. In a matter of months I observe human evolution close-up, as she has gone from lying, to shuffling on her bottom; to standing upright and cruising around the living room whilst holding onto a wooden stool for support; to gingerly taking a step or two between one piece of furniture and another, before finally casting aside all walking aides to literally taking her first steps towards independence.

But can you imagine being a parent who is unable to experience such joy? Or can you yourself imagine a life confined to a wheelchair or having to walk around with the aid of walking stick or a Zimmer frame, of  not being able to run, skate and ski and do everything else with our legs that we all take for granted.

This, unfortunately, is often the life of a polio victim.

Luckily polio is not an incurable disease: in fact it costs less than 15 US cents to vaccinate a child. Since 1988 the number of polio endemic countries has plummeted from 125 in 1988 to just four in 2005. When the initiative started its work, polio infected more than 350,000 children annually – the size of a small European city. In 2009, it had dropped to fewer than 1,700 cases – the size of a European village.  This has mainly been due to Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a public and private initiative that includes Rotary International as one of its partners.

The good news is that we’re 99% close to eradicating a disease that has been around since the Pharaohs in Egypt. Eradicating it would make it the second disease after smallpox to disappear. Yet, being close is not enough. In an increasing global world, computer viruses aren’t the only viruses immune to border controls. That’s why the final push is important.

So what can you do? You don’t have to be a Bill Gates to donate, neither do you have to find a cure for Polio to eradicate polio; that’s already been done. Simply give up that Monday morning cup of coffee and instead donate 1 euro or dollar it to End Polio now campaign. By doing so you’d not be helping just 1 child but 6 children to walk and therefore to take their first steps towards independence. Imagine seeing that look of pure joy on their and their parents’ faces when they do this. Wouldn’t that be a look worth giving up your cup of coffee for?

For more information on how to donate go to: http://www.rotary.org/en/EndPolio/

Alpona

(March 2011)

Despite the reservation mix-up Jochem takes everything in good stride and gives us a spirited and enthusiastic presentation. He tells us about his skating career, how it started and how he eventually won gold medals in Calgary, and how he finally decided to quit speed skating in 2007. In the following years Jochem has looked back at this decision, trying to discover why he reached this point in his career. We discover that it all boils down to energy management.  If you do not focus on energy management your career is not sustainable and you will eventually burn out.

Jochem tells us that sleep is a major factor in determining your energy balance. He shows us a sleep graph which describes the phases that we go through during a good night’s sleep. We start out with a light sleep which gradually progresses to deep sleep, then resets back to light sleep and continues the cycle several times during the night. We learn that light sleep helps mental recuperation and deep sleep helps physical recuperation. The catch is that we only reach deep sleep at the beginning of the night. By going to bed late at night we skip over a deep sleep cycle which prevents our body to recuperate. We also learn about siestas and catnaps which help mental recuperation. By planning when we go to bed and when we get up we can influence how our body restores itself.

The second factor affecting your energy balance is stress. Jochem tells us that stress releases more Cortisol in our blood and prolonged exposure to Cortisol is damaging to our bodies. When our job becomes a stressful chore the effects of Cortisol will actuality worsen our performance and we can get stuck in a negative cycle. Jochem tells us that the best current skating teams all use stress management techniques like meditation to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

Afterwards we all thank Jochem for a great presentation and head home, knowing that the tools he gave us will help us maintain a healthy energy balance in our lives.

I hate car navigation systems. No matter how detailed and up-to date they are, I still get lost. Take last week after the club meeting. What should have taken half an hour ended up being an hour. I’m still mystified about the route I took. What I do know is that I almost ended up 20 kilometres north of Utrecht, instead of heading 30 kilometres south.

Maybe I should have used a different kind of map. According to Sophie, who gave a cross-cultural talk on her life and her profession of mapping technology, there are several kinds of maps and uses of mapping technology, namely: aerial maps, satellite mapping, and LIDAR. Aerial mapping gives a bird’s eye view of the ground by simply taking a picture from a plane. Satellite mapping techniques, on the other hand, with the aid of various filters, can be used to distinguish areas undistinguishable to the naked eye. This technique can be used to: identify specific objects, right down to the types of trees in the area; distinguish the sea from lake and identify residential areas. Finally, there’s LIDAR. This uses lasers to create detailed 3-D maps; it  enables the viewer to see depths and heights of objects – useful if you want to see if there are any overgrown trees near electricity pylons or railway lines.

Besides these basic means of gathering topographical and geographical information, mapping has advanced rapidly in the last decades. These days, spatial mapping combines demographic and geographical information. So if you want to find out income levels or voter preference in one area, you simply click on an interactive map, and lo and behold all the data is there.

All these techniques seem rather advanced, though, maybe too advanced for my navigational abilities. I would prefer a far simpler mapping solution, such as navigating using restaurants as reference points. Even I wouldn’t be able to misunderstand an instruction such as “Take a left at the next Macdonald’s” or “Your address is round the block from the Chinese Restaurant”. Then again, I do have the spatial awareness of a headless chicken.

Luckily, one person who doesn’t seem to have any problems with navigation is our newly elected President, Mark Farragher for 2012-2013. He seems to have clearly used the latest mapping techniques in helping him define the challenges as well as setting a clear course for the club. His top priorities include: promoting the unique and diverse nature of our club; reinventing the Rotary story to make it relevant in an ever-changing world; and focusing on charitable projects which do not necessarily need huge amounts of funds, but do have a considerable impact on the community, such as the eye clinic our club supports in Uganda. Considering his past experience as head of the Communications and PR committee, I have no doubt that he will avoid any unnecessary detours and navigate us clearly and smoothly to reach our final destination successfully.

We went to Oeroeboeroe to have a different kind of activity that the children are normally used to and hoped that they will have some good time while baking and eating pancakces with us. We were very warmly welcomed by both children and staff of Oeroeboeroe. Steve, a 8 year old, was very active, cheerful and didn’t run out of game ideas for hours! Manon, an olde girl, was very keen to help and to make contact with each and every of us.

Apart from the pancakes evening, RCUI members have donated money which Oeroeboeroe will use to buy new (sustainable) toys for the children.

We found this little project to be very fulfilling and enjoyed it no less than the children we met.

In the series of talks Sharing cross-cultural experience: a Rotary scholar Robbieanaa Leung gave a presentation in our club. Robbie is a guest Rotary scholar at our club this year. The ambassadorial scholarship of Rotary supports 600 students each year from 70 countries. There are more than 40.000 alumni around the world.

When the cross-cultural experience presentation by Robbieana came up as the theme of our meeting last Tuesday it found me in the true Aloha spirit (should this make any sense when said by a Ukrainian). I was naturally expecting photographs of the beaches and the sun, the most extraordinary cocktails and flowers. Needless to say, those expectations were met and even more, to the point when one of us (I bet you it was Peter L.) exclaimed that seeing all that beauty on a foggy night in Utrecht simply hurts. As a bonus, we learned to say a few street names in Hawaiian thinking this must be some piece of great wisdom and learned about Robbiana’s other “place of origin”: Hong Kong. Speaking of the latter, Holland is under-populated when compared to those street images.
And yet it wasn’t all about the beaches (although picturing our meeting at the sand bar required little to no effort). Robbieana told us about this new human species called Third Culture Kids, the true representatives of the globalization, the very proof that this world is small, who are born and raised in so many cultures and societies that a question of a national identity becomes irrelevant. Being a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, she shared the inspiring goals of the scholarship and her own immense positive outlook.  We learned about the Blanket Project. By the end of the presentation, I felt that the dauntingly high piles of textbooks Robbieana has to go through for the Master’s studies in Conflict Studies & Human Rights at University Utrecht will be conquered easily.
Thanks Robbie and have a great year in Holland!

Professor Oerlemans’s website: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~oerlemns/
Professor Hans Oerlemans works in IMAU, The Institute for Atmospheric and Marine Research in Utrecht University.
He received the Spinoza Prize of 2.5 million Euros in 2001 to support his research. He has also received many other honors.

In his talk professor Oerlemans explains how glaciers work. Glaciers and small ice caps shrink all over the world – a feature frequently quoted as a clear sign of global warming. But is there a simple relation between temperature and the size of glaciers?
Measurements on and near glaciers have revealed the processes that determine the response of glaciers to climate change.

Prof. Oerlemans is doing research together with students on glaciers all over the world. He shows us pictures of glaciers, how they grow and shrink during the change of the seasons and how they move down the slope. By talking a picture from the same spot every day you see how the glacier moves down.
By measuring the snow/ice mass – change and bringing that in relation to meteorological conditions you see how the climate influences the glacier. We see that glaciers are sensitive to climate change, but there are differences over the world, due to for example the size of the slope and the humidity conditions. Very striking was that they do research on the history of glaciers using paintings of glaciers form years ago as painters seem to have favorite angles from which they picture the glacier.  This way they have information from dates before photography was invented!

Regiane tells us that she comes from Juazeiro do Norte, Sertao, in Brazil, the rough and dry north-east part of the country. She gives us a short but fascinating account of the historical background of Brazil with its religious wars, slavery, independence and modern times, and she also tells us some personal history of her and her family. We get to see Brazil from an insider’s point of view. Regiane tells us that the beauty of Sertao is not the nature but the people: strong, independent people with joy, humor and wit. And we get to witness this firsthand; Regiane’s story is full of humor and interesting details. Especially funny is the part about names and how Brazilians choose to name their children. Regiane’s mother had a fascination with Holland and so her first son was named after a Dutch doctor. And Regiane’s own name is an anagram of “Energy” which suits her well!

Regiane ends her story with a picture of Brazilians leaving the country “A vida no Sertao” by J. Borges. “That’s our life there in the North”, she tells us; “Most men go away in search of a better life.” We hope Regiane has found this life here in Holland with us.