Jennifer McCurrach, Exec. Dir. of The 1st Tee of Greater Austin spoke on their character-building program for youth using golf as a centerpiece.

The 1st Tee of Greater Austin is a 501(c)(3) non-profit youth development organization dedicated to providing young people with educational programs to build character, instill life-enhancing values, and promote healthy choices through the game of golf.  Jennifer provided many examples of how golf -- sometimes referred to as the "gentleman's" sport -- shows youngsters how to work as a team, to be courteous to opponents, how to meet and greet people, and generally how to develop a solid value-based system in their lives.

Jennifer is a former member of the LPGA golf tour.

Thanks to Bill Parmeter for bringing this program.

Planning for the "F4" event continued at today's meeting.

The Foster Family Fun Fest "F4" event draws near as Daybreak made final plans and adjustments for the event this coming Saturday, May 17.  The day of fun for foster families is part of Daybreak's effort to encourage more families to consider becoming foster parents.

The Marble Falls Jail -- historical -- will be beautified

Marble Falls Daybreak Rotary in conjunction with the Falls Career High School of MFISD will be beautifying the old jail on 2nd street, just across from the Chamber of Commerce. It has already had a good cleanup with the plan is to do a major planting of hardy, native plants to dress up that part of our town. A plan has been drawn by Bill Bradshaw, Emeritus Landscape Architect and is in the works.

The first annual (and first ever anywhere) picnic event for foster families has begun.

Daybreak's innovative (repeat) President Eddie Arredondo has added to Daybreak's increasing role to recruit and assist foster children in the Highland Lakes area.  Building on the successful Adoption Day last November, Daybreak is now hosting a Foster Family Fun Fest which will provide a day's entertainment for area foster families out at the Hidden Falls Adventure Park, courtesy of Daybreak Rotarians Brooks and Marian Blake (both former presidents of Daybreak). As is typical for Daybreak, this will be an all-hands-on-deck event as we host up to 200+ people on a Saturday.

Awards were made to the Club members by incoming District Governor Rich Kaye.

The Daybreak Rotary Club of Marble falls is a 100% sustaining member club. That means that every member contributes at least $100 annually to the Rotary Foundation. On April 2, 2013 incoming District Governor Rich Kaye presented certificates to all of the members, recognizing their contributions. All but three of the members were present which also is a comment on the vitality of this club.

The impact of the "Every Rotarian [at least $100] Every Year" program is summarized by RI thusly:

"Sustaining Members are critical to the Foundation. If every club member contributed $100 every year, Rotary could nearly double its efforts to help needy people worldwide and support the continued growth of its programs."

In the accompanying photo Foundation Chairman Jeff Watts receives his certificate from Governor-elect Rich Kaye.

Falls recognized the partnership with a beautiful plaque at graduation.

On Friday, June 6, Jim and Barbara Warden together with Jennifer and myself attended the graduation ceremonies for Marble Falls Career High School where we presented three scholarships of $1,000 each. Other organizations also awarded scholarships to some of the 36 graduates.

What we did not expect was to receive recognition by way of a beautiful plaque given to Daybreak. The plaque was presented to the Club on June 10.

Jim Berg opines:  "Finally, Rotary gets the recognition it justly deserves! Our main focus of our beloved Rotary is the project conceived and driven by our 34,000 clubs and districts. This is a wonderful tool to support our ongoing drive to raise the funding to complete this important job : eradication of polio."  Learn more about the tremendous progress in killing polio. 

"Finally, Rotary gets the recognition it justly deserves! Our main focus of our beloved Rotary is the project conceived and driven by our 34,000 clubs and districts. This is a wonderful tool to support our ongoing drive to raise the funding to complete this important job : eradication of polio" as reported by Jim Berg. Apparently the Asian and other editions of editions of the current Time magazine has a big spread on the polio eradication. 

Read about the progress in fighting polio and Rotary’s role in eradicating this crippling disease. “Thanks to aggressive global vaccination programs led by Rotary International, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and, most recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the year just beginning could be the disease’s last.” 
(from an email by Jim Berg, RRFC 2012-2015)

Here is part of the Time article:

There’s no one place a virus goes to die — but that doesn’t make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out. In the developed world, vaccines have made once-common scourges such as measles, rubella, mumps and whooping cough rare to the point of near-extinction. Only once, however, has any virus been flushed from its last redoubts in both the body and the wild and effectively vaccinated out of existence. That virus was smallpox, which ceased to exist outside high-security labs in 1977. Since that day, humanity has been free to put the vaccines against the disease — and the terror its periodic outbreaks would cause — on the shelf forever.

Now we are tantalizingly close to another such epic moment. This time the disease in the medical cross hairs is polio, and there’s no minimizing the progress made against it. Just 25 years ago, polio was endemic to 125 countries and would paralyze or kill up to 350,000 people — the overwhelming majority of them children —  each year. Now the disease has been run to ground in just three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria, and in 2012, it struck only 215 people worldwide. Thanks to aggressive global vaccination programs led by Rotary International, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and, most recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the year just beginning could be the disease’s last.

(TIME: Read the magazine story on polio, available to subscribers here)

But polio still has strong-armed friends. On January 1, as the rest of the world celebrated the New Year, gunmen in Pakistan shot and killed seven medical aid workers — six of them women or girls — who had been part of the anti-polio drive. Those killings followed nine others in December, as well as the shooting of a Ghanaian doctor, also conducting polio-vaccination work in Pakistan, in July. The month before that, the Pakistani Taliban blocked the planned vaccination of 161,000 children until U.S. drone strikes in the country were halted.

Polio is a notoriously slippery disease, one that relies on — indeed its very survival depends on — just the kind of holes such sabotage efforts open in the vaccine safety net. In 2003, polio was similarly near its end when clerics in Northern Nigeria halted inoculations — claiming that the vaccine contained HIV and was designed to sterilize children. Within two years, cases of polio linked to the Nigerian strain were raging across 16 countries. And since once case of paralysis can result for every 200 cases of polio infection, that means there may be 199 other carriers silently and unknowingly spreading the virus.

(MORE: At the U.N., a Vow to Eradicate Polio by 2015)

Using children as viral suicide bombers this way is a new — and grotesque — form of bioterrorism, and the world, for now at least, is not standing idly by. After the December killings, Pakistani officials pledged to continue with the country’s plans to deploy 250,ooo health care workers to vaccinate 35 million children this year. The governments of Nigeria and Afghanistan have similarly vowed to see the eradication drive through to its end, as have the U.N. and the other institutions involved in the battle. The Islamic Development Bank has put fresh money behind the  push, donating $227 million to the vaccine program in Pakistan in particular. This is on top of the billions already provided by Rotary and the Gates Foundation alone.

All of that money could turn out to be very very well spent. One billion dollars per year over the next few years could save $50 billion  over the next 20 years in the costs of continuing to chase the disease around the globe and treat the children who are felled by it. And there is no way, of course, of putting a price tag on the suffering of those stricken children — or the importance of sparing other victims the same fate. The war with the polio virus and its human defenders has been joined — and 2013 could be the year in which the climactic battles are fought.

MORE: How a Ban on Polio Vaccination in Parts of Pakistan Puts the Entire World at Risk

MORE: The War Over Polio

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/01/03/the-final-battle-against-polio/#ixzz2HQf4RLAd

The 4-Way Test

From the earliest days of the organization, Rotarians were concerned with promoting high ethical standards in their professional lives. One of the world's most widely printed and quoted statements of business ethics is The 4-Way Test, which was created in 1932 by Rotarian Herbert J. Taylor (who later served as RI president) when he was asked to take charge of a company that was facing bankruptcy. This 24-word test for employees to follow in their business and professional lives became the guide for sales, production, advertising, and all relations with dealers and customers, and the survival of the company is credited to this simple philosophy. Adopted by Rotary in 1943, The 4-Way Test has been translated into more than a hundred languages and published in thousands of ways. It asks the following four questions:

"Of the things we think, say or do:

1. Is it the TRUTH?

2. Is it FAIR to all concerned?

3. Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?

4. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?"

Daybreak Rotarians unanimously cheered the initiative for adoption awareness and foster parent recruitment.

Co-chairs Eddie Arredondo and Barbara Warden explained the program to the membership today. In a comprehensive push to increase the number of foster homes and adoptions in the Highland Lakes Daybreak Rotary has undertaken a life-changing service to abused and neglected children. Daybreakers will be involved in three major areas of activity which include (1) an "Adoption Day" event each November, (2) helping the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (TDFPS) to recruit prospective foster parents, and (3) assisting TDFPS in conducting the training necessary for certification as a foster parent. 

Members Arredondo (Burnet County Attorney), Leslie Vance (Burnet County's civil attorney) and Gil Jones (retired District Judge) all echoed the tremendous benefit that will come to abused and neglected children by increasing the number of foster homes in the area. Many new foster homes will become certified as "foster/adopt" homes meaning they are pre-approved for adopting a child needing a home.

Each Christmas season Daybreak Rotary along with the other two area Rotary Clubs helps in the bell-ringing for the Salvation Army. We hear grateful stories which we now share with you.

While the current bell-ringing raises the entire budget for the local Salvation Army effort and is appreciated by them, many people have stories from years and decades past where the Army helped them or a loved one. Heart strings are tugged. Additions to the stories below will be forth-coming. The quoted material is the person's story as recalled by the Rotarian ringing the bells.

• Giver:  "My brother came back from WW2 and made it to the U.S. but we did not know where he was. The Red Cross would not help us, but the Salvation Army did. They looked for him for months."  Rotarian:  "Did they find him ok?"  Giver:  "No, but they tried. They tried hard."  -- as told by Gil Jones
• I had a lady stop her car in front of the bell ringing , holding up traffic, and pulled her ash tray out full of change to give to Salvation Army. Kinda cool. Another stopped, wrote out a check and came running up to deposit. Fun to see. -- Dick Nicholson

• My job tends to lead me to dealing with the tougher side of people; I had no idea what to expect.

  I’m a numbers guy and naturally had to see my score at the end. During my 2 hour ringing I made about $200; I’ll take $100/hour any day. This included 2 - $10’s, 13- $5’s and then a large pile of singles and change that I didn’t expect. Multiple people thanked me for even being there. A father stopped with his two young sons and described how the Salvation Army had saved his life when he was orphaned at a very young age, making their lives possible. It was truly amazing.

  Looking back at Christmas 2012, this was when I felt the spirit of giving and genuine human desire to help one another selflessly. Thank you for allowing me to be involved; it helped me quite a bit also to see the power of giving.

  This was something I had thought would drag down my day; it was the true bright spot instead.

  This was something I expected to add to my stress; it got my mind off of my problems completely and gave me a sense of accomplishment.

  This was something I expected to endure; it instead strengthened me.

  Those people gave me more than $200 for the Salvation Army.

  -- from Whit Holcomb
• An older gentleman with the gait of a much younger man came up to me and, as he was making his donation to the kettle, he told me that the Salvation Army was the only organization that he gives money to.  He explained now that he was on social security he he had to watch his pennies.  However he could not pass up a Salvation Army kettle with out giving all the money he had in his pockets to help out.
  He said that the worst time in his life was as a young man in World War 2 where he served in the European Theatre.  While he was there, the only time that any one gave him anything was when the Salvation Army gave him hot coffee, a free doughnut, and a warm smile. Even today he hasn't forgotten the Salvation Army's outreach, and he continues to give back what he can.
  -- shared by Jim Warden
• Hill Country folks sure are generous, and especially around Christmas.  We're not born knowing how to give, though, and it takes some patient training from those who love us to develop that compassion for others.  I saw this in action as I rang the bell this year.  A little boy about six proudly walked over to the kettle to deposit the money his mother had tucked into his hand.  She watched thoughtfully, and said "Son, what's in your wallet?"  He looked over in surprise and said "my money." She said, "put in the bucket."  With a shocked look, he stated "it's MY money!"  She directed him, "put it in - all of it."
  
  He did so, a LOT more slowly than he'd deposited the first donation, and with a rather troubled look on his face.  His mother smiled and said, "Son, your gift will be returned to you with so many blessings - many more than you gave."  I could see the doubt in his eyes, but I knew her lesson was heard and would prove true.  I felt a big lump in my throat, hearing that reminder, so well taught that afternoon in front of Wal-Mart.
  -- an experience by Barbara Warden
• A WW2 vet walked over to the bucket & emptied every pocket, including his jacket. He explained that he never passed up a Salvation Army bucket because they were the only ones who cared & went all the way. I asked what he meant.
  
  He explained that he was in WW2 as a young man, fighting in France after the invasion. His unit had just taken a small village from the Germans, but the Germans retreated all around the village. They were "sort of" under siege surrounded by the German troops they just ousted. The Germans didn't attack, but just kept them in the town. They soon found out why, as food, water, shelter & clothing were scarce. All they could do was wait for reinforcements.
  
  The few locals remaining told them that red cross was nearby, but refused to come in, stating it was too dangerous & not a great enough need in the village.
  
  A few days later the salvation army showed up in town, with food, water & most of all, dry boots & socks for everyone. He never forgot. They never asked for "thanks" & refused even the smallest token of appreciation. He gives his "thank you" in every red bucket he sees, every year.
  -- Wow. What a story as related by Allan