THE HAPPINESS TO ATTEND A ROTARY INSTITUTE AROUND THE WORLD

The Rotary Institutes around the world – like the annual Conventions – are among the best scientific and social events I’ve ever been. And I was a participant, a speaker, a training leader and an organizer in many of these events from Brazil to Japan.
However, it is also a privilege for me to have particular friends among the conveners and chairmen on the last and the next Institutes in Europe and Africa.
My dear friend Andrzej Ludek was the Warsaw Institute chairman last 23-27 September. In Poland, and in the town of Chopin, with the beautiful sites like old town and the Castle Square, King Sigismund’s Column, St John’s Cathedral, the Market Square and the Barbican, it was a marvelous occasion for about three hundred persons from Scandinavia, Finland, Poland, Baltic countries and Russia, to have an important Rotary Meeting.
My dear and good friend V. G. Patel for a long time, one of the major contributors to the Rotary Foundation, classmate in my first time in Anaheim, was the chairman of Seychelles Rotary Institute last 14 – 18 October, in the beautiful Sainte Anne National Marine Park. The Cerf Island Resort was really something like the Paradise in hearth. People from the whole Oriental African countries were there and benefited from the best themes and speakers.
Next 4-6 December in Paris the Rotary International Director Catherine Noyer-Riveau – my classmate in Anaheim, my dear colleague, gynecologist, my dearest friend -, will have her Rotary Institute. She is the Convener. This one has a particular characteristic which I appreciate too much. It is dedicated to a special theme. And she chose a very special theme as it is Sustainable Development.
From 11 to 13 December Örsçelik Balkan, the dean of Rotary Institutes in the world, will chair another one in Istanbul, Turkey. Örsçelik is also a long time friend, we met in Nairobi some years ago, and he was an important speaker in my District Conference at Coimbra, Portugal, with Carl-Whilhelm Stenhammer. We were also classmates in USA and I could be a speaker in some of his Institutes. Istanbul is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I´m sure it will be a success and everybody will be happy to go there.
In the seventies I was studying in England, I went so many times to attend concerts here and there. Last year Ulrich Sprandel and his lovely wife Ann Marie visited us in Portugal. When we were lunching in Casarão, at Leiria, we discovered they had been doing the same in England in the same years and we were in the same concerts very often.
Sprandel is also a medicine professor, in Germany, and he chairs the Rotary Doctor’s Bank in the country. We were also classmates in USA. Well, he will be the Munich Rotary Institute chair next year. Congratulations to all, my dear friends.
Henrique Pinto
November 2009
PHOTOS: Haja Sofia, Istanbul, Turkey; Anse La Sourde d'Argent - La Digue, Seychelles Islands