This Week at Rotary

This week we'll hear about from an unusual source about an activity beneficial to many. Join us on Zoom Tuesday at noon to get a student's perspective on the importance of blood donations from Bailey Brooks!

Last Week at Rotary

In a fascinating talk last week, rancher-writer-entrepreneur-you-name-it Lisa Schmidt schooled us on the business of ranching. Lisa is known to most members as the columnist whose “Prairie Ponderings” began appearing regularly in the Great Falls Tribune several years ago. When her husband Steve died in 2017, many assumed she’d give up the ranch. It’s hard work for two people, and it must be dauntingly so for one.

“Give up” is not in Lisa’s dictionary. She continues to raise cattle and sheep on the ranch she and Steve co-founded in 2006 and to apply business principles to her livelihood. The mission of A Land of Grass Ranch is to raise cattle in an economically and environmentally stable manner. The core values emphasize healthy land, water and air; healthy and nutritious food; heathy values for kids – and adults; healthy livestock and wildlife; heritage; and top quality products and services.

“We treat people the way we want to be treated,” Lisa emphasized. “We don’t tell customers what we want. We listen to what they tell us and we strive to provide it.” Although she appreciates and preserves the heritage of ranching, she is also very entrepreneurial in promoting her products. View her website at https://www.a-land-of-grass-ranch.com/ and see for yourself how well she promotes her business methods and the quality and service that result.

Lisa is active beyond the agricultural world as well. When she saw that her writing for the Tribune was popular, she compiled a book of her ponderings. She also figured that as long as she’s already doing the writing, she may as well read her columns on the radio. Now her readings are heard in Great Falls on KGPR and in towns as distant as Calgary and Miles City on a commercial radio station.

Lisa is full of ideas and energy and is raising an equally independent and entrepreneurial daughter in Abby. Now 14, Abby is already figuring out ways to buy herself a Jeep Wrangler when she is old enough to drive. “I’m very proud of her,” Lisa told the club. “She’s amazing.”

So are you, Lisa. So are you.

Rotary International Update

Our international committee representative, Sheila Rice, sent us an update on Rotarian interantional recently. The numbers are quite impressive. There are over 35,000 Rotary clubs world-wide in 161 countries, numbering over 1.2 million members. Wow!

As a reminder of what other clubs are doing, members of the Rotary Club of Dar es Salaam, Oyster Bay, Tanzania, represent 20 different nationalities – a reflection of the city’s diversity. To increase membership and expand their reach, the club has sponsored 5 new clubs, where all the inaugural presidents are all women. Their ‘fun” fundraiser is a goat race.

A Montana club was also featured in the January update. The Whitefish Rotary Club has a new member, Heidi Rickels, who is Co-Founder and CEO of Freshwater International, a non-profit that provides clean water, safe sanitation and hygiene facilities in schools, health centers and villages in Malawi. The East African country ranks among the world’s least developed and poorest nations, where 90% of the people live in rural areas.

Heidi will be a tremendous asset to our international work, since she is also the president of the Rotary e-Club of WASH, where Rotarians from countries across the globe meet virtually to focus on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene.

A Message on Peace from Rotary Magazine

WHAT IS PEACE? How do we recognize it? If we were to paint it, should we imagine a valley in springtime, with full sun? Cue the songbirds, the leafy trees. Sprinkle liberally with daffodils. Remember to pack plenty of pastels.

In the popular mind, peace is a state in which nothing much happens. There is no conflict, there is no friction; it’s where never is heard a discouraging — or incendiary — word. It’s a world in aspic.

Sound nice? Not really. There’s no room for real life. Wars break out. Grievances, resentments, a strategic advantage, and the availability of weapons can all contribute to the flipped switch that leads to bloodshed and tragedy. Peace never simply breaks out. It’s far more deliberate. It’s not improvised. The run-up to peace, I bet, goes through several drafts, with lines rewritten, entire paragraphs cut, and great gnashing of teeth over a few crucial words.

We have many famed renderings of the ideas behind war, rebellion, and carnage. Jacques-Louis David’s kinetic portrait of Napoleon crossing the Alps, for example. What a selfie! Or Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, which depicts a Romantic version of heroic rebellion. It would be 85 years before photographs from the battlefields of World War I revealed the raw barbarity of armed conflict, a sight from which we could not avert our eyes.

So what do we have as a modern image of peace? In 2010, I visited the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where I tucked myself into an exhibit re-creating John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s "bed-in," when they encouraged the world to give peace a chance. But in what felt like a mausoleum for peace, I was unable to summon much enthusiasm for the enterprise.

Two years later, in 2011, I spent time with Sakuji Tanaka as he was about to assume the office of Rotary president. His theme was Peace Through Service. He organized presidential peace conferences in Berlin, Hiroshima, and Honolulu, bold gestures for Rotary. He attended a peace forum in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the nuclear material for the first atomic weapon, deployed against Japan during his lifetime, was made.

I asked Tanaka how service could lead to peace. He believed that by serving others to provide for the basic needs of health care, sanitation, food, and education, we could nurture peace. So is there a painting of that?

Maybe Caravaggio’s The Seven Works of Mercy in the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples, Italy. In it, the artist crammed representations of the Misericordia brotherhood’s agenda: bury the dead, feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked, visit the sick, refresh the thirsty. Treading air above it all are two angels, bearing Mary and her child, conferring on those below the grace to be merciful. The painting is full of action.

So is the pursuit of peace. But we have to come up with our own pictures.

John Rezek, Editor, The Rotarian

Milestones

We celebrate the Rotary anniversaries of several Rotarians next week. Here are the three with the most years of service above self:

Gregg Holt - 42 years
Mark Finnicum - 20 years
Cari Yturri - 19 years

What a stellar crew! Thanks for all you have done and continue to do for Rotary Club of Great Falls!

Weekly Wit: Groundhog's Day