Acampar!

Last weekend I had the opportunity to join seven other members of my Rotaract club (Paso Molino) for the bi-district conference held in the department of Colonia, Uruguay. We all braved the cold for a weekend of planning, networking and of course, a bit of festivities!

The enthusiasm of my group brought back memories of my experiences at the USCC Rotaract convention two years ago with ASU’s club. And although it was quite cold sleeping in our cabins with the bats and the spiders, I enjoyed every minute of it!

Taking a moment to reflect on the experiences I had, it was especially interesting to see the differences between Rotaract of ASU and Uruguay. There are still the same goals, the same themes such as “service above self”, but in Uruguay they have the added obstacles of working within a third world country.

Those obstacles meet them at every turn, for example the session that I was a part of for the weekend was called “Public Relations” and its focus was how to use the limited resources available to put the word out about Rotaract. The Rotaract clubs of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay have decided that the word needs to get out about Rotaract, all the clubs have pledged that by 2010 the membership in each club will be no less than 15 members, more members means more Rotary in action—RotarACT. I remember when our ASU club was trying to come up with ways to advertise Rotaract and increase membership, everything seemed possible to accomplish. Here however, if you want to hand out flyers, host a concert or anything else, it costs money and they don’t have the money to spare. It becomes a major obstacle, and it is something they want to overcome because more Rotaracters means more Action!