“If you want to touch the past, touch a rock.
“If you want to touch the present, touch a flower.
“If you want to touch the future, touch a life.”
These words closed Rotary District Gov. Jim Roxlo’s message to the Rotary Club of Farragut last Wednesday. His message was about inspiration and about serving and being there to meet those we serve. In other words, touch a life. “It’s fun to be there,” he said, “and see whose lives you are touching and changing.”
He’s right, too.
Last Saturday Farragut Rotary joined with members from Knoxville’s other five Rotary clubs and Denark Construction to begin work on a Habitat for Humanity home. The family that will live in this home was there.
This coming Saturday (Nov. 3) is the next “Build Day” and again the builders will meet this family. They are Johnnie and Tiffany Skinner and their three young sons — Julius, 9, Eli, 3, and Ace, who is 1. Johnnie works full-time in city transportation and Tiffany works as a full-time Certified Nursing Assistant. Even though they both are hard-working parents who want the best for their children, the two would never have the means to qualify for a conventional home mortgage, Habitat says.
As the District Governor said, meet those people you serve and help. We are meeting them, the Skinners, and touching their lives and in return we’re touching and changing our own lives.
We touch lives at Free Flu Shot Saturday and meet and interact with those we are serving that day, too. It happens in many projects on which we work. It happened last week when Farragut Rotarians helped special needs children paint their Halloween pumpkins at Ridgedale School, our Partner in Education. It happened a few months ago at “Laundry Love Knoxville.”
Roxlo, a member of the Chattanooga Breakfast Rotary Club, shared two personal stories with us when he was working with the DuPont Corp., building plants overseas in Indonesia and on a Rotary trip to Haiti building latrines in villages there.
His story about building a $100 million tire plant in Indonesia was about everyone realizing there was no toilet paper —any where in the plant. The local workers they hired believed that everything should be shared and that is part of their culture. They shared the toilet paper with their families. Together, they finally solved the problem — together, side-by-side.
In 2015 in Haiti, Rotarians from 14 clubs were there to build latrines for the local villages. On a four-hour trip to a mountain village, Jim and the other Rotarians met a young lady with a baby girl who was sick and struggling to breath. They carried them both off and down the mountain to see a doctor. She had TB as did her child and the baby was almost dead. “But we were there, not for this purpose, but for other reasons and because we were there we saved two lives.” Rotarians returned six months later and the mother and her baby were thriving.
Rotary’s theme this year of “Be the Inspiration” is a big part of DG Jim’s message.
“Meet the beneficiaries of the work we do,” he advised. “Be there. Work. Touch a life. Have fun. You may discover your Rotary Moment and understand why we do what all we do.”