A busy Friday: Fundación Gota de Leche, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, and the Rotary Club of Sevilla-Centro Charter Dinner

Hey everyone! I hope you had a great week. The good weather had finally returned to Sevilla and I can't think of a better way to have ended up my week. Friday was a very busy, but extremely rewarding as well.

It all started at 7:00AM when I woke up to go to my first day of volunteering at an organization called Fundación Gota de Leche. The foundation is essentially an overseeing nonprofit organization that sets up programs for underprivileged kids in schools across Sevilla. The program I worked at yesterday morning is called "Desayunos Saludables" that provides healthy meals for the children of immigrants or gypsies in Sevilla. I got to the school I was assigned at 8:15 and met my director, Rebeca. She was really nice and helpful and the kids were great. I sort of expected the kids to be shy, because a lot of times kids coming from not great home lives have a tougher time socializing, but they were incredibly social and welcoming. We gave them their breakfast, made sure they ate, then got them off to class with a mid-morning snack (a small sandwich and fruit) prepared for them. I really enjoyed the experience and am trying to get more involved in the Foundation.

At 9:30 I hopped a bus from Pino Montano, where the school was, to make it back to the Macarena for my last Preventive Medicine Práctica. At noon I headed home and went for a nice run by the river and ate some lunch before I got a call from a Rotarian from Sevilla-Macarena, Raul. I've talked about Raul in previous posts because he is the Rotarian that I went with to the Seminar on the Rotary Foundation in Fuengirola. He is a professor of Bioinformatics at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide. The University of Sevilla is the main public university in Sevilla, and it's various "facultades," or schools, are scattered about the city. Pablo Olavide (affectionately known as UPO) is a private school and located just outside the city and reachable by Metro. Raul, with his experience in computer science, has been appointed to an Ad Hoc Committee on creating a Rotary Social Network. As a part of this appointment he will be traveling to headquarters in Evanston, IL to meet with the other members. As I know better than anyone, when you travel with Rotary, mountains of paperwork are inevitable, so when he called to ask if I could help him sort through the various documents (in English), I was glad to help. He swung by and picked me up and we drove out to UPO to get the paperwork sorted out for his trip to the US. Aside from being happy to be able to help him after all the help the Rotarians have given me, it was a great opportunity to see the UPO campus for the first time. It is much more like an American campus with all of the various departments being interconnected and in one location.

After helping Raul, he dropped me back off at home to get ready for the Charter Dinner for Rotary de Sevilla-Centro. I had visited the Sevilla-Centro club a few months ago, so I was thrilled to finally see them receive their official charter. Now I also went to the Charter Dinner for Marbella-Guadalmina, the bilingual club on the Southern coast of Spain, but this dinner was very different. The Rotarians of Sevilla have become my family and I knew most of the people present. It was much more personal when I actually knew the people receiving their pins, unlike in Marbella where I was essentially a spectator. María Antonia is the founding president of the club and is one of the most elegant and classy women I have ever met. The group is about half women, which I think is incredible, especially in Spain and given the male-to-female ratios in the other clubs I've visited. The dinner was delicious and the ceremony was very well done. When I first arrived I felt a little uncomfortable at events like this, but as I said, I feel like these people are my family now and we all stayed late into the night chatting and celebrating. Here are some pictures from the event!

New friends from Rotary Sevilla-Centro

Other half of my table.

All of the new members getting ready to receive their pins!

This was a particularly emotional moment. Carlos Goméz is a member of the Rotary Club of Sevilla and he is giving the Rotary pin to his daughter, who will be president of the new club next year.

María Antonia, the new president, flanked by her husband Tarik on her right and Vicente, past Dsitrict Governor on her left. Both were named Honorary members for the work they did in helping to found the new club.