President’s message

LOOKING FORWARD

 

In order to look forward you need to look back and so I thought about when I joined the Colchester Soroptimist Club in June 1997 and when I became President of the club, 8 years ago.  Due to the nature of my work, education at University level mainly with international students from a huge range of cultures and backgrounds and because of the meaning of Soroptimists, I decided to make my theme for the year ‘Women Internationally’.  We celebrated International Women’s Day at my home in Wivenhoe sitting 14 ladies around the table set up in our front room, served breakfast by my partner, Tom.  We watched a film ‘Kandahar’ and invited friends to join us and raised awareness about Cluster Bombs.  We were trained to go out and talk to other groups about the importance of ‘breast screening for cancer’, especially for women over 70.  We packed boxes for Christmas which were sent in truck convoys to Romania.  We raised funds by doing a sponsored walk from Harwich to Wrabness where we enjoyed lunch and bathed our sore feet in the waters.  We did the fire swim!  We had garden parties and teas and lots of fun.

As my year as President came to an end I began to think how we would use the monies we had for the President’s Charity.  So I wrote to a friend who was undertaking VSO work in Ethiopia and asked her if she had any ideas.  I was determined that no charitable organisation was going to get their hands on a percentage of our hard-earned monies.  I wanted all the monies raised to go directly to our chosen cause.  My friend Jan LeFevre wrote back to me about a project in Ethiopia where a wonderful lady, Tsehaye Seyonm, who took in street children.  Tsehaye wanted to build an orphanage.  She was raising money but needed £5,000 to put up a building, she already had land but the authorities wouldn’t give her permission to build using local materials and insisted that building blocks be imported and used, an impossible achievement.  Tsehaye housed the children in her back yard, fed them and made sure that they went to school.  Her sons, a photographer and tourist guide helped her financially as best they could.  I thought about our £250 towards £5,000 and got depressed.  Then Tom said ‘that’s only £2 per household for Wivnehoe’ and so we started to fund-raise.  We put up a thermometer in our window, did a lunch, sponsored walks, sales, etc. etc and within 6 months we had sent £7,000 to Jan and the orphanage was being built.  It stands today and I hope Jan will update us on it later in the year.  The Soroptimists played a huge role in this.  Without you I would never have thought of offering some money to an unknown lady in Ethiopia.

This is just a tiny recollection of all the things that we have done and that came to me when I was thinking about the way forward.  The Colchester Soroptimists have played roles in our local community that I think we perhaps need to shout about more.  We have been instrumental in

  • supporting the Mary Barron Suite (Colchester Cancer Ward)
  • St Helena Hospice where we run a Sunday rota, more help always welcome
  • Acorn Village, our previous president’s charity
  • The Women’s Refuge in Colchester which is about to lose £34,000 in local authority income due to cuts
  • Distributing the 1000 bookmarks
  • The St Anne’s Community Centre, we are proud of this building, to which we contributed £150,000.  We continue to help, perhaps not as much as we might, but we’ve recently donated plants and done a little gardening, every little bit helps.
  • Joining with our Anglia Region to mark International Women’s day and raise awareness for no – women no –peace.

We can’t really take on much more.  We are only a small club, but we are strong and I hope I’m right in saying that we all have the same aims and objectives.

Firstly with regard to business meetings: I am proposing for my year as chair that we lighten the burden of our meetings and events.  I’d like to suggest that we keep the business meeting to business with the occasional speaker from amongst our own members maybe giving a job talk.  I’ll be calling on new and old members to assist with this.  It should be fun.

Secondly the supper meetings: Would you all be happy if we met a little earlier?  I don’t think we’ve got any long distance commuters anymore who would find it difficult so I’d like to suggest that we start at 19:00 and that when the venue permits we could have someone to entertain us at these meetings.  Its to one of these meetings that I’d like to invite Julie from the Refuge to give us an update.

Finally, my message to you is to go out and shout about what we do and hopefully we’ll attract more members even if its just to improve on what we already do and share out the load, and that’s lots.  I was surprised myself having sent out various emails/small ads within the University to raise awareness about Soroptimist that in response to a recent one sent out only a few weeks ago 3 ladies from my own department expressed an interest and will be joining us alongside 4 others!

We are all busy ladies, either working, involved in important positions in our community, looking after our families, young and old and having a life.  Your life comes first of course, but sometimes we can integrate the fun with Soroptimism, like celebrating International Women’s Day or Human Rights Day.

 

So here we go 2011 roll on.

 

 

Dilly Meyer

March 2011