President’s message
**NEWS** JOIN US at a FUNDRAISING DINNER in aid of Cementing Futures in Bangladesh.
To be held at AZIZ,COWLEY ROAD, OXFORD at 7pm on TUES.MARCH 23rd.
Mr Aziz has won awards for his curries. DANCERS will entertain us.
£25 excluding drinks.
Contact 01865 769105 for tickets.
Lac Leman, near Geneva makes a beautiful background to this photo and was pleasant to swim and sail in.
It is an extremely peaceful contrast to the experiences of prolonged violence and abject poverty of many of the ecumenical students from places including Myanmar [Burma], Georgia, Serbia, Albania, Sudan, Congo, India, Philippines, Indonesia and South America based at Châteaux Bossey, where I was working. This centre also serves as an International Conference Centre for the World Council of Churches which welcomes those of other faiths and many international organisations with similar areas of concern, like the UN.
Meal times were vibrantly colourful events and extraordinary opportunities to meet and engage about world situations, events, policies and active programmes, many similar to those of Soroptimists. This brought alive my daily reading of the International Herald and rekindled my Soroptimist motivation. Sometimes I attended lively debates and realised not just the depth of conviction of those attending, but their determination to effect education for action to improve human relationships and lives of those living in fear, hunger, poor health, already facing climate change.
The Oxford club chose to focus this year on Women’s Health issues of interest to everyone. Some experienced members work or have worked as a Health Visitor, Public Health Physician, Mothers Union Development Officer, NHS Public Patient Panel Co-ordinator, Medical Company Director or like me as a Specialist Physiotherapist in Women’s Health. These issues raise many ethical, political and practical questions for us all.
We have recently been joined by a young doctor hoping to become a GP, the manager of a Cheshire Home for the disabled, someone who worked in Lesotho, and one who has just transferred from Dusit Club in Thailand where we now have a friendship link. Oxford is a very international place, members having been born in China, the Philippines, New Zealand, Holland, and Germany. Our past president lived in South Africa.
I want to emphasise our International concern abroad by choosing to share in the project of my previous club, Bournemouth ‘Cementing Futures’, to build a school for children from the slums in Bangladesh above the flood plain. We are getting to know business people now in our city but from Bangladesh, who can explain their understanding of the crying need for education particularly for girls, and are offering generous support to fulfil this challenge. We hope to find students who will also join this project, 16,000 study at Brookes University where a member lectures, in addition to those attending the original University, many are from abroad. Our International Christmas Party was intended to widen our international understanding and horizons more fully, while we continue to develop networking with other women’s groups in Oxford.