In honour of the Rotary Club of Tortola’s 50th anniversary this year, Rotary International President Barry Rassin visited last week.

Mr. Rassin’s visit marks the first time an international Rotary president has come to the Virgin Islands.

The Bahamian is also the first in his position to be selected from Rotary District 7020, which includes this territory, the United States Virgin Islands, Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Barths, St. Maarten, St. Martin, the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

During his stay, Mr. Rassin attended a reception hosted by Governor Gus Jaspert, visited various Rotary projects around the territory, and led a press conference in Village Cay.

“My primary focus is to say thank you to Rotary and what Rotary is doing here, and all that they have done, especially recently in terms of disaster relief,” he said during the press conference. “It goes so much beyond that, but that’s been the most immediate issue.”

YEP programme

Mr. Rassin praised local Rotarians, but added that certain global Rotary initiatives could be good additions to the VI branch.

“We talked about a number of possibilities of how Rotary can do even more … but there are things we can do to help,” he said.

“Rotary is a very complex organisation with many, many programmes, and every Rotarian doesn’t know every programme, but we have a number of programmes that can come here and help in various aspects of this country.”

Mr. Rassin didn’t list any of those programmes, but he complimented the Youth Empowerment Project in East End.

“I think anything we can do to help the youth, especially the disadvantaged youth — they need a focus, they need something to do — so I think that’s an excellent programme,” he said in response to a question from the Beacon.

“If we can continue to grow and develop it, I think that’s a great opportunity for young people to get involved.”

Asked by another reporter which local Rotary projects impressed him most, Mr. Rassin said he didn’t want to “pick and choose.”

“If we’re helping one person, or we’re helping 100 people, they’re important,” he said, adding that he was happy to see that Peebles Hospital was “well-kept” and “well-maintained.”

“We always have to make sure we focus on all those who need help,” he said.

2018 hurricane season

Rotary District Governor Elect Delma Maduro said that while the organisation has long focused on disaster preparedness — including signing a 2015 memorandum of understanding with the Department of Disaster Management to assist with training and other initiatives — this function has taken on added urgency after Hurricane Irma.

“As an organisation, we’ve always been, I suppose, ready,” she said. “We never thought we would experience anything like Irma, but it happened and we were able to reboot very quickly as an organisation.”

At a recent district conference, Tortola members met with one of Rotary’s international partners — ShelterBox — to formalise an agreement in order to make it easier for the VI to access aid if needed, Ms. Maduro said.

“[ShelterBox] was very quick to respond to the VI this past September when Irma struck, and because of them we were able to provide some shelters through tents for about 40 families, primarily on Jost Van Dyke,” she explained.

“It was by sheer coincidence that they were able to deploy that equipment to us at that time, because they were in transit somewhere. So we want to make sure that we have things in place so that deployment can happen a little bit quicker.”