We Rotarians travel from everywhere to visit each other anywhere. We have many motives for doing this, most of which are within the context of “Service Above Self.” Through international fellowship we bring peace and understanding to the world in ways we could not do alone. Our shared philanthropy and compassion brings profound changes in the quality of life from wherever we live to anywhere we go. But often another change occurs that we do not recognize until we find a quiet moment in our lives to look within ourselves. The PolioPlus campaign is example.

Rotarians have driven the last remnants of Polio to remote “last-stand” areas of Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. While polio is in these regions of the world and citizens there are being infected, polio is not their problem alone. It is a world problem and Rotarians have risen to the challenge to combat this unrelenting enemy in these final battlefields. So, in partnership with local citizens and fellow soldiers, Rotarians bring the battle to where the enemy is. In this case, Rotarians come to India to participate in the eradication of polio. Arriving there Westerners encounter a culture and way of life different from their own. And resident Indians encounter visitors who are equally different. Here we have a meeting of east and west.

The dynamics of the peoples and cultures of the East and West are both powerful and different. Most cultures West of Suez have world-views based on Western Civilization beginning with Egypt, Ancient Greece and the Fertile Crescent of the Tigress and Euphrates from about 3000 years ago to the present day. The formal education of Western history seldom reaches further back than that. The oldest written references from the Torah, the Bible, Greek texts, Egyptian hieroglyphics and others are based on even older verbal allegories, myths and folk-lore from the mist of early history, the time frames of which are hidden in the depths of time. East of Suez, before the Greeks, the fertile crescent, or the Rosetta Stone, India is also steeped in myth and mystery, written and not, extending into the past further than Western minds usually contemplate.

The people and cultures of India have written histories going back more than five thousand years. Artifact histories there are even more ancient. It is a complex and culturally rich region. Perspectives in India itself suggest that major civilizations existed there before the written histories and early dynasties of China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Archeological evidence provides support of those views. Genealogical perspectives suggest that some of the first humans to leave Africa prior to 40,000 years ago likely drifted East, following the coast along the Arabic and Indian shores. Ultimately they ended up in Southeast Asia, Borneo and Australia, leaving pockets of people and DNA as they went. So, while Africa is no doubt the cradle of human existence, India is also no doubt one of the earliest nurseries of human growth, development, culture and civilization. Later migrations out of Africa likely made the Fertile Crescent and the Middle East their historical homes leading to Western civilizations. But earlier migratory surges of people were probably already settled in the Indian Subcontinent and lived there for thousands of years before written documentation of their histories and cultures. Much of their historical and cultural record was passed down through verbal histories, stories, songs and legends for many generations before being written. It remains to be seen what anthropologists, archeologists, geneticists and linguists will make of the mosaic of India’s influence on human culture, both east and west, given the respective pieces and perspectives that each will contribute to telling the story of humanity there. The ancient nature of pre-history and the early existence of people in India, hints that much of what is discovered there will have relevance to our collective human experience and our longitudinal understanding of it.

India’s ancient history, with wide swings of cultural dominance, conquest and submission, diversity of cultures, languages, religions, beliefs, arts and ethnicities is a testimony to the resilience of the human race. The respective ebbs and flows of many of those ancient cultures, languages, religions, beliefs, arts and ethnicities have come and gone, but the vitality of the people who remain continues unabated. This same vitality exists in all of us. There are lessons in both the inherent strengths and weaknesses of such diversity, all of which are folds in the same fabric of human history. Such lessons may be revealing to us both individually and collectively but may be lost if respective receptivity, tolerance and insight is not captured, focused, applied or disciplined. Whether we visit India or anywhere else, the swirl of history moves around us, but the experience is internal and personal. The greater the differences between our own cultures and those that we visit, the greater our potential for learning and growth. Wherever we live, what of history that becomes part of our collective memory, amnesia or revision, is a choice of particular and general consequence. What it is of history that we chose to learn, “revise” and remember, whether that of India, our own or of any other, has consequences beyond us personally. Learning is in both the student and the culture. Often we are not aware of what we’ve learned until we step out of the whirlwind, the experience sinks into us, settles into our foundation and radiates into the bones of our lives. Such experience requires contemplation and assimilation. In this, the richness of Rotary’s cross-cultural exposures touches us most deeply. When we take the Rotarian mission, perhaps in the guise of PolioPlus, into battle or any service above self we also take a personal brass bell of our past to another culture where we allow the people there to give it a good ring. Then our learning vibrates for long after we’ve returned home. Hopefully, through this process we become aware that as Rotarians not only did we bring change to the country we visited, but also change came to us personally and we brought it home. It matters not where the Rotarian lives, or where that Rotarian visited. The bell we bring from our part of the world to any other part is rung during the visit and vibrates in our bones for years to come. So, in the interest of peace and international understanding, we Rotarians visit the world. People of the Southern and Northern Hemispheres exchange visits. Westerners visit India. Indian and Asian people visit the West. Australians, New Zealanders, Africans and South Americans visit North America, Asia and Europe. Carrying Rotary’s mission, we travel on NIDs, GSEs, Friendship Exchanges, Matching Grants, and share our homes and lives, both ringing bells and having our bells rung as we go. And once our bells are rung and during the time required for their silence, calm and stability to return, something happens within us. We are new, renewed and likely transformed: left with the epiphany that our human experience is more complete for having left our homes to breath their air, eat their food, and share their laughter. As we visit, in the interests of peace and international understanding, we find that not only have we made the world a better place, the world we visit has made us better people.

Back to the BreadBasket Menu