It seems like only a very short while ago that I was taking the oath of membership in Rotary. As last night’s event made clear, that was over seven months ago. Crazy how time flies. Now, we’re coming up to the midyear review and all this preparation has gotten me thinking about what it means to be President of a Rotary Club.
When I first joined Rotary, I saw it as just a welcome diversion from my day job. However, the weekly meetings quickly became a sort of refuge that I looked forward to more than the weekends. And then I got elected President. At first, I really didn’t want to accept the job, seeing as how we were about to get into the craziness of election season, but I was told that the work would really start after elections … and besides, I’ve never really believed in quitting before trying something, so I said yes, let’s go. And off we went.
I quickly found out that, contrary to the assurances I’d been given, the work of a Club President actually begins in earnest about three to four months before the actual start of the term in July. Which meant that prepping for the presidency actually started in March of the previous year. For some, it starts even sooner. Thankfully, my Club understood the demands of my day job and the then incumbent President covered a lot for me, so that by July – two months after Day Zero for my day job – it seemed, for all intents and purposes, that I was ready to lead the Rotary Club of Manila South into RY 2019-2020.
Appearances, of course, are deceiving.
After the kumbayah moments leading up to and immediately after the formal handover ceremony, it became apparent to me that I was entering an environment where the demands on your time quadrupled from what they formerly were. Basically, I realized that all the grumbling I did about how difficult my dayjob could be was infantile whining compared to how difficult the Presidency of an RC was.
It helps (now, in some kind of hindsight) to understand the demands of the presidency as being of three kinds: there’s the social demands – where you’re expected to rep your club to other clubs and, of course, yourself to your fellow presidents. This is why there’s such pressure to attend inductions and to participate in the projects of other clubs. Then there’s the organizational demands. They don’t give you a full and complete appreciation of this at the training seminars incoming presidents need to attend, but they are very real nonetheless. Things like how challenging it is to put together up to date club reports and how nerve wracking it is to ensure attendance, while documenting everything, and being constantly on top of everything going on at your events. These organizational pressures are so significant that being a club secretary is almost like a profession – they even have their own association.
And finally, there’s the pressure that comes from being exposed to the harsh realities faced by the underprivileged. Prior to joining Rotary, I was able to intellectualize the plight of those who had less than I did – the poor, the sick, the abandoned. I knew they suffered, but only as an abstract concept, like, the difference between knowing the definition of hot and screaming when you scald yourself. Rotary opened me up to a visceral awareness of the suffering I have been lucky enough not to be a part of – it was like a sucker punch to the gut that makes your eyes fly wide open. And once opened, your eyes just can’t shut things out anymore. The constant awareness of people suffering regardless of what you’ve done already – the realization that whatever you did today may have helped someone, but not everyone – exerts pressure to go back and do that feeding program again, to send over boxes of the meds you weren’t able to bring the last time – to do more.
Of the three kinds of pressure being a Rotary President puts on a person, that last one is – for me – the most compelling.