Subject: Port Shepstone South Africa – Your Teacher / Training workshops
Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 17:50:27 +0200

Dear Yunus,

I am the President of the Port Shepstone Rotary club & I take this opportunity to thank you and the management of your school & your financial donors for the magnificent humanitarian gesture you & your colleagues made by coming to our country, & our town in particular, to help train our teachers in a subject – Mathematics – where as you know we require much assistance to bring our people to acceptable levels of competancy. As I have mentioned to you , Rotary International is heavily committed to LITERACY & we Rotarians in South Africa are actively involved in Literacy projects.During President Bill Clinton’s visit to South Africa some years ago it was brought home to him by many of our people that there is no democracy without literacy. Furthermore, for many people (especially mothers bringing up children ) literacy is not enough & numeracy skills are required. We Rotarians have been asked by Rotary International to extend our work on literacy throughout the developing world by adding numeracy to the agenda.

Your involvement by training the Maths teachers might seem minimal to you but I cannot emphasise how important those teachers skills are required by the masses of our people crying out to understand the world that they have recently acquired through their freedom ! To them nothing has been achieved if they ,through their illiteracy, find it impossible to share in the benefits of the new dispensation.

We urgently request that you consider making this an annual visit( at least ) & I will be writing to the Rotary club/s in Honolulu to request them to get you to talk to them at one of their regular meetings where you can advise them of the desperate need that we have here in South Africa for training programmes such as yours and I would like to work with them in trying to find ways & means to obtain finances to make this course an ongoing course & so much bigger to cover more teachers (who in turn can cover more pupils)

Once again,thank you on behalf of all our Rotarians & members of our public for your generosity & we look forward to this project becoming a regular feature.

Yours faithfully,
Richard Alborough
President Port Shepstone Rotary
P.O.Box 117
Port Shepstone 4240
South Africa