Visit to Suzhou

Rotary Club of Suzhou was chartered on April 27, 2015, sponsored by our club. Our past member Veronica Campidelli started the club as the charter president. Some of our members have been visited Suzhou club these years, but it was my first time to visit them. Our members Frank Mulligan and Michel De Vriendt took me there.

Rotary Club of Suzhou meets biweekly on Wednesday for the dinner at Kempinski Hotel. Gerhard, the General Manager of the hotel is a member of the club. I assume he supported a lot the Fine Art Auction and Sale event held at the hotel on December 2^nd. I saw the same situation in Chengdu and Hangzhou, that is, the GM of the hotel where they meet is a Rotarian.

Through good connection with an Italian Rotary club, Suzhou club has a project to send Chinese doctors to do medical exchange. Two young Chinese doctors participating in the projects were invited to the meeting when we visited.

Suzhou club has 17 active members which is much smaller than us, but other than active service projects, they also sponsors a very active Rotaract club in Suzhou, which hosted DraCon (District Rotaract Conference) last month successfully.

The meeting on December 13 was attended by 18 people including honorary members, visiting Rotarians and guests. Dining at a big long table was a really good fellowship with at-home atmosphere. President Joseph Chan gave a gift two pairs of beautiful chopsticks with names engraved) to Secretary Karol Sikola who will be married soon. Rotarian Scott brought Suzhou silk gifts for everyone as Christmas present. Happy money raised was RMB1,700, quite a good accomplishment in that size of meeting.

You can see that the club is very well functioning. I was invited to talk about legal status of Rotary in China. Based on my presentation, which I made at the club assembly in May, 2017. I added some case study including the successful model of our Christmas Market at Marriott last month. A lot of questions were raised, which showed that Suzhou Rotarians are serious on this topic.

After my session, another guest speaker talked about blockchain, the technology used in Bitcoin. It brought me a new knowledge about what is happening in the world.

I went there as the President of the sponsor club to present a big flag with the name of Rotary Club of Suzhou, but I got more than what I presented.