At its September 2 luncheon, the Rotary Club of San Antonio welcomed Bobby Martinez, governor of Rotary District 5840 for 2026-27, who used his official visit to make one argument: the good that Rotarians do is worth little unless it is built to last.
Martinez, a charter member of the Rotary Club of Atascosa County, has served two terms as a club president, as an assistant district governor, and as his district's PolioPlus chair, and has helped run the Poteet Strawberry Festival for more than 40 years. His theme for the year is "Be the Change," and he spent much of the hour explaining what he means by it.
His remarks moved among three ideas: how close the world is to ending polio, what it means to create impact that lasts, and why that work comes down to one person at a time.
This Close to Ending Polio
To make the point, Martinez held up a small vial: 20 doses of oral polio vaccine, the drops carried into remote communities by health workers and volunteers, sometimes by camel, motorcycle, or canoe. The world, he said, is down to 21 recorded cases. He pointed to the district's polio walk on October 24 at Enchanted Rock near Fredericksburg and asked members to wear red and turn out.
Impact That Lasts
Rotary International President Yinka Babalola has asked members this year to "Create Lasting Impact," and Martinez built on the phrase with a plain example. A well dug in a village that is never taught to maintain it, he said, fails within a few years; the point is to leave behind something that keeps working after the Rotarians go home.
He illustrated it with a story about Jennifer Jones, the first woman to serve as president of Rotary International, who visited a village after a large clean-water project. An elder approached her, Martinez recounted, and said simply, "Our babies have stopped dying." That, he said, is the why behind the work.
He also challenged members to grow Rotary by recruiting people "with a heart of service," and to look after one another: to notice when a familiar face is missing from the table and reach out, because that person may be struggling in ways the club cannot see.
The visit also carried club news: with Martinez's backing, the club has applied to host a future Rotary International Convention in the early 2030s and expects to learn within a month whether its bid clears the first cut. It would be San Antonio's second, after 2001.
A Member's Report from Corrymeela
The luncheon closed with a second, shorter presentation. Club member Mark Figart shared reflections from a July visit to Corrymeela, a peace and reconciliation community on the north coast of Northern Ireland, near Ballycastle and about 50 miles from Belfast.
Corrymeela was founded in 1965 by Ray Davey, a former prisoner of war who had witnessed the bombing of Dresden in 1945 as a prisoner of war and came home convinced that the end of a war is not the same thing as peace. Through the decades of sectarian violence known as the Troubles, in which more than 3,500 people died before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Corrymeela became a place where people from opposing sides could stay a few days and share a table. Sixty years on, Figart said, the method has not changed: you go, you stay, and you eat together, and somewhere in there the conversations begin that people would never have at home.
The club's tie to Corrymeela runs through Nurturing Hope San Antonio, a year-long fellowship for college students at UTSA, Trinity University, and Northwest Vista College, and a companion effort called Seeds of Hope. The connection reached Texas in 2019, when a member of the Corrymeela community spent a year in San Antonio on a Fulbright and helped write the curriculum the fellowship now uses; two of the club's Rotarians, Jack McGuire and JC Clapsaddle, helped build the program and partnership that followed.
Figart attended this summer as one of about 72 participants in the program's Summer Learning Journey.
The lesson, he said, was about the distance people place between themselves and anyone who sees the world differently, and the responsibility, if one claims to be an agent of peace, to close it. Peace is precious and easy to take for granted. "In July, I got to see peace happening in real time." He left the club with an image: a campus on a hill above the sea, where the whole idea is to bring people together long enough to share a meal and a conversation.
