ROTARY CLUB OF GAYRETTEPE, ISTANBUL
The Club was founded in 1990 and chartered in 1991.
Gayrettepe founded Goztepe Rotary Club in 1997 and Gayrettepe Rotaract Club in 1998.
The members meet on Tuesdays at 7:30 PM in Hotel Dedeman in
Gayrettepe, Istanbul.
There are 25 active members, of which 13 are women and 12 are men, and one honorary member. The average age of members is 48.
56 % have college degrees; 32 % have Master’s or Doctorate degrees.19 members of the Club are Paul Harris fellows.
Rtn. Sabiha Tugcu Vurkac (strada@superonline.com) presides the Club for the term 2007-2008.
Rtn. Serdar Duman (sersimon@lycos.com) is the secretary, and Rtn. Cigdem Soylemez (vitamiks@vitamiks.com), the treasurer.
SUMMARY OF SOME PROJECTS COMPLETED IN PAST TERMS
Immediately following the founding of the club, members engaged in building a primary school in a relatively needy village in a nearby town. The construction was completed in 3 years and the school, fully furnished, accepted the first cohort of students in 1994.
Since then, each term, a project was undertaken to improve the school. These include a fully equipped conference room for 100, a computer room fully furnished with 11 computers with Internet connections and desks, water fountains and sports equipment. Painting and any repairment jobs are met by our Club almost every year.
In 1994 the Club organized the 2420th and 2430th District Conference.
Over the course of the recent years, the Club refurbished rooms in several hospitals and provided an anesthesia machine for one of them.
Opening up vocational courses for juvenile prisoners in a pre-trial detention facility has been a continual project over the years.
Another project that received recognition was the planting of 17,000 trees in a forest in Cyprus. That section of the forest had previously burned down.
Back in 1999, 150 tents were provided and set up for families whose homes were damaged in the tragic earthquake in Adapazari. These families were also provided with food and supplies until the Red Crescent took over.
In 2003, in collaboration with our sister club in Southeastern Anatolia, sets of full winter clothing were supplied to 1,600 children in the region. The following year, school bags complete with school supplies were provided to 1,100 first-grade students.
A full course of computer technicianship was opened for disabled young people to enable them to find jobs as computer technicians.
2007-2008 PROJECTS
The main projects of the present term are:
Cafe Light: Setting up an Internet cafe for visually impaired children.
Mevlana-themed Art Exhibition: In order to raise funds for Cafe Light, traditional Turkish art works of marbling, miniature, gilding, carving by well-known Turkish artists will be exhibited and sold.
Prevention of Early-Life Alcohol Abuse:
A series of conferences for students and their parents;
Distribution of leaflets about the dangers of consuming alcohol at an early age.
A ceremony to distribute prizes to members of the press who brought the subject to the attention of the public, where we shall have a chance to ask for their support to ban beer commercials during the previews of children’s movies.
Project ‘I’ve been to Turkey’ aims at conducting a short survey among foreigners who had visited Turkey, in order to reveal what impressions they had.