Douglas is a small farming community about 100 miles southwest of Savannah. I first became familiar with it when I was a summer order clerk for my family’s wholesale hardware business. We had several good customers there, as mentioned in my recent column on nearby Broxton. Douglas has renovated their downtown section to make parallel one-way streets, going north-south. A short distance southwest of downtown is South Georgia College, which I later became familiar with through Rotary Club.

My first time visiting Douglas in recent years was to attend a one-day Rotary District Assembly, held at the college. This was a training session for club leaders across District 6920, which stretches from Augusta to Macon, Savannah to Brunswick and Waycross, and all points in-between.

My wife and I have been to many of these, over the past twenty years, and they are always enjoyable – both for the training we experience, and also for getting to meet new friends from across the eastern half of the state, and seeing old ones.

I later got to experience Douglas from a different perspective, but one also connected to Rotary Club. Rotary International is the world’s largest service organization, with some 1.2 million members in over 160 countries across the globe, all dedicated to making a positive difference in our communities: local, state, and international.

Our signature project has been the 30+ year effort to eliminate polio from the face of the globe. It has taken hundreds of millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers administering vaccines “on the ground” across the world. It has been a mammoth effort, aided by partnering with both the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others; but the results have been striking.

Instead of seeing half a million new infections across the globe, thirty or so years ago, we only had about TWELVE last year, in two countries. This is nothing short of miraculous – but shows what people can do, when joined together in a common cause, willing to give of both their funds and their time, to make this goal a reality. We are now working to “finish the job.”

Rotary has several other main “Areas of Focus,” in addition to polio eradication. These include providing clean water and sanitation in developing countries; maternal and infant health care; youth and education; and disaster recovery efforts. Local clubs also participate in local activities that help their local communities, in various ways.

One of the activities under the “Youth and Education” umbrella is the RYLA program, which stands for “Rotary Youth Leadership Awards.” Each district has their own program, but in our district it’s a four-day leadership program for high school students, which for many years was held at South GA College in Douglas. (It just recently moved to the College of Coastal GA in Brunswick.)

I got involved with this program about ten years ago, when the Savannah club I belonged to sponsored a student from Jenkins High School. Her parents could not take time off work for the five-hour round-trip on the opening Thursday, so I was asked if I could take her instead.

I was able to take that day off, and to go back the following Sunday to pick her up, so got to know her a little bit from both those trips – as well as introduce her to parts of rural south Georgia that I was familiar with, that this girl from Tybee Island had never seen, and, for the most part, never heard of. It was a real eye-opener for her.

She got so much out of that short weekend that my club decided to send her back again the next year, and I reprised my taxi service. That second year made a much bigger impact on her; and we have kept in touch ever since. She went on to get an engineering degree, has worked for several companies in the southeast, and is getting married this fall. A real success story.

Those two weekend drives got me hooked on the RYLA program, and I wound up taking students from Chatham, Bryan and Liberty counties to that weekend program in subsequent years. All of them were very glad for that opportunity. And I was glad to be a (small) part of it.

I had a big laugh, on one subsequent trip, when I took two students from Chatham and Bryan counties. We took US 17 south from Savannah through Richmond Hill to GA 196 to Hinesville, then US 84 to Patterson, then a county road west to Douglas – roads I was very familiar with.

I told them we were going to take the “Dairy Queen Trail.”

They looked at me in befuddlement, until I explained that there were Dairy Queens in Richmond Hill, Hinesville, Ludowici, Alma, and finally the one in Douglas, right across the street from the college, where we’d eat lunch before I dropped them off! They had a good laugh with that.

I told them I was partial to DQ chocolate shakes, but also their good onion rings. So I guess I should not have been surprised – but I was -- when the parents of one of them met us in Richmond Hill, Sunday afternoon, when I brought them back, and gave me a DQ gift card as a thank-you for taking their daughter to and from that RYLA weekend!

I enjoyed using that gift card.

But not as much as I enjoyed taking them to Douglas that weekend. It was a life-changing experience for both of us.

“The Power of Rotary!”

Rafe Semmes is a proud graduate of (“the original”) Savannah High School and the University of Georgia. He and his wife live in eastern Liberty County, and are long-time Rotarians. He writes on a variety of topics, and may be reached at rafe_semmes@yahoo.com.