Rotary Club of Wynberg

Leigh Meinert of DignitySA joins us on Thursday 10 September to speak on the Right to Die — and we are opening the evening as a district raid, so Rotarians from other clubs are warmly invited to join us.

Few subjects ask more of us than this one. DignitySA campaigns for the right of terminally ill South Africans to choose a medically assisted death. In April this year the organisation filed a motion in the Gauteng Division of the High Court in Pretoria, asking the court to declare the blanket prohibition on Medical Assistance in Dying unconstitutional and invalid. Should the challenge succeed, Parliament would have 24 months to write the legislation. The case draws on reports from fifteen foreign experts across six countries, and from South African practitioners who hold that our healthcare system could implement and manage such a framework responsibly.

It is a debate that turns on the things Rotarians weigh often — dignity, compassion, personal autonomy, and the duty of care we owe the most vulnerable among us. Thoughtful people land in very different places on it. Leigh will set out the case DignitySA is making, and there will be time for questions and discussion afterwards. The club takes no position on the question; we simply think it is one worth discussing properly.

Come with an open mind, and bring a guest.

Details

• Date: Thursday, 10 September 2026
• Time: 18h00 for 18h30 — dinner at 18h30 sharp
• Venue: Chairman’s View, WP Cricket Club (WPCC)
• Cost: R100 per person for the meal, plus a cash bar
• RSVP: stacyed@gmail.com by Wednesday, 2 September 2026 — numbers are strictly capped at 50

1937 – 2026

It is with deep sadness that the Rotary Club of Wynberg learned of the passing of His Majesty King Harald V of Norway, who died peacefully at Oslo University Hospital on Friday 28 August, at the age of 89. Europe’s oldest reigning monarch, he had spent 35 years on the throne. The news reached members of our club while they were in Kristiansand, guests of Norwegian friends whose warmth and hospitality made the loss feel all the closer to home.

On behalf of our members, we extend our heartfelt condolences to Her Majesty Queen Sonja, the Royal Family, and the people of Norway. Vi lyser fred over hans minne — may his memory be a blessing.

A life of quiet devotion

King Harald V reigned as Norway’s constitutional monarch from 1991, succeeding his father, King Olav V. Born in 1937, he was the first prince born on Norwegian soil in centuries — a bond with his country that lasted from birth to his final day.

A lifelong sailor who represented Norway at three Olympic Games, he was admired for his humility and his steadfast devotion to Queen Sonja, whom he married in 1968. In a celebrated 2016 address he reminded Norwegians that their nation is made of people of every origin and belief — the words of a monarch who saw his country in all its diversity.

He is succeeded by his son, who accedes to the throne as King Haakon VIII, and is survived by Queen Sonja, his two children and five grandchildren.

The club spent the first weekend of August on Goedgedacht, a farm in the Riebeek Valley, and took two guests along: Gary and Natalie Lord of the Rotary Club of Gaborone, in Botswana.

On the last evening, around the fire, Gary presented his club's banner to club president Stacy Edwards. Exchanging banners is one of Rotary's older habits, and a durable one — a small piece of cloth that leaves two clubs on opposite sides of a border knowing each other by name.

The farm is worth a word of its own. Goedgedacht dates to 1704 and has belonged to the Goedgedacht Trust since 1993; the profits from its accommodation go to the Trust's Path out of Poverty programme, which runs youth centres across the rural Swartland where farm children play sport, do their homework and eat a proper meal grown in the gardens on the property. The Rotary Club of Riebeek Valley holds its Mental Wellness Conference there. It made for a weekend where the bill did a little work of its own.

The rest of the weekend went much as these weekends do: a stop at YzerBru Craft Brewery, a tasting flight worked through with some diligence, lunch down one long communal table, and a fire that outlasted most of us. The photographs are in the gallery.

“At 6:30 this morning, Nomsa carried 40 litres of water home before her children left for school.”

That sentence, and the reason it works, sat at the centre of a district Public Image session on ethical storytelling in the age of AI, presented by Sarah van Heerden.

The argument is blunt. AI is not making organisations sound alike — people are. A model learns patterns, so when every club types the same instruction, “write a Facebook post about…”, every club gets the same paragraph back. The sameness is not in the software. It arrives when nobody does the thinking first.

Set Nomsa against the opening most of us have already written: “Today we celebrated another incredible milestone as our amazing volunteers came together…” Everyone has seen it. Nobody remembers it. The difference is not vocabulary. It is that somebody was there, watched what happened, and wrote down the part that was true.

Four questions, then the tool

Before opening an AI tool at all, the session put four questions on the table: What happened? Why does it matter? Who changed? Why should anyone care? Great prompts cannot rescue poor thinking — answer those four badly and no amount of instruction will save the result.

Where AI does earn its place is in the shaping. A prompt that sets a word count, bans the tired phrases, demands an opening line that cannot be skipped and asks for a closing question produces something usable, because a person decided all of that.

The part that does not transfer

If AI invents something, the software is not accountable. The organisation is. The writer is. The communicator is. That responsibility never moves, which is why the five rules from the session start with never publishing what you cannot verify, and why the second is simply that AI cannot witness. It was not at the handover. It did not meet Nomsa.

There is a practical half too: stop writing everything everywhere. A magazine article carries the whole story in 350 to 450 words. Facebook gets the first paragraph and no more than 200. The website carries the rest. People stop reading because we ask them to read 800 words in the wrong place.

The three working guides from the session are now in the knowledge base: the thinking that comes first, the five rules, and writing for the channel.

AI can predict words. Only people can recognise what is true. So the question the session leaves every club with is a plain one: when somebody reads your next post, will they be able to tell it was your club that wrote it?