Life in the city

Discrimination in International School Education

Posted on by Gilbert Van Kerckhove

Rotary Club of Beijing meets

On 11 May 2021 Lucas Roberts gave us a talk on “Perceptions of Discrimination in International School Education and Rotary International’s Drive for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”.
Location: Morel’s Restaurant and Café.
I had to do magic as the restaurant was overbooked and we had 21 attendants for our 18 seats. We managed…

Lucas aka Luke was also officially inducted as our new member of the Club.
Members and guests enjoyed the food, drinks and dessert!

Luke’s talk

Luke is currently the Head of Primary at Tsinghua University High School International (Chaoyang). Since coming to China to work as a Humanities teacher with a liberal arts major background in 2009, Luke has served as Vice-Principal and Principal in four international and bilingual schools and amidst all those positions, has also acquired a master’s degree in educational administration. Luke also serves on international school accreditation /inspection committees around Asia. Having witnessed the hiring practices first-hand, Luke wanted to share the research findings from his doctor’s dissertation, still in progress, on discrimination in international schools. Additionally, he wanted to highlight Rotary International’s drive on DEI and how this drive amplified the phenomenon of discrimination.

Luke started the talk by sharing the origin of his dissertation and the current lack of research on gender and racism in international education. There has been a growing awareness of racism and diversity within international education in recent years as part of the response to Black Lives Matter.  For his dissertation, Luke investigated the experiences of racially and ethnically diverse international educators who experience discrimination (e.g., racism, native-speakerism) in recruiting, hiring, and promotion opportunities, thus limiting their professional path in international education.

Luke was careful not to take positions in his research but to show the phenomena of discrimination, so as not to compromise the findings of his research. He did, however, share his own experience of fighting for his recruiting for qualifications over skin color in his work. Lastly, Luke showed how his research dovetailed with Rotary International’s statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which showed the value RI places on building community across cultures and ideas.

(As reported by Piper)

Rotary Club of Beijing in April

Posted on by Gilbert Van Kerckhove

Rotary lunch 6 April

Rotary Club of Beijing in April had a busy month, started with the board meeting before the lunch, in a private room of Kempinski Hotel on 6 April 2021.

Lunch was in Via Roma, the Italian restaurant of Kempinski. PE Didier inducted our new member Vivian.

A new venue: Encuentro

The dinner on 13 April 2021 was held in the new South American restaurant Encuentro, located opposite Worker’s Stadium North gate.

Happens that our guest Iris from Panama is a professional food expert and has been advising the restaurant. She also tried an impressive and colorful cocktail, or was it a fruit cup…

Two new members were inducted by PE Didier, Hans and Chris.

A Spanish evening in The Roots

On 27 April 2021 the Rotary Club of Beijing had a Spanish-themed evening party, attended by visiting Rotarians, guests and Rotaractors. Full house at The Roots Restaurant that did a good job with the food, drinks and service.

PE Didier presided the dinner and brought along two guitarists (both from … Xinjiang, not Spain) who entertained us during the evening.

See here a short video (VPN needed in China):
Rotary Spanish evening in Beijing The Roots on 27 April 2021, https://youtu.be/0YBakPzOmQQ

Rotary Club of Beijing is active

Posted on by Gilbert Van Kerckhove

Picking up speed again, except Rotaract

As life in Beijing is basically back to normal, our Rotary Club of Beijing is active thanks to the efforts of PE Didier.
The club is also trying to attract new blood and I am happy to see we have more interest from people from Latin America, among others.
Rotaract is still struggling as many of its members can’t yet return to Beijing, but we try our best under the conditions.

We look back at times like when we had a well-attended hotpot with the Rotaractors on 18 December 2019, in Ritan Dong Lu.

Last year we kept in touch with the Rotaract Club of Beijing West by ZOOM. They still organize this year online events. The Sanlitun club has restarted meetings, like this one in SOHO Sanlitun.

On 22 December 2020 we had our Rotary dinner in Morel’s Restaurant and our Rotaractors Kien and Trefyn also joined.

Rotary lunch 2 March

Our lunch of 2 March 2021 in Kempinski hotel was presided by PE Didier, our President Elect. It was his first event as Club President filling in for Rtn Danny, our 2020-2021 President, who is relocating to Nanjing.
No speaker but Didier gave some feedback to the members present, as well as new potential members, after yesterday’s Club Board meeting.
The project HOPE, introduced by Rtn Helen was approved. As a result the active projects of our Club are HOPE and hypospadias. The Bethel project is still waiting for better times. A project to teach English in Hebei schools is being considered where members of Rotary and Rotaract could act as volunteers.
HOPE is an initiative to help children with mental disabilities to improve their mental and physical condition through special riding lessons. The specially trained horses and the qualified therapists use the horses for the children to open up. The contact with the animals have a proven therapeutic effect.

Didier also appealed for members to come forward and help in taking up roles in the different committees of the Club. Several positions need to be filled such as treasurer and membership chair. New committees are in the pipeline such as events committee (includes the speaker program). On the Rotary International website we can find the job description of most common positions and committees.

More details about hypospadias, see this earlier post with the details: https://www.beijing1980.com/2017/04/13/hypospadias-surgeries-need-support/

Rotary dinner 9 March

Tuesday 9 March at 7 pm we met in Morel’s Restaurant and we had an interesting speaker Tilman Rieger. He is a Shanghai Rotary Club member and also introduced Tilman Tillmann to our Club.  He is the founder and CEO of 8C Consulting, Executive Coaching and related.

He talked about Conflict Management in Relationships. “Know yourself, understand your counterpart, communicate more effectively!”

Old China Hands stars

Posted on by Gilbert Van Kerckhove

Our members are interesting figures

As mentioned in my previous post our Old China Hands stars come in different colors.
Here more about some of them, we have several other stars! Proud to have this community and sad each time one has to leave Beijing (like Kent).

Terry Crossman

You can call him the Hutong guy, well known around the Houhai area and featured in many media. He speaks Chinese fluently and sometimes I think he is more Chinese than American.

Many articles on the net with all the interviews he had. See this one from Haivision (Hainan Airlines magazine). I just was on Hainan Airlines but the Haivision on board did not have the article yet.

210403 TerryCrossman

Mark Levine

He is plastered all over the Chinese Internet and appears in all kinds of official meetings, often as a juror or something for English language competition and other.
See the article in China Daily of 1 April 2021. (Link)

He is a teacher (Minzu University and more) and musician, also a member of our foreign experts team (see: https://blog.strategy4china.com/2019/05/china-international-talent-exchange-foundation/).

I had the pleasure of being on a few assignments with him where he used his musical skills well as a bridge between the West and China. I was also one of the first to be in the audience for his public concerts.Article and video Introducing the documentary short film “Music Life” by Dr. Mark Levine, a foreign expert from Minzu University, here the full article, one other recent interview:

210401 MarkLevine_Minzu

Our hard rock (?) guy

Kent Niepert is one of our regular “Old China Hands” at the monthly lunch. He is also a painter, chef (loves to cook) and plays some great guitar, here with his two gifted sons who form a band. I missed his concert of 3 April 2021 but I hope to make it at his next one on 17 April 2021.

See a short video clip of his recent concert: https://youtu.be/e0z_xI4hA9s

You can see that Beijing’s (night) life is not exactly boring, even in these COVID times.
Kent has been constantly surprising us, bringing some great deserts to our lunches and handing out some “original” paintings of our members (like me). See earlier lunch reports such as this one.

Old China Hands 2 April lunch

Posted on by Gilbert Van Kerckhove

Start of the Tomb Sweeping holiday

We had our our Old China Hands 2 April lunch on what was actually Good Friday (nobody seemed to notice it). Many of our members were already away to take advantage of the long weekend for Tomb Sweeping. We were still near 30 to chatter away for hours while enjoying as always the food of Morel’s Restaurant (packed as always). But Easter was everywhere in the restaurant with the decoration of eggs, cute little chicks and flowers.

We also welcomed our youngest member, Oliver, son of Didier with well over ten years of China!
Our Belgian friend Benoit first thought to be alone at his table but some late comers ended his isolation.

Always something happening

Our artist member Kent presented his painting of Mark and Fu Han to Mark. Well done!
Sadly our artist/musician/chef Kent is planning to leave us for the USA to be finally reunited with his wife.
And I introduced a fellow author and long-time friend, Rainer Thomm, whose book “China Mission Impossible” I help to promote, see my book report here.
I hadn’t seen Rainer since ages as he left for Guangdong, far away from the mad crowd of Beijing.

In next post I will talk more about some of our famous Old China Hands members. We have a few remarkable and unique fellows really. Stay tuned!