Garuga decided its Assistant Governor belonged to it — then sat still while he told it the truth.
By half past seven the dust of Gerenge was still on some of the shoes in the room.
A few hours earlier, on the afternoon of Friday 21 August, members of the Rotary Club of Garuga had been sitting under a shelter in a community up the corridor, listening to residents talk about boundary stones and marriages that had gone quiet. Now they were at Wilna Motel in Garuga, in jackets and Rotary pins, and the room was filling faster than anyone had planned for.
Past District Governor Peace Taremwa was there. So were seven Assistant Governors — a turnout that, in Rotary arithmetic, is not an accident. And at the front, waiting to be introduced to a club that had spent the week describing him as one of its own, stood Assistant Governor Paul Kigonya.
The visit that is not a ceremony
An Official Visit sounds like a courtesy. It is not.
It is the one evening in the Rotary year when a club is required to sit still and be looked at by somebody whose job is to see it clearly — to open the books, produce the numbers, and account for what it said it would do twelve months ago. Attendance. Membership. Public image. Giving to The Rotary Foundation. A club can carry a good reputation for years on projects and photographs; an Official Visit asks what is underneath them.
For Garuga, the evening carried a second title: Homecoming. Which takes some explaining, because AG Paul Kigonya is not a Garuga man. He is a member of the Rotary Club of Kampala Muyenga Breeze, and always has been.
The club called it a homecoming anyway.
It was a deliberate choice, and a revealing one. An Assistant Governor is assigned to clubs; he is not given to them. The relationship can be entirely correct and entirely cold — a visit received, a form completed, a handshake at the door. Garuga decided to treat the arrangement as something warmer than the constitution requires, and to say so out loud, on a banner, in front of a Past District Governor and seven of his colleagues.
You do not claim a man as your own and then hope he goes easy on you. Claiming him was the club’s way of saying it wanted the real version of the evening.
“I have made official visits before. I have never been welcomed home by a club that is not my own. Garuga has a way of making you belong before you have finished arriving.”
— AG Paul Kigonya, Rotary Club of Kampala Muyenga Breeze
Four questions
Kigonya took the club through the four areas that decide whether a Rotary club is growing or merely busy.
On club performance, he asked Garuga to measure itself against what it had promised rather than against what felt comfortable — the difference, as he framed it, between good and better.
On membership, the conversation turned to the arithmetic every club avoids: not how many joined, but how many stayed, and whether the ones who left were ever really given something to do.
On public image, he pressed the point that a project unseen is a project half-delivered. A community that does not know what Rotary is will not join it, fund it, or trust it — and visibility is not vanity but recruitment, partnership and credibility in one.
And on Foundation giving, he made the case that a club’s contribution to The Rotary Foundation is the clearest statement it makes about itself: proof that it understands its service does not stop at the edge of its own district.
“Membership is not the figure you report in July. It is how many people still feel needed in March. And any club can find money for its own project — giving to the Foundation is how you prove your service does not stop at your own boundary.”
— AG Paul Kigonya
It was frank. It was also, by every account of the room, warmly delivered — the tone of somebody correcting family rather than inspecting strangers, which was precisely the licence the club had handed him at the door.
The weight of who came
The presence of PDG Peace Taremwa gave the evening a longer memory. A Past District Governor has seen clubs rise and clubs quietly stop, and knows the difference is rarely dramatic — it is a matter of whether a club keeps asking itself hard questions after the applause.
“Clubs rarely fail loudly. They fail quietly, in the seasons when nobody is willing to ask the uncomfortable question. Keep asking it, and you will not need anyone to come and rescue you.”
— PDG Peace Taremwa
Seven Assistant Governors in one room for one club’s Official Visit is its own quiet verdict. Assistant Governors are busy people with clubs of their own to shepherd. They turn up in numbers where they expect the evening to be worth attending.
A Friday that made the point
It is worth holding the two halves of that day together.
In the afternoon, the club’s Katabi Buddy Group sat with the Gerenge community and talked about how to settle a dispute before it becomes a court case. In the evening, the same club sat down to be examined on membership, image, and giving.
The two are not separate exercises. The dialogue at Gerenge happened because a club had enough members to staff it, enough standing to convene it, and enough discipline to plan it. The Official Visit is the maintenance work that makes the afternoon possible. One is the service. The other is the machinery underneath it, and a club that neglects the second eventually stops being able to do the first.
Better is better than good
The club’s watchword this year is not subtle, and it is not meant to be. Good is where a club stalls. Better is a decision taken repeatedly, usually about unglamorous things: a follow-up call, an accurate return, a member given a real job.
By the end of the evening, the plates were cleared, and people were still standing in the aisles between the tables, talking — members with Assistant Governors, Assistant Governors with a Past District Governor, and somewhere among them a Muyenga Breeze Rotarian who had spent his evening telling a club that is not his exactly where it still falls short.
He will go back to his own club, of course. Garuga has decided to keep him anyway.
The Rotary Club of Garuga meets at Wilna Motel, Garuga. Visiting Rotarians and prospective members are welcome.