It was a lively run for the Club on the International Service road starting with the forging of matched clubs relations with two foreign clubs—RC Bukit Bintang in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and RC Sydney in Australia, and with three local ones—RC San Pablo South in Laguna and RC Binmaley Century and RC Lingayen in Pangasinan.

The sister clubs highway also got busy with two-way traffic for Club visits to/from RC Kuala Lumpur Diraja, RC Bukit Bintang, and RC Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia and RC Itako in Japan.

The promise of paradise inched closer to fulfillment for the Gawad Kalinga community in Villa Paraiso with the delivery of a package of services. The Club built a three-storey multipurpose center that became the venue for community meetings, socials and medical missions and housed a reading corner for children and a health clinic manned by a part-time nurse employed by the Club. On two occasions the Club brought doctors to the place for medical missions that offered consultations, checkups, and medicine, all for free. And the children had smiles on their faces at Christmastime when the Rotary Anns came to bring them presents under the Last Angel Project. And because GK is primarily a housing project, more housing units were built to replace the hovels in which the people once lived.

A critical issue that plagued Villa Paraiso was the lack of water. To address this concern, the Club applied for a TRF grant of $20,000 for a water system that would bring in Maynilad service and water straight to the people’s taps.

By happy coincidence, the Club was assigned the lead role in the planning and staging of the first Summit on Water Concerns that assembled various stakeholders for a discussion of water issues in Metro Manila.

In November the Club once again took center stage as host of the Testimonial TRF Dinner at the Manila Peninsula Hotel. This annual recognition program gives due honor to the contributors to The Rotary Foundation in the past year.

This year, the Club launched the coffee table book, Our Children, Our Future, attained ISO certification for office operations, set up of a club website, and shifted from offset to digital process in the printing of the club bulletin, Kaunlaran.

The Club’s fortieth-year run affirmed Pres. Sonny’s philosophical measure of Rotary as an instrument in doing God’s work on earth.