Our next club meeting is this Wednesday, April 28, at 7:30am. This meeting will be IN-PERSON at the Bluffton Rotary Building. For those members of the club who can't join us in person, please log onto Facebook and go to the Bluffton Rotary Club Facebook Page and tune into the live Facebook stream of the meeting.
Our speaker will be Tamela Maxim who has graciously agreed to join us and discuss her life and the children's book she wrote,"Nellie Jelly and the Jelly Well." She is also donating 40 copies of her children's book to our Little Free Library. Nellie Jelly and the Jelly Well provides a great lesson in overcoming our foolish fears and prejudices and to love everyone. What we fail to realize is that everyone is different and everyone has something special to offer. Just because someone is different, we can still be kind and be a friend. "Love with your heart and not with your head." Children are very aware of their surroundings and expressed feelings of their peers and to "fit in" they also share these prejudices. "The meaning of love is clearer than clear, that ugly's not ugly, except for our fear." This book has a lot to say for all ages of the world. Tamela Fleetwood was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1954. Four months later she was in Germany. Her father was an attorney, and later a judge for the U.S. Army. She spent half of her life in Germany and the other in North Carolina, Georgia and Hawaii. As an Army brat she experienced the difference between military and civilian life as she moved between the two worlds. "There is a kind of 'color-blindness' which exists in a military brat's childhood. Tamela has a passion for peace and harmony. Nellie Jelly and the Jelly Well is a story that was born out of this passion. She hopes to bring light to the hardened hearts of this generation who are called to love one another, despite their many differences.