Rotary Club of Riga International

Rotary Club of Riga International was chartered August 22nd 1998. With almost a million inhabitants Riga is by far the biggest city in the Baltic region, a truely international city with a large community of foreigners from all over the world. Quite naturally there was a serious interest in this community to establish also an International Rotary Club with English as Club language. Since the Club had been chartered the number of nationalities among our members has grown significantly. Today RCRI has over 40 members, so we are not really small anymore and we are for sure multilingual. Many Rotarian visitors to Latvia choose CRI as the meetings are in English and the meeting time on Friday fits nicely to a weekend trip. Our beautiful capital Riga can look back to more than 800 years of history which left a lot of multinational traces. Our town saw periods of wealth and beauty, but also dark and difficult times. But one attribute always fitted to Riga, since the days of the "Hanse" Riga has always been very international, a hub to the Baltic sea as well as to the big neighbour Russia in the East. Also Rotary as such has a long tradition in Latvia, going back to the early years of the 20th century. In our International Rotary Club we enjoy very much to have guests from all over the world and to host them in an atmosphere of openness and friendship.

Our meetings take place as lunch meetings on Fridays in Hotel Konventa Seta, nicely located right in the middle of the beautiful old town. Of course our club is also active in different social projects, starting from small local activities to Rotary matching grants with international partner clubs. Riga today is a very antagonistic town, like most capitals in Central Eastern Europe. Here you can see the "nouveau riche" and the poor side by side. The ultra modern communication society, impressing huge shopping malls, people driving the most expensive cars are in a strong contrast to many very poor older people or street kids. The fast change of society creates not only winners , but leaves many Latvian citizens behind. So there is a lot to do for Rotarians in our small world. We try our best to give a contribution to the development of Latvia into a socially more balanced, open and democratic society. Please feel free to visit us and share the great Rotarian spirit with us!

yours, with a kind Sveiki ! ( Hello ! ) from Riga, Latvia.

President Horst Rieger