20/06/2026
2026 - A Day with Our Becarios
With Rotary you never quite know how a day will end. It usually starts with a plan, and somewhere along the way the plan happily falls apart.
Yesterday we had the pleasure of spending the day with a lively group of becarios, young scholarship students from Mexico and the United States who are spending time on the island. They arrived by train from Petra, and we picked them up at the Manacor train station. From the very first moment there was plenty to talk about and plenty to learn about what everyone is working on.
One of our club members and chaperones had brought along his 23-year-old daughter, and that instantly made everything more fun. Suddenly there was someone of exactly their own age at the table, and it lifted the whole mood to a higher, cooler level.
From there we headed to the Rafa Nadal Museum. Not the sit-and-look kind of place, but an active museum, where you can measure your own fitness and reaction speed and compare it, with a healthy dose of humility, to Rafa Nadal himself. There was plenty of laughter as we discovered exactly how far we all are from a Grand Slam.
And because the company was simply too good to call it a day, we did what Rotary people tend to do. We changed the plan. Completely unplanned, we drove on to Palma for a long table, a proper meal and a lot of stories. We may also have pointed them toward the best cocktail bar on the island, purely in the interest of cultural education, of course.
What stays with us is not the museum or the menu. It is the exchange. Sitting down with young people from the other side of the world, hearing what drives them, what they study and what they dream about, and sharing a piece of our own corner of Mallorca in return. That is what these days are really about, and it is exactly why the unexpected ones so often turn out to be the best ones.
Until the next plan we get to happily ruin.
