Eric opened the meeting inviting our guests to introduce themselves. Therefore, we met Felix, Veronica from Venezuela, Darío from Dominican Republic, Elena and Lee from Korea. The last two names are not real names but easier for us to remember than the real Korean names of their bearers.
Names were very important in our last club meeting: Eric had thoroughly looked for the meaning and popular bearers of the names of all the participants in the meeting. We learnt popularity statistics and that most of us share the Biblical origin of our names.
We all loved how members who recently joined our club (Maria Mirat, Christian, Maravillas, Juliet and Ana), played a very important role in the first part of the meeting.
During the introduction of her role as Timekeeper, Maria Mirat made us remember the story of the “Men in Grey” from the novel “Momo” by Michael Ende. Those “Men in Grey” represented the “Time Saving Bank” and promoted the idea of time saving.
Christian, our Grammarian, chose “Impeccable” as the Word of the Day. And he confessed that he had just learned that the Spanish word was very similar.
Just before the prepared speeches, Maravillas recommended us to see a film: “The good lie”, in a longer than usual, but very interesting Thought of the day.
Two prepared speeches were Icebreakers. The Icebreaker is the first speech in the Competent Communication Manual, the first milestone for every member in her Toastmasters journey.
Juliet, the first speaker, remembered with emotion, her first working experiences in the city of Jos (Nigeria). She taught us how we can influence and touch lives with something small and trivial: Chocolate!!
The second prepared speech of the meeting was Ana’s Icebreaker. With “the pets of my life”, she presented the different stages of her life, her family, the period of time she spent in the US… and how animals have always had a prominent role.
Masha is nearly Competent Communicator!! She delivered her 8th speech on last Wednesday. With her magnificent body language, vocal variety and all the visual aids she was requested to use to reach the objectives of her project, we learned “The true story of Matryoshka”. According to Masha, originally Russian Matryoshkas consisted on 7 figures. Each one was painted in a certain rainbow colour, from red to violet, in the same way that the 7 chakras or 7 life force-energies in yogi tradition have a corresponding colour.
When speakers are finished, evaluators take their turn:
- Both Teresa and Raquel focused on the opportunity that new members give the rest of us to know them better with their Icebreakers.
- Jim evaluated Masha and he pointed out that “as always, it is a pleasure to listen to you”.
Julian, the Table Topic Master, gave us the opportunity to travel through time (as Rosa and David did), and through space, because Elena flied over Ibiza. During Table Topics Evaluation, Nacho focused on the great Rosa´s performance and that Elena “gave us more than a short speech of a minute”.
Before the meeting is finished, our supporting roles (Grammarian and Timekeeper) gave their reports:
- According to Christian, paying 0.10 € for each filler word is always something to celebrate, as we are helping others with the money we get.
- Maria divided us in three groups: the frugal, the moderate and the talkative ones, depending on how long we talked.
General evaluator is always the last role of each meeting. Jane, Gift of God, as her name means, pointed out that we had struggled against noise and heat during the meeting. Something that the new Club Committee has to face for future sessions, next one on 17th of June.
Written by Raquel.
The Table Topic Master, Jose, was an excellent moment of teamwork as well. Aware of the importance of working with others, Jose increased the participation component with a topic related to the Master of Ceremonies in a Conference, where the one of the main workshop leaders failed. The impromptu speakers had to to find why another different topic would still fit in the conference. We enjoyed a lot with speeches, such as, the Art of Walking, the Lady Gaga fame or the history of Harry Potter. We enjoyed a lot, where the evaluation of the motivated participants and Table Topic Master were fine, so I would like to say congratulations to all!!
To summarize the meeting, our Toastmaster of the day, our Grammarian, our Timekeeper and our General Evaluator, demonstrate us that the prime advantage to working as a team is the ability to combine skills and talents. That is, we benefit from a wide array of skills and talents that no single member could possess alone. Thus, our outstanding meeting was an exemplary teamwork.
The agenda contained one Thought of the Day by Mabel, one project speech (number #5) of the 
Eric’s speech, “Words speak, do you listen” dealt with the meaning of words. His speech pointed out that it is the time for ours to understand what words truly say. It is to be noted his particular spelling of the words “PEACE: Pacific Engagement Against Conflictive Encounters” and “STRESS: Simply Temporary Retrogressing Energy that is Severe System” evaluator, Jim, showed his humor just when entering the scenario: “Your speech reminded me when I was studying vocabulary lists” and praised his speech.
To close the meeting, the president came up to the stage for a Presidential Announcement, that was starting to be called, by request of the audience: “Let the president speak!”. We were relieved to check out that Jaime was alive after running the complete Marathon and he gave special recognition to María and Anselmo, who, in a record time, had delivered more than 5 speech. He concluded with a sadly news: his farewell (seems that we are going to miss to claim “The President likes to Speak” encouraging the members to apply for the 
Today is our official 15th birthday as a chartered club in Toastmasters. 15 years of Toastmasters in Spain, seeing how we grow in our skills by practicing in a safe environment. We asked the founder of our club, Jim Dodson, to tell us something about the beginnings of our club. Here you are his words.
Contests are a way to explore your boundaries, and cross them, especially if you win and compete at