The lions of Lagos, the rotarians of Rawalpindi how the civic groups that once defined America are thriving abroad, and what it means for us.

• Author: Gravois, John

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One sweltering day last spring, out of curiosity and a long-standing interest in the old-fashioned American institutions of civic engagement, I stepped out of my apartment building in the nation's capital and walked over to attend a nearby conference of the Toastmasters. Founded in a Southern California YMCA basement for the betterment of tongue-tied young men, the Toastmasters have been offering "practice and training in the art of public speaking" along with "sociability and good fellowship" since the mid-1920s. In my mind, the group harked back to a half-imagined America of bowling leagues, church barbecues, and Rotary signs on the edge of town. What was funny was that my apartment resided in a sandy, congested neighborhood of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Under the Arabian midday glare, I scurried across one of the city's sprawling six-lane boulevards--past a billboard that months earlier had advertised the local Krispy Kreme's "Ramadan Dozen" special--to reach the campus of a local women's college that was hosting the event. When I arrived at the main auditorium, I found it humming with a 300-horsepower murmur. The place was packed with men and women in off-the-rack power suits, plus a few starched white robes and black abayas. The room was decked end-to-end with gold silk banners, each, to my amazement, representing a different local chapter of the Toastmasters. By itself, Abu Dhabi--a young boomtown of global migrants roughly the size of Milwaukee--harbors seventeen active chapters of the group, I learned. The UAE as a whole, with a population of about eight million people, has seventy-one chapters.

When I first heard that the Toastmasters had a presence in Abu Dhabi, I pictured a small roomful of ill-adjusted American expatriates draining their water glasses, trading a few speeches, and then adjourning to a bar. Suffice it to say, my imagination had failed me. At the conference, I found only one fellow American in the crowd. In fact, I found only one other native speaker of English in the crowd. Instead, the group drew from a pretty representative sample of Abu Dhabi's usually rather fragmented society: there was a strong majority from the Indian subcontinent, small contingents of Filipinos and Arabs from abroad, and a few actual citizens of the UAE--all guffawing warmly at speeches delivered in broken English about following dreams, learning lessons from failure, seeing through appearances, and other themes of uplift worthy of a motivational poster.

Curious, I called up the Toastmasters headquarters in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, to find out whether the United Arab Emirates was some kind of anomaly. It isn't. The organization reports hotspots of growth throughout Asia and the Middle East. "Within India and Sri Lanka" said Daniel Rex, the Toastmasters' executive director, "we're organizing about a chapter a week."

Then, on a hunch, I began poking around to see how similar organizations were faring overseas--groups like Rotary, the Boy Scouts, the Lions, and the Kiwanis, which all came into existence during the same early-twentieth-century period that gave rise to the Toastmasters. Most of these groups have been bleeding members in the United States for decades. And yet, as I discovered, many have been growing nonetheless.

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