SLO County Rotarians help fight polio in India

As soon as he got out of the car in the small Indian city of Aligarh, Joel Conn — a veterinarian from Pismo Beach — was immediately put to work.

“We pulled in, they hand me a dropper of the vaccine, and I was presented with this newborn baby in its mom’s arms,” said Conn, one of five local Rotarians who made the trek to India in February to take part in the country’s National Immunization Day to help stop polio.

“She was looking up at me with these eyes of hopefulness,” he said. “It was just such a powerful moment for me, to be handed this newborn — it couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks old — and be asked to help give it this life-saving medicine.”

Conn and four other Rotary Club members from San Luis Obispo County — Steve Cool and Doug Drube of Arroyo Grande, James Molnar of Cayucos and Louise Payne of Pismo Beach — traveled to India for a two-week trip in which they would conduct outreach to educate the population about the necessity of vaccinating their children against polio.

According to Cool, Rotary International started the outreach program in the mid-1980s, when there were an estimated 350,000 cases of polio every year, and about 500 a day in India.

“Since then, through what Rotary calls the Polio Pulse Program, and working in partnership with UNICEF and the World Health Organization, they’ve carried out this massive immunization program worldwide so that now, at this point, there is just a handful of polio cases worldwide every year,” Cool said. “Like so far this year, there’s only two, from Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Cool said a huge part of that decrease can be attributed to National Immunization Days held in developing nations where a poorer population may not be aware of the necessity of the vaccine or have ready access to it.

On Immunization Day, children receive free polio vaccinations at a handful of events in cities across the country. These events are largely manned by Rotarians from around the world, Cool said.

“We administer the vaccine, but our main reason for being there is just to motivate the people there and let them know it is really really important,” he said. “We come from the opposite side of the planet to do this. And it really has an impact.”

During the trip, the Rotarians stayed with host families in Aligarh, Bareilly and Hathras (all in the Uttar Pradesh state in northern India), visited hospitals dedicated to polio treatments and worked at the National Immunization Day rallies.

“I think my most compelling moment was the first day we went to the inoculation booth,” Molnar said. “They had drummers, and they had the people parading down the streets. It was just really cool, because that is what we are there for, to build awareness.”

Molnar, whose signature cowboy hat was popular among the people he met there, said he and the other Rotarians felt like celebrities while visiting the country, taking photos with the children and waving as they paraded by.

“It was just amazing,” he said.

While there, they also got a crash course in Indian culture. From eating cornflakes with warm buffalo milk to being stuck between ox carts and mopeds in six lanes of traffic (on what looked like a two-lane road), the cultural differences were quite a shock to many of the club members, they said.

All of the Rotarians said their trip was a life-changing experience.

“To be able to see what other countries are going through is just overwhelming for me. It’s just unbelievable,” Payne said while describing a particularly inspiring trip to a hospital where the doctor conducts more than 15 surgeries a day to help treat polio victims who have been disfigured from the virus.

Many of the patients at the hospital had limbs that were twisted in the wrong position, and they had to use leg braces and canes to walk. Because of their disfigurements, many of them had been isolated from society, but they were now being given another chance through reconstructive surgery to straighten their limbs.

“There was one little girl who had just come in that day, and she was just petrified, she was so scared,” Payne said. “By the time we left, we had her smiling and happy, and we kept telling her it would be OK. But when you see this, you can’t even imagine that these things are going on in the world, because we are so blessed to live where we are.”

Drube probably put it best, in his description of the trip: “No matter how many pictures you take, no matter how many stories you bring home, no matter what you say or do, you cannot convey the magnitude of everything. Nothing comes close — you have to be there. You can’t reproduce it.”

This story was originally published March 5, 2016 at 6:08 PM with the headline "SLO County Rotarians help fight polio in India."