TENETS OF ROTARY: POLIO PLUS

e-Musings: Growing up in Kingsville was a world of discovery, yes, even in that small setting. I learned about life and some of life’s interesting questions not knowing that answers would come later. One of those was why the lady who hired my grandma as her housekeeper, had a leg shorter than the other. She walked with a bad limp and had metal braces on that leg. She used crutches and had a difficult time walking. My parents only said that she had suffered polio as a child and that was the result of that illness, a life sentence of limited mobility. This might have been the time something wonderful was given to me as medicine; a sugar cube! All my meds had come through an injection, usually not my choice, and the locale of same were definitely not my choice. Yes, we had spoonfuls of other medicines and none of them cherry-flavored or sweet in any way, so to get a sugar cube in the name of medicine made me feel great about the future of medicine! It was an oral polio vaccine designed to keep me and my classmates from contracting polio in our lives. It sure beat the painful scratch of the smallpox vaccine and the nasty, feverish blister it caused. I can still feel that scab bothering me until the day it fell. I know that’s not the image for a breakfast meeting, sorry!
But Rotary International has taken on the enormous task of battling polio worldwide. I say battling, but the correct word is the eradication of polio. Given all the world’s resources and all the advances in science and medicine, and generous gifts from individuals and corporations around the world, there is no reason we as Rotarians cannot defeat polio once and for all. We’ve been at it for over 20 years and we’re very close to reaching the@200 million matching grant to match The Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation gift making RI a $555 million dollars to make a worldwide push against the disease. As long as one child has polio, other children are at risk of becoming paralyzed or disabled because of what polio does. Let’s do our part in helping win the war!