Two members of a Spalding fundraising group have been out to India to help administer polio vaccinations to children.
Chris Chew and his wife Wendy and Pat Luckett travelled to India as part of the Rotary Club of South Holland’s commitment to help eradicate polio worldwide.
Ridding the world of poliomyelitis became the top priority of the world’s 34,000 Rotary Clubs in 1984.
The South Holland club was one of the first to lend its support, and has been a consistent supporter ever since. To date it has raised and given £15,000.
Club members were delighted to hear that Nigeria – the last country in Africa with endemic polio virus – is now polio free. That leaves only two countries in the world – Pakistan and Afghanistan – where polio has yet to be stopped.
When the campaign started, more than 350,000 children in 125 countries were stricken with polio every year – almost 1,000 new cases every day. Now cases have been reduced by 99.9 per cent with less than 50 cases so far in 2015.
“It has been a long, hard but wonderful journey in which our club has been proud to play its full part”, said South Holland Rotary president Bob Bradley. “We thank the many Spalding people who helped us do that.”
Chris (a former club president and district governor) and his wife Wendy travelled to India.
Former Holbeach Rotary Club member Wendy said: “A constant stream of appealing, scruffy, barefooted, dust covered children – with very grubby faces and teeth in an even worse state – queued to receive two drops of vaccine on the tongue and to be marked with an indelible pen on their left hand.
“The whole Rotary team was humbled by the warm appreciation shown by the local people as they reached out to shake our hands.”
Pat Luckett (the South Holland club’s first woman president) also travelled to India.
She said: “To be part of the Rotary team and to be thanked by parents for saving their children was a very humbling experience. Their gratitude and hope for a better future was moving.
“Every week we end our South Holland club meeting with a toast to ‘Rotary brings hope the world over’. I witnessed that it actually does!”
