Coleman Reports on India Travel

TODAY IN ROTARY Jim Coleman, a longtime member of SGR, shared his experiences on a return trip to India where he served as a GSE team leader in 2006.   On this trip the PDG traveled 37 hours to spend 17 days in India where he participated in a National Polio Immunization Day in Dibrugarh, Assam.  For several hours, the St. George realtor, father and grandfather helped in the distribution of two drops of polio vaccine to children he had never met, nor would ever see again, to protect them from the debilitating, crippling, even fatal, disease of polio.

“To be part of the immunization team, to deliver the vaccine to an infant in his mother’s arms or to an apprehensive toddler unsure of what this activity was all about, was life-changing, not just for the recipient but also for the one doing the immunizing,” states Coleman of his experience.  “Some of the children stepped right up, tilted their heads back and opened their mouth, as if to say, ‘Thank you for helping me to have a normal life free from this terrible disease’.”

India - polio free for three years - is Rotary's fastest growing area in the world, attracting tribesmen as well as polished professionals who proudly declare "together we defeated polio."  It is a country of “classes and castes among people of prosperity, poverty and pollution” but they are working toward unity among diversity.

For more information, contact Jim at jim@rotarymatters.com.