Guy Parkinson, a member of the Frome Selwood Rotary Club, with his wife Gill travelled to India to be there for National Immunisation Day on Sunday 21st February.
This is the day when all 172 million children under the age of five years in India are vaccinated against Polio – a crippling viral disease.
In fact, vaccination by oral drops is carried out over three days, on day one the children are expected to be taken to one of the 709,000 vaccination booths set up over the country and then on days two and three health workers visit all the dwellings with children in them and vaccinate any that were missed on the first day.
Rotary International is one of the main organisations involved in ensuring this programme is successful. This has resulted in India being polio free for five years. However, because of continuing problems in neighbouring countries India has to maintain a rigorous vaccination policy.
The logistics of this programme are incredible – vaccine has to be transported cold [four degrees C] to 709,000 booths by truck, car, bike, camel, elephant or whatever else is available where it will be administered by one of the 1.2 million volunteers involved in the programme.
Guy and Gill were two of those volunteers. They travelled to India with a group of 105 Rotarians from the UK to assist in the immunisation programme.
On arrival in Delhi they were briefed on the polio situation in India and took part in a rally and march through the streets of Delhi with 2000 school children and other Rotarians from Belgium, Luxembourg, Japan, America and Canada to publicise the immunisation day.
On 21st February Guy and Gill were assigned to the Delhi Ridge Rotary club which was supervising 99 vaccination booths in one of the poorer areas of Delhi, and they visited four of these booths where they assisted with the vaccination of children.
The first booth attended was in a local community house where over 50 children were lined up by the time they arrived. Guy reports that they had to travel through some unbelievable conditions including a road flooded by blocked drains to reach the community centre. After this they were asked to walk to three other booths as this would attract attention and bring children to the booths.
The following day Guy and Gill went with a local health worker to one of the slums around Delhi where they went door to door checking whether there were any children present and whether they had been vaccinated in the day before. They were vaccinated by the health worker if they did not have a purple little finger due to the indelible ink applied at the time of vaccination that indicated they had been vaccinated the day before.
This meant walking along very narrow pathways which were also open sewers between rough single roomed buildings which could be several stories high, each level being accessed by bamboo ladders. They also visited a hospital where the deformities caused by polio infection are corrected so that the patient can lead a reasonable life.
Guy reported, “This was an incredible experience which it is impossible to describe adequately because of the unbelievable conditions encountered. and that the teams carrying out the vaccinations have to put up with, and yet it was very pleasing, rewarding and enlightening to be part of the process.
“We were told on arrival that the presence of westerners at booths attracts more children and so we were sent to areas where vaccine uptake was poor in the past and this appeared to be the case with us as the kids came out to see these strange people in their alleyways. It was good to see the Rotary motto ‘Service above Self’ in action.”
