The World’s Best-Kept Secret is that Rotarians Have Been Busy Doing Good Deeds in Their Communities for More Than 100 Years.

Rotary's Good Deeds Were Low-Key
Until They De-cided to Eradicate Polio.

By Carlos H. Giraldo – District Governor 2008-2009

Anywhere Town --- Somewhere in the world, in a community tucked away in any of 170 countries, a Rotary club meeting is taking place. It might be a local restaurant, a church, or a hall - serving breakfast, lunch or dinner. The Rotarians are not there because the food is exquisite; they are there to enjoy fellow-ship and to serve. Little by little, they wander into the meeting place and the din of voices gets louder and louder. It takes a louder ring of a bell to bring the meeting to order. Even so, the conversations and laughter continue until the increasing silence wills everyone to pay attention. The business portion of the meeting starts: introducing guests and visiting Rotarians from other clubs, an-nouncements reeled off by members, including,reports on projects, upcoming events, an update on the health of a fellow member.

These Rotarians are a cross-section of the community: a dentist, a lawyer, a banker, a gas station owner, the city manager. They are a friendly bunch who catch up on each other’s lives every week. They have shared many meetings over the same bacon and eggs, chicken Marsala, beans and rice. They are also di-verse in age, from a septuagenarian to a twenty-year-old just out of college. They are mostly men, but in-creasingly more women. And, in many communities, they are even more diverse in ethnicity, religion ex-pression and cultural background.

For 102 years, Rotary has been the reason for such meetings,since it was started by a lonely lawyer named Paul Harris, in Chicago in 1905. The concept spread like wildfire across the planet and today there are over 32,000 clubs worldwide with over 1.2 million members.

During most of these years, Rotary did not focus on one specific area of “doing good for the community.” Rotarians rolled up their sleeves during disasters, helped the world’s hungry or mentally ill, battled in-fectious diseases, provided drinking water by digging wells, fought against illiteracy, gave educational op-portunities through scholarships, or sought world un-derstanding through student youth exchanges, but never took the reins in combating one iniquity.

That changed in 1979. That year, president of Rotary International Clem Renouf, an accountant from Queensland, Austra-lia read an article in Reader’s Digest about the eradication of polio. Out of that article, a germ of an idea grew to be a global drive to stamp out this debilitating disease. It wasn’t easy. It took almost 10 years to develop partnerships with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Center for Disease Control. It was an arduous task , requiring a lot of arm-twisting of politicians and bureaucrats, guerrilla chiefs and religious leaders, from Washington D.C. to the heart of Africa, from Hong Kong to London. But the fight was on.

The logistics in the battle are mind-boggling. The trust of its success was in country- wide Na-tional Immunization Days, conducted in the most afflicted countries. More than 50 million chil-dren are immunized in just one day. It’s a labor of love, of endurance, and of lots of money. Ro-tarians from all over the world have generously donated almost three quarters of a billion dollars to fight the war against polio.

The war is still not won, but the outcome is clear. The virus -- which 50 years ago still plagued classrooms in the U.S. and maimed or killed more than half a million children around the world each year -- is almost gone. Today, there are only three endemic countries in the world: India, Niger and Nigeria, with less than 200 cases reported each year.

Stories about National Immunization Days filter back to the clubs, and with each passing day, the statistics bring a sense of pride to these Rotari-ans, who truly give “service above self.”

Whether it is immunizing a child against polio in India, building a ramp for a wheelchair-bound resident, or simply giving a fresh coat of paint to a house of an elderly home owner, club members meet each week to do what truly brands them professionals – giving back to the community -- whether that community is local or worldwide.

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