From Australia to India and back, Monica Saville embarks on a polio journey.
For Monica Saville, Rotary’s polio eradication campaign is personal. Saville, who survived the disease as a child in Australia, has helped raise money to fight polio and vaccinated children in India. A member of the Rotary Club of Epping, she is a regional Rotary Foundation coordinator and a past governor of District 9680.
THE ROTARIAN: What was your own experience with polio like?
SAVILLE: I was raised about 300 miles from Sydney in Junee, a small rural community that had a lot of sheep and wheat. In 1951, when I was 11, a farmer died of polio. The whole town was reeling. We were a fairly isolated place. Just after that, I was at school one day feeling very sick. Flu-like symptoms, aching back – I will never forget the pain. I went home, and my mother called the doctor. He checked my arms and legs, and then he said, “Put your chin on your chest,” and I couldn’t do that, because my neck was paralyzed. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t eat very well and couldn’t talk properly. He told my mother, “You need to take her to the nearest large hospital,” which was 25 miles away in a city called Wagga Wagga. There was no treatment, but I was able to go home after three weeks, and I went back to school after another three weeks.
Mine is a good-news story in that I’m now 74, and I’m fit and well. But for millions of other children, it’s been either death or lifelong disability.
TR: How did you become involved with Rotary’s fight against polio?
SAVILLE: I had put the whole childhood episode behind me until I became a Rotarian in 1993 and learned that the eradication of polio was Rotary’s most ambitious project. You know how you feel compelled to do something? I felt a huge need to vaccinate children against polio.
I was in Andhra Pradesh, a very poor part of India, in 2010. We started off early in the morning in a bus; then we transferred into jeeps. Along the way, we were vaccinating children. The Indian parents ran out to meet us, and the children were terrific. It must have seemed strange to them – these were isolated communities – but they knew their parents wanted them to have these two vital drops.
Then we transferred into an old boat and went out on a lake with rocky shores. It was night, we’d been vaccinating all day, and we had only the light of flashlights and phones. I remember thinking, “If we start to sink, I should keep my shoes on,” because the shores were so rocky. We’d pull ashore, scramble over the rocks, and vaccinate children. One family jumped in a coracle and frantically paddled out to us so their children could be vaccinated before we went away.
TR: What are Australian Rotarians doing these days to help end polio?
SAVILLE: We have a project for World Polio Day on 24 October, the Ribbon of Gold. The idea is that clubs can put a yellow strip of tape on the ground at their local shopping centers and people can line up coins on it – Australian one- and two-dollar coins are gold-colored. And at the international convention in Sydney, our prime minister announced that the Australian government would give $100 million to help eradicate polio. For a small country, that’s a large amount. – Anne Ford
