Service above self

The morning of Oct. 24, Mountain Brook residents Will Ratliff III, his wife Carolyn and Emmet O’Neal Library Director Lindsy Gardner will take off in a plane, only to land 25 hours later in Delhi, India. But this isn’t just a vacation. It’s a service trip.

Together with Vestavia Hills residents Jennifer Davis and Mike and Judy Wade, they are traveling around the world to help vaccinate young children against polio. It’s a coincidence they fly out on World Polio Day, Bill Petty said, but a good one.

Petty, of the Rotary Club of Tuscaloosa, is the district governor-elect of the North Alabama Rotary District and has been on this trip twice already — once through a program offered to Rotarians worldwide, and once on a service trip he put together himself. The first year he helped organize it, in 2017, only six volunteers from his district were able to make the trip. 

This year, Petty has brought that number up to 16, including Mike and Judy Wade, Davis and Gardner, all of whom hail from Shades Valley Rotary Club, and Will and Carolyn Ratliff, who represent Birmingham Rotary Club.

Upon landing in Delhi, the group will take a bus about 150 miles south to the city of Agra, most known for the Taj Mahal. Ratliff said because this is a global Rotarian effort, other local clubs will meet up with the Alabamians to show them around the area. 

They’ll spend their first full day there handing out flyers for the polio immunizations.

“We’ll have a rally day before the actual immunization, and then there’s the day itself,” Will Ratliff III said. Rotary started this program to help vaccinate against polio in 1983, he said, and since then has helped bring down the number of cases from thousands to hundreds.

Gardner said the group is going for National Immunization Day, or NID, which is part of a worldwide Rotarian effort. But up until the last few years, she said there haven’t been people regularly going from the North Alabama District.

NID is held across India twice per year, according to the India Polio Learning Exchange. Although India was declared polio-free in 2014 by the World Health Organization, the virus still is present in nearby countries and poses a threat to those who may travel across borders or come in contact with individuals affected by polio from those countries.

Volunteers spend the day in communities administering the oral vaccination to children under the age of 5, and because the vaccination does not require shots — two drops are placed in the child’s mouth — there is little training needed. While Petty has made the trip before, the others have been told being able to help protect children from polio is an experience like no other. 

“To us older folks, it’s a very, very scary disease,” Wade said. “We were scared in the ’50s. You wouldn’t even go to a public pool, seeing all the kids in iron lungs.”

“We all knew people who had polio [growing up],” Davis added. “… To travel and participate in a rotary project of this magnitude, it means the world.”

Ratliff said typically, the presence of Americans brings out more people to the vaccination day because many have never interacted with those from the United States before. Wade added that this can help promote peace as different cultures get to know and understand one another, and he mentioned that many have told them to be prepared for an unfamiliar level of poverty.

“We don’t know what poverty is in this country [the U.S.], and to serve others and help eradicate an awful disease is wonderful,” he said.

In addition to helping vaccinate children — Petty said in the past they helped as many as 250 with just six volunteers — the group will do some sight seeing and tour facilities where Rotaries have helped the community. This includes a school and a clinic, for which Petty’s Rotary donated benches for the waiting room on their last trip. This group of Rotarians will be donating benches on their trip, too.

All participants signed up for the trip with different reasons — some of which included the chance to travel to India — but a shared idea was to have the chance to “do some good,” Gardner said. It all aligns with the Rotary motto, “Service above self.”

“I have done traveling where I’ve been hosted by Rotarians in other countries. It’s an exceptional experience to be able to see the country through the eyes of the people who live there,” she said. “And then add on to that the chance to maybe do some good? … I just couldn’t pass it up.”

“For me, one of the things … I hope it moves me to another level of being a better Rotarian,” Wade said. “We do a lot here, but I think that, you know, saving small children from the ravages of polio has got to change you. … It’s got to be a moving experience.”