We’re so very close.

Since the international polio eradication campaign began in 1988, polio has been eliminated from more than 120 countries. In 2006, fewer than 2,000 cases of the disease were reported, down from 1,000 a day two decades ago. Rotary International has played a major part in this effort, and Rotarians should pause for a moment and feel proud.

Now take a deep breath and press on, because as close as the goal is, it hasn’t been reached yet. The poliovirus still ravages lives, and Rotarian volunteers are still integral to National Immunization Days in the four polio-endemic countries – Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan – as well as in other areas.

The rewards of traveling on an NID are great. Sometimes they come in an epiphany, when your worldview shifts – a little or a lot – in ways you might never have imagined. The Rotarians in this story joined the international fight against polio and, along the way, they learned about themselves, the world, and what it means to be a part of Rotary.

Wendy Wayne
Rotary Club of Bakersfield, Calif., USA

Among the thousands of people she encountered in Nigeria, Wendy Wayne was most deeply touched by one small life.

A registered nurse who had participated in smallpox eradication efforts in the 1960s, Wayne was familiar with large-scale health projects. NIDs, however, “are much more massive, much better organized, and involve so many more children at one time,” she says.

Wayne went to India on her first NID in 2004, but it was in Nigeria in 2007 that she had one of the most moving experiences of her life.

She was in a remote village going door-to-door with Pam Dauda Sho, a bacteriologist and member of the Rotary Club of Bauchi City, Nigeria, when they saw a boy who was about three years old and obviously malnourished.

“Then his mother came out with this tiny little baby who was screeching,” Wayne recalls. Sho immediately heard trouble in the cry, and Wayne knew that the baby’s reddish hair was a sign of kwashiorkor, or malnutrition. “She couldn’t have been more than 10 pounds, and they said she was 18 months old,” Wayne remembers. They knew the baby needed immediate attention.

She and her teammates administered the polio vaccine and then, meeting in the home of the village chief, pooled what money they had and hired a car and driver to transport the mother and infant to the hospital. Both were diagnosed with tuberculosis. The four team members contributed funds to pay for their treatment and hospital stay.

Wayne visited the hospital before leaving the country and saw the baby, who looked healthier already. Back home, she received photos from Sho of the girl’s homecoming after six weeks of treatment. “Now she’s walking,” she says.

While in Nigeria, Wayne visited several remote villages. In one, her team leader was presented with 100 pounds of rice and a live goat. At a local hospital, she observed polio-related surgery.

But helping that one child was the pinnacle.

“It was an incredible experience that you don’t have happen to you often,” she says.

John Kenyon
Rotary Club of Ojai West, Calif., USA

John Kenyon found a new family in India on his first NID.

Kenyon, a Rotarian since 1991 and the owner of several auto service centers, always knew he wanted to participate in an NID, but the time never seemed right. In 2005, he says, “I finally decided that there’s never a perfect time, and you’ll never have the right amount of money, so just do it.”

He and his wife, Maud Huey-Kenyon, love to travel, but to keep from leaving their teenage son alone for extended periods, they take alternating solo vacations. Though Kenyon left one family behind on the NID trip, he found another in India among the Rotarians who warmly welcomed him.

“It’s like a family reunion for relatives you’ve never met before,” he says. “I specifically wanted to be in people’s houses, and that was one of the pivotal experiences. That was key – waking up in the morning and having a bowl of anise seeds and yogurt. My host really wanted me to experience the food. That was the sort of intimacy that you have. They bring you into their families. They want you to meet everybody.”

After he got home, Kenyon’s slideshow of the trip inspired his wife to join the Ojai West club immediately and participate in an NID in Nigeria. “She got on the very next opportunity,” Kenyon says. “I think she would have gone on an NID anywhere.”

Bruce and Jane Howard
Rotary Club of Cambria, Calif., USA

“My wife and I have a saying that there is no they in Rotary,” says Bruce Howard, noting that Rotarians don’t wait for others to get the ball rolling. “If you want to do it, it’s up to you.” Upon their return from their first NID trip, Howard and his wife, Jane, saw an opportunity to do just that.

Howard, a real estate agent and concert promoter, and his wife, a personal trainer, joined their first NID in India in 2004. On that trip, they learned of the situation in Nigeria, which that year had 782 confirmed cases of polio, up from a mere 28 in 2000. In 2006, he recalls, “half the world’s polio cases were in Nigeria. We heard there was a problem, and we said let’s go where the problem is.”

Back home, the Howards started inquiring about NID trips to Nigeria but learned that none were planned. “That left it up to us, in the true Rotary spirit, to do our own,” he says.

Howard had the advantage of being familiar with the city of Kano, the capital of the northern Nigerian state of the same name. A former flight attendant, he’d been based there one year during the hajj, working on flights taking Muslims from Africa on their way to Mecca.

His cousin, Brad Howard, a member of the Rotary Club of Oakland Sunrise, Calif., and travel agent who had led NIDs in Ghana, connected him with Ade Adefeso, then-chair of the Nigeria PolioPlus Committee. In June 2005, Bruce and Jane Howard met with Nigerian Rotarians at the RI Convention in Chicago and began planning in earnest. Sally Adelblue, 2005-06 governor of District 5240 (California), offered support. Robert Stuart, 2005-07 RI director and member of the Rotary Club of Springfield, Ill., signed on for the trip.

The couple led a team to Nigeria in November 2005, followed by a second effort in January 2007. (A third trip took place in early 2008.) Brad led a trip in November 2007 that combined an NID with the third annual West Africa Project Fair.

Nigeria presents numerous cultural and logistical challenges, but Howard recognizes it as the final slog for the polio eradication effort. “We’ve been pushing a car up a hill for about 20 years,” he says. “We’re so near the top, but we’re really tired. There’s a great motivation to let go of that car. But we can’t because we all know what will happen.”

Andy Loveless
Rotary Club of Cambria, Calif., USA

Andy Loveless didn’t realize that polio eradication was among Rotary’s goals when he attended his first lunch meeting with his friend and sponsor Bruce Howard. Though he had traveled on projects with other groups, including a trip to bring ophthalmological care to children in Mexico and several visits to Romania to do service work with orphanages, he wasn’t sure at first how he fit in with Rotary. He considered resigning.

Then Howard invited him to join an NID in Nigeria.

“It was a light bulb moment – kids and polio,” Loveless says. “I couldn’t believe I was being offered a chance to go to the epicenter of polio in the world and eradicate it, to be a part of that.

“I didn’t have to think. I had no idea how I was going to do it. I said sure.”

Loveless, who has owned a window-washing business for 25 years, has a loyal and supportive clientele. When he decided to participate in his first NID in 2005, his customers opened their wallets. “The first trip I went on, my clients pretty much paid my way,” he says.

In 2007, he went on NIDs in India and Nigeria, where he also attended a Rotary peace conference.

Everywhere he went, Loveless says, people asked him, Why are you here? What are you doing here? “I told them their kids are my kids, and I care about them just as much. And I told them about my mother.”

Loveless’ mother had polio as a child and now has postpolio syndrome. He has vowed to do whatever he can to eradicate the disease in her lifetime.

Through NIDs, Loveless found a way to pursue two big dreams simultaneously. “I’ve found my purpose. I’ve found what I’ve been saying for years: that I was going to change more kids’ lives than I could ever possibly imagine. I never knew how that was going to happen, but it’s been shown to me.”

Michael Jeffery
Rotary Club of Barrow (Nuvuk), Alaska, USA

As a member of one of the world’s northernmost Rotary clubs, Michael Jeffery has sometimes felt disconnected from the global organization.

The remote location of Barrow, Alaska, which sits on a point jutting out into the Arctic Ocean, makes traveling expensive, and Jeffery’s job as a superior court judge keeps him busy.

But an NID in India helped him understand that, as a Rotarian, he was part of something big.

In November 2006, his club’s PolioPlus committee chair sent an e-mail urging people to participate in the NID. Jeffery, who had spent five years in India seeking spiritual enlightenment as a young man in the 1970s, decided it was time to return.

“I said, I don’t know how, but I’m going to do it,” he says. After persuading the local magistrate to fill in for him on the bench and brushing up on his rusty Hindi, he set off on the long journey.

On the second day, at the formal NID kickoff, the full impact of what he was doing hit him.

“We get to this village with mud streets,” he recalls. “Then someone comes over to me and asks, ‘Would you like to vaccinate a child?’ Oh, yeah! Suddenly, I find myself with an infant in my arms. Basically, you have a little bottle of the vaccine with a rubber tip, and you squeeze two drops into the mouth. I did that and just got emotional. It was extremely moving.”

The moment connected Jeffery in a new way to the club he’d belonged to for 20 years.

“We were part of a National Immunization Day that was going to vaccinate over 100 million children across India,” he marvels, “and there I was, part of this amazing campaign.”