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February 9 - National Immunization Day

District Governor Visit
Saturday February 8 was the official visit of the District Governor to the Dharamsala Rotary Club. They also had the District Chairman for Inner Wheel visiting, so they made a big meeting in common. Awards were given to outstanding vocational leaders of the community. The Inner Wheel Club also donated a sewing machine to a local lady in need. I gave a Torrey Pines Rotary banner to the Club President, and a District 5340 banner to the District Governor.

On the center picture above you can see left from right: the District Secretary Upkar Singh Sethi (GSE Team Leader to Mississippi this year), District Governor Mohan Singh Sachdeva, myself, and Rotarian Raj Sharma who will represent the Dharamsala Rotary Club at the Brisbane Convention in June. It will be nice to see a friend from India in Australia. During his visit, the District Governor gave $2,000 of his District Designated Funds towards a Matching Grant project that the Club could do before the end of the year. I spoke to the Club members and we will get a project started to provide a few computers for a vocational training center. Watch these pages later for more details. The Rotary meeting started at 7 pm., and lasted 3 hours and a half! We only had dinner after the meeting, at 10:30 pm...

National Immunization Day (NID)
On the Sunday morning (February 9) I joined the members of the Dharamsala Rotary Club for the National Immunization Day. This is the day where all the Rotary Clubs in India gather the children of India (0 to 5 years old) to give them the two drops of the Polio vaccine. There are potentially 160 million children to immunize! This worldwide effort is done in collaboration with UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control, and other NGOs. This is the last stretch of a campaign that started in 1985, and the goal is to eradicate Polio from the face of the Earth by 2005, for the 100th anniversary of Rotary International.

From 350,000 cases of Polio per year in 125 countries in the 1988, cases dropped to 450 in 10 countries in 2001, with 268 cases in India. Unfortunately, there was a dramatic increase of cases in India in 2002, with 1556 cases in India alone, most of them in the state of Uttar Pradesh (See video of PolioPlus Chairman in India Deepak Kapur on page 1). The main effort to eradicate Polio is therefore happening in India.

Rotary has provided tremendous financial support to the PolioPlus effort, over 500 million dollars. In addition, the Rotary members in the infected country help to gather the population and administer the vaccine on National Immunization days. The Rotary Club of Dharamsala is no exception. In collaboration with the Inner Wheel club, they setup a booth outside the hotel of their meeting place. This is the main location, but they also send teams of Rotarians all over the town, in strategic locations, where they stop all cars and buses to ask if all the children have been immunized. They also send teams to more remote areas where people do not use transportation.

It was great to be part of such an important worldwide project. I shot lots of video, including an interview of the District Governor. I will try to edit a short video on PolioPlus. Check these pages later.

Handicapped Children School
We also visited in the morning a Matching Grant project that the Dharamsala Rotary Club did last year. The grant was for $14,000 to build a new roof to a handicapped children school, and raise the walls in some rooms that had very low ceilings. The children of the school make small objects that they sell to visitors for fund raising. Another great project from the Rotary Foundation!

Rotary Club of Kangra
In the afternoon I followed the District Governor for his official visit of the Rotary Club of Kangra, the closest Club from Dharamsala. They first did a distribution of 100 pairs of shoes and 100 sweaters to the children of a local school. The children danced and sang to thank us. We also did the inauguration of a new traffic control kiosk in the center of town. Then they had their Club assembly and a Club Meeting. I offered the banner of the Torrey Pines Rotary to the Club President. The meeting ended at 10 pm., so that was a very long Rotary day!