By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Talking to Dowagiac Rotary Club about polio "is kind of like doing a program on prime numbers in front of Albert Einstein."
"For someone involved in polio, coming to the Dowagiac club is like coming to Mecca," according to Dick Sammis.
"I was in Niagara Falls at Zone Institute with the president-elect of Rotary, the Rotary International president and board members all over the place, and everybody talks about this little club in Dowagiac" because it's the hometown of Dave Groner and Barbara Groner, Sammis said.
"They're important in the entire world polio effort of Rotary. Dave has gotten a lot of kudos for many, many years for his work. People are realizing how much Barbara has done behind the scenes. I'm so glad she's getting the recognition she deserves and starting to lead (immunization) teams on her own."
This from a man who not only knows where Timbuktu is, he's been there with the Groners vaccinating against polio.
He also knows what a main stumbling block was in eradicating the disease in Yemen (no Rotary Clubs).
Sammis shared his 17-minute PowerPoint presentation Thursday noon at Elks Lodge 889 on their November 2005 journey to Mali, the West African nation where Timbuktu, or Tombouctou, is a city that sits at the edge of the Sahara Desert.
Their 18-member team spent the majority of its time in the capital, Bamako.
Sammis, an attorney from St. Joseph who belongs to the Lakeshore club, will be Rotary's 2007-08 District Governor as of July 1.
He is originally from Cincinnati. Sammis attended college at DePaul University and law school at Northern Ohio University.
He brought two Russian exchanges to southwest Michigan and visited Germany with a Group Study Exchange.
Sammis said they flew from Detroit Metropolitan Airport to Charles DeGaulle Airport, arriving in Paris while France was torn by riots. "I can't tell you how frustrating it was to see the Louvre from the outside only."
"Western Africa is one of the hardest places we've had to immunize," Sammis said. "Nigeria has been our biggest problem. Around 2003 rumors were rampant that these two drops of vaccine were a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslim children and wipe out the race. Nigeria stopped immunizing for about a year. It created a horrible problem. From Nigeria, polio spread back into Niger, then to Mali. Sixteen countries were either reinfected with polio or the situation was made much worse. There were only two or three reported cases in Mali, but only about one in 200 people actually shows physical signs of polio. In the case of FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt), he was infected when he was a young child, but his symptoms didn't come until he was in his early 30s. When you actually have a breakout of two or three cases of polio, that may mean there's a real epidemic and that's how they treat it. You could have thousands of kids infected, actually. You don't talk to people in Mali about the Nigerians because they are so ticked off. They were polio-free and they had to start from scratch immunizing."
Sammis called Egypt "the biggest progress we've made" in wiping out polio. "It's now a non-endemic country, 'endemic' meaning polio has been undisturbed – in Egypt since the time of the pharaohs. Those are the countries it's hardest to get rid of polio. Niger is also gone except for cases being transferred from other countries.
"The bad bit of news we have is that this year we have almost as many reported cases of polio as the year before," Sammis said. "It's disappointing to all of us. The problems come from Muslim northern Nigeria, where it's no longer safe for people from the United States to go there and try to immunize. But, they're trying a brand-new campaign and hiring people to go door to door and it's other Nigerians, not Westerners, that they see."
"There's no question," Sammis said, "the bottom line is that we will win this."
Bamako is on the Niger River, the source of transportation and sustenance. "It's very much a city of contrasts," he said. "There are 6 million people and beautiful Muslim mosques. Since it's the capital, there are beautiful government buildings and a national museum. Textiles are very important, but as in all Third World countries, they have to solve the problem of open sewers. They dump their trash next to the beautiful river, on the road, wherever they want. I learned you have to look through Third World eyes. Trash is not a big problem to them because getting food is."
Their first excursion out of their modern four-star hotel took them to the grand market in the French-speaking country. He brought back a drum for the boy he mentors in the Big Brother program.
Sammis was fascinated strolling the artisan alleys and watching craftsmen apply their ancient tools to Mali's famous wood, just as they did four or five centuries ago. "Some of my friends brought home carved wooden elephants, but I prefer donkeys," the Democrat said.
Sammis also found it remarkable that "the people in Mali love to hold meetings more than we do. There were meetings about where we should meet," including permission from a tribal chieftain before they could start immunizing.
"The whole medical system is on hold. It takes four days and all the doctors helped. Instead of them coming to us, we went door to door – a wonderful way to see their culture in Bamako. We had to carry small refrigerators to keep the vaccine cold. They rely on donkeys quite a bit. I was very surprised at how clean and happy the people are. Most children readily took the vaccine. They greeted us like we were important visitors."
"A few of us got to go to the homes of the doctors we worked with," Sammis said. "I don't know what we ate, but it was delicious."
Most families eat "gruel" cooked over open fires and live on $525 a year.
"We have to get every last bit of it, no matter what it takes," Sammis said, because "the United States is only one plane ride away from a polio outbreak here."