On 29 September 1979, leaders of Rotary International sat down with Philippine officials in a muddy schoolyard outside Manila. There they signed
an agreement that launched a five-year partnership to provide the oral polio vaccine to 5.3 million children in the Philippines.....
Among other things, Rotary, under the auspices of its fledgling Health, Hunger and Humanity program, pledged more than $700,000 to the endeavor.
About 100 children received the vaccine that sunny September day. RI President James L. Bomar Jr., who administered the first dose in what became Rotary’s global fight to eradicate polio, dedicated his program to the mothers assembled in the schoolyard and to their children and their children’s children. M.A.T. Caparas, a Philippine lawyer, Rotary director, and future RI president, reminded his listeners that “great things always have a small beginning.”
After administering that first dose, Bomar felt a tug on the leg of his pants. “I looked down through the maze of human beings surrounding me,” he recalled, “and spotted a small boy who was crippled [with polio]” and whose sister had just received the vaccine. A grin spread across the boy’s mud-streaked face and he said, “Thank you, thank you, Rotary.”