A photographer documents progress and promise on the road to stopping polio for good.
By Jean-Marc Giboux
As a freelance photographer, I was looking for a great story for the new millennium when I read an article in the Chicago Tribune in 1997 about the drive to eradicate polio. I noticed a local connection: Rotary. I called Rotary International and the organisation gave me a grant to cover the story.
PICTURED: Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1998
This is one of my favourite photos. I was on my first assignment with the World Health Organisation. As in Ethiopia, the Cheshire Home was a place for kids with polio. There were no parents there. The children were in a big estate surrounded by walls, and outside those walls a civil war was raging. What always stayed with me about this is that it was such a haven of peace, of retreat, for them to be there. I had to be evacuated because the war was worsening. I don’t know what happened to them afterward.
The Rotary team picked five places in the world for me to visit. Starting in 1997, I spent a year travelling to Turkey, India, Nepal, Ethiopia, and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. At the end of my travels, Life magazine picked up the story and published it in the November 1998 issue.
I went on to cover the polio eradication effort for 18 years. I kept the subject fresh by trying to link polio eradication with major events happening in the world.
PICTURED: Mathura district, India, 2015
This photo of nurses and health workers at the Farah Community Health Centre is from the first anniversary of a polio-free India. When the end of polio was celebrated, of course it happened in New Delhi with the cabinet ministers. But the really hard work was being done by hundreds of thousands of workers going by foot door to door. The lines, the visuals, the composition make the picture beautiful.
For example, I decided to see the polio vaccinations in 2004 during the conflict in the Darfur region in Sudan. There were more than 200,000 refugees in Chad on the border with Sudan. Just getting there was very difficult. I had a contact with Doctors Without Borders – the group was handling health care on the border. I stayed in tents with doctors and nurses in the camp for a week. I would follow them on their daily routine to do the vaccinations. It was interesting to get to see what was happening in people’s private spaces. The polio program allowed me to get into those places.
PICTURED (left): Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1997
At the time I took this photo, there weren’t too many places for kids who had polio to receive treatment. The Cheshire Home, part of a worldwide network, was giving them reconstructive surgery and a place to live. What I love about this photo is that kids are kids. The child’s legs had to be reconstructed, but he’s having a blast on the playground like any other kid.
PICTURED (right): Herat province, Afghanistan, 2002
I was following teams of vaccinators just after the fall of the Taliban, when there were a couple of years where it was easier to travel around Afghanistan. More than 100,000 people lived in the Maslakh settlement, where displaced people from within the country came to stay. There was a food distribution centre where they would line up for hours. That’s where you’d find the children. You could see who was vaccinated in the camp and who wasn’t by looking for the marking on their finger. That little girl in the centre of the picture is getting a ticket to be in the food line.
I was impressed by the way the polio campaign was done from the bottom up. It reminds me of an ant colony working together. It’s teachers, nurses, health workers, anybody. It’s a pretty simple vaccination to give, and so everybody’s involved. Hundreds of thousands of people are contributing.
PICTURED: New Delhi, India, 2004
The Akshya Pratisthan school is another private school that provides education and rehabilitation in an integrated environment. When I go into places like this, I’m taking a lot of pictures. In this one, they’re lining up to pray before school. It’s a nice environment – it’s early morning and there’s beautiful light. The photo’s composition is more geometric and drives you to the boy’s face.
PICTURED: Delhi, India, 2004
This photo of insulated boxes captures a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the campaign – the importance of the cold chain in the drive to eradicate polio. The polio vaccine is cheap to produce, but it has to be kept cold all the way to delivery. That is one of the biggest challenges of the campaign, because in some places there is no electricity. So everywhere I went there were always those ice boxes. From Africa to Asia to everywhere, always the same small boxes.
PICTURED: Jean-Marc Giboux speaks more about his experiences as a photographer covering polio eradication on the Rotary Voices podcast. Listen at on.rotary.org/podcast
MAIN PICTURE: Delhi, India, 1998
At the Amar Jyoti Research and Rehabilitation Centre there is an integrated school where children with polio study alongside children who don’t have polio. This photo was striking because of the condition of their legs. It was such an intense picture when you see how they got reconstructive surgery. Their legs are supported by metal rods; they get shoes, but they still need crutches. They are the lucky ones. They are getting an education.