Thank you for your efforts in the polio eradication effort.  As I shared with you in an earlier email, three important events occurred recently:

1.  We reached and succeed the $200 million Challenge from the Gates Foundation five and one-half months early!

2.  In honor of that, the Gates Foundation awarded us an additional $50 million, not as a matching grant, but an outright contribution!

3.  We celebrated one year without a reported case of polio in India!

We are more that “almost there!”  We are on the brink!!!  But, please remember, it will be three years after the last reported case of polio before the world is declared polio free.  We still have three endemic countries – Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.  So, we have not fully completed our mission and fulfilled our promise.  There is still work to be done!

Thank you so very much for your concern and commitment to all the world as well as to your district!

Barbara Finley

Zone 31 $200 Million Challenge Coordinator

111 Pine Forest Lane

Fordyce, AR   71742

 Subject:  Rotary Communique Jan 2012