My Polio Campaign Experience: A Five-Day Effort to Safeguard Children’s Health in Pakistan

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I hope everyone is well and enjoying their lives. By the grace of Allah, I am also completely fine. Today I am going to tell you about my polio campaign. The polio campaign in Pakistan lasted for five days and we were part of this team. In five days, we tried our best and administered two drops of polio to children under the age of five in our country so that their future could be safe.

This has been a five-day campaign from Monday to Friday and during this campaign, we used to go to the hospital every morning from where we used to get our vaccines, our vaccine carrier, and all the things we needed. And because our duty was at the bus top Harappa station, we had to cover all the children there, so we had to reach our bus stop before 8:00 am, for which we had to go to our hospital early.

After getting the vaccine and other necessary things, telesheets, etc., we went straight to our bus stop. There are two lanes there. Two teams sit on both lanes. So both teams went and first put on their flex, the flex on which information about polio is written so that whoever passes by us can see our banner and come to us and we can administer polio drops to them. This was our way of indicating where we were sitting because the bus stop was often very crowded.

Hospital	Banner	Bus Stop

We have a vaccine carrier and a telesheet for each team, and in this vaccine carrier we have placed our vaccine, which is sealed vials, and then we have to open it and put a dropper on it, and then we give the drops to the child through this dropper. So inside the vaccine carrier, we first place two ice packs, which are completely frozen, so that the vaccine does not spoil because keeping it in too much heat or cold spoils the vaccine, so it has to be kept in the cold.

After reaching our stop, our first task is to set our vaccine because we have to open the closed vial and put a dropper on it. After that, we have tally sheets on which we mark the children to show how many children we have vaccinated with the polio vaccine. There are two types of lines in them. In one line, we have to write those who are children under one-year-old,d and in the second line, we write those who are children between two and five years old.

Vaccine Carrier	Icepack	Dropers
Vaccine In Carrier	Seal Vial	Open Vial

After setting up our sheets, we have to write down the doses on them, how many doses we have received in total, and at the end of the day, we have to write down how many children we have vaccinated, how many doses have been used, and how many are left.

After setting up all our things, we got ready so that if any child comes, we can give them polio drops. As the children come, we take them to a side where there is shade because we cannot give the polio vaccine to the child in the sun. After all, it gets damaged by the heat of the sun. After giving the drops, their age is asked. Based on this, they are marked on the telesheet, and a mark is made on the little finger on their left hand so that any other team that sees them can confirm whether the child has taken the polio drops or not.

Marking On Finger	Giving Drops

Our job was for five days, so in these five days we had to spend from morning to evening at a bus stop, it was obvious that we would get hungry during this time, and anyway, all kinds of food were available around us, so seeing them, a person's heart starts to yearn for something to eat, so we kept doing our entertainment during this time and kept eating something or the other. Sometimes we all ate together and sometimes we didn't have to eat together because when we were eating, a child would come that time, so it became difficult not to say anything to them. That's why we used to eat in pairs. Two people would go to eat and two people would do their duty there, and then when those two would return, the other two would go to eat.

In these five days, we enjoyed many things, some of which we forgot to take pictures of because we had no idea about them during the work, so we have taken pictures of some of the things, all of which are listed below. We have enjoyed our entire campaign with all these things.

We have worked for five full days, three of which are for our actual campaign and two days are for giving drops to any child who has missed it. We usually cover all the children in three days. We have made a list of all these days and there is a separate page for each day on which we used to make a report.

My report for all the days is listed below. This is the report that our area in-charge used to see twice a day and our UCMO used to see it only twice because it was his duty to come, check sign it, and leave.

At the end of each day, we used to give our report to the area in charge about how many children we had vaccinated and how many vaccines we had used. The area in charge would then give that report to his UCMO. In this way, we would all prepare a report together, which we would submit in the evening in the Sahiwal district.

For this, we had to go back to our hospital every day where we kept our vaccine carrier and kept our ice packs in the freezer. We kept the vaccine in another freezer. In this way, after saving all our things, we wrote our report there. After writing the entire report, everyone would sit together and prepare a complete report, which would be on one page.

They are listed below all the reports. Daily, how many children have we called for polio? How many of them are young children? How many are older children? In addition, how many of them are guests in our council and children from the council who are included in the HRMP? The HRMP are those who are nomadic people.

In this way, we used to prepare a daily report and that report, UCMO, along with his other friends, would go to the main district in the evening meeting and have the report filed there.

In this way, we used to submit this report physically in the meeting in the evening, but apart from that, we had to send this report by writing it in a message, apart from, we had to share this report in PDF, and apart from that, there are three types of applications on which all these reports had to be uploaded online. One is the application on which all the reports have to be uploaded, the second application is the one on which we have to register the children who are newborns and the third application is the one on which we have to register the children who are below two years of age.

In this way, all our applications and physical reports were submitted to our main office in the evening and after some time, we would upload the report on which we could check our status to see how many of our reports had been completed.

A policeman is hired with each team so that no problem arises where we stand. The job of these policemen is to stop vehicles and children and bring them to us. We bring them two drops of polio. There are some families who are afraid of this polio vaccine. They think that it is harmful to their children, so these policemen are hired for them so that they can explain it to them and reassure them that it is very beneficial for their children.

He also used to take pictures with us every morning and send them to his organization so that he could confirm that he had reached his duty at work.

Team 01	Team 02

Daily, officers also came to check on us. Those officers who are at the district level check us. Every day, they have to check one or two or three councils. In this, they have to see the performance of all the people. And then they come to us and conduct a market survey so that if any child is missing, they can tell us about it. However, if they find any missing children, it is a matter of great shame for us that we did not cover them. Alhamdulillah, we have had a market survey. In this survey, all the children they checked were covered and they encouraged us a lot.

Thus, we participated in a five-day polio campaign and tried to ensure that all our five-year-old children receive the polio vaccine so that their lives can be happy and they do not have any kind of disease in the future because a disease like polio is a very serious disease that is incurable, so we should give our children the polio vaccine from the beginning so that they do not suffer any harm in the future.
Thanks for visiting.

Cc:
@aaliarubab, @suboohi

_{Dated: 23-12-2024 About Me}