Monday’s scheduled 20-hour flight from Los Angeles to New Delhi will be the third of its kind for Simi Valley High School teacher Jim Lewis.

He’s made the painfully long flight twice before, in 2004 and again in 2005, as part of a group of local Rotary members sent to assist the World Health Organization (WHO) in a massive vaccination effort aimed at eradicating polio in India—one of four remaining countries in the world with new reported cases of the debilitating disease.

Only this time, Lewis and his five other team members will be trailblazing new ground for Californian Rotary volunteers. Led by District 5240 governor Sally Adelblu, the team will be the first group of Californian Rotarians to enter the Indian state of Bihar since the organization’s global polio eradication effort began in 1982, and only the second contingent of Rotarians to enter the area in recent years.

“Going into Bihar is going to be a little more difficult because they haven’t been exposed to the National Immunization Days like other states have,” said Lewis, who spent his first two trips to India in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh, “but that’s why we’re only sending in experienced volunteers.”

A 26-person contingent will arrive in New Delhi on Feb. 22, led by Simi Valley resident and India native Anil Garg. It’s the fifth time in seven years Garg has taken a group to his native country to participate in the fight against polio, a successful battle that’s helped reduce the total number of new cases in India to 64 last year—down from 1,126 in 1999.

Though he’s been in the United States more than 35 years, Garg can still remember the sight of polio victims when he was a young man. Like many untreated polio sufferers, those he witnessed had lost the ability to walk—only in India, most of the victims could not afford to buy wheelchairs.

“You could see the people who were affected with it crawling in the streets,” Garg said. “But there was no cure for them. There was no polio eradication program. It wasn’t even on the radar at that point.”

Soon after arriving in New Delhi, Garg and Lewis will part ways. Garg will fly to the state of Uttar Pradesh, while Lewis and his team will board a flight to Patna, the capital of Bihar.

They will be accompanied by local Rotary members at all times, both for safety, and to aid in their diplomacy efforts.

“The India Rotary members just take us right in and treat us like family,” Lewis said. “They treat us so well. We learn a lot from them, and I think they learn a lot from us.”

In recent years, civil and political unrest in the culturally and religiously diverse state have kept nonIndian Rotary members from joining in the immunization effort, despite the fact that Bihar is one of the final roadblocks left in the road toward a complete eradication of polio in India.

Thankfully, according to Garg, the recent election of a new chief minister has returned stability to Bihar, and just a few months ago government officials gave Rotary and other participating organizations the chance to bring their vaccination efforts to what used to be one of India’s most lawless states.

“The National Polio Committee in Delhi said they felt comfortable sending a team there,” Garg said, “and we trust their judgment.”

Lewis said he’s never felt threatened at any time during his previous two trips to India, and he refuses to let fear get in the way of Rotary’s mission—a mission the 63-year-old has a very personal and deep connection with.

“I was diagnosed with polio in 1948, so I know firsthand just what a frightening disease it is,” Lewis said.

His brief battles with the disease in India, the father of four said, have changed his life, and the way he looks at the world. For that reason and others, he said, he’ll be in this fight as long as Rotary needs him.

“I’ll never forget the face of my mother when she found out I had polio . . . Just like I’ll never forget the faces of the mothers in India when we give their child those two drops (of vaccine),” Lewis said. “Their faces just light up because now they know they have hope, now they know their child is safe. That’s what keeps me coming back.”

According to Lewis, the importance of the team’s mission in Bihar outweighs any threat of violence.

“This mission is so important, that all concerns you have for terrorist activity are overshadowed,” he said. “We have something to do there. And that’s to eradicate this disease. No child should have to suffer from polio when there’s a vaccine out there to prevent it.”

Though Rotary and WHO are making great progress in India, Garg said, vaccinations for children under the age of 5 must persist in a country with 650,000 births every month.

“Even though cases are way down, and the program have been very effective, the thing to remember is that in order for a country to be declared polio free, it has to have three years of zero (new polio cases) reporting,” Garg said. “So there is more work to be done.”

Lewis has lived in Simi Valley for 33 years and is the work experience and career internship coordinator at SVHS. He is a member of the Simi Sunrise Rotary.

Garg has been a Simi resident since 1981 and is a member of the Simi Noontime Rotary.