Rotary at Wensleydale Show 2016

Visitors to the Show were encouraged to throw seven dice to win a car worth £10,000 if seven sixes were thrown. The car was provided by S G Petch of Richmond. No-one was successful!

At the same time, Wensleydale Rotarians supported colleagues from Upper Eden Rotary on the next pitch who were raising funds for, and awareness of, Rotary's ongoing efforts to eradicate Polio from the world. Rtn Roger Frank had spent 650 hours creating an exact working replica of an iron lung such as those used in the 1940s and 50s when thousands of children were paralysed by the disease. Visitors were fascinated by this, and some of the more agile got into the apparatus to see how it might have felt. Others watched a video interview of a 58 year old lady who had spent her whole life in an iron lung from the age of 3 years!

Rotary has been working with the United Nations since 1985 to eradicate Polio from the world. At that time, there were over 300,000 case per year. In 2015, there were only 74, and those limited to the two remaining endemic areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A last massive push is needed to clear these two countries of the disease, otherwise it can spread world wide once more.