World Polio Day 24th October 2021

News from Polio Australia

Each year, Global Citizen organises an event for World Polio Day. They engage other organisations to join them, including Polio Australia. While the main focus of the event is to encourage government towards “one last push” to global vaccination access and therefore towards eradication of polio, they also include a polio survivor talking about the real-life experience of polio and its late effects. This year’s lived experience speaker is none other than our own Gary Newton. 

While the event is usually at Parliament House (and usually has champagne and finger food), it’s going virtual for the second year in a row. The loss of champagne and snacks is a shame, but the huge advantage is that people can view the event from across the country.

 

It’s at 4pm Australian Eastern Daylight Saving Time on Monday 25th October. 3.30pm for South Australia Full details are here: https://www.polioaustralia.org.au/world-polio-day-2021. Hope you can make it!

Blessed Book by Esther Simbi

Esther releases her second book “Blessed” The follow-up to Beyond Calamity, Esther Simbi’s second book continues the story of her life journey as a woman and as a single mother with a disability from a refugee background living in Australia.
Contracting polio at the age of four, as a child Esther escaped the Sudan civil war and spent almost two decades in refugee camps in Uganda before being resettled in the suburbs of Adelaide. In this book she writes about the dangers and hardships for women in the refugee camps, finding her feet in a new country, navigating family and relationships, living with post-polio syndrome, the grief of losing a child, and raising two daughters while juggling work, study, writing and political aspirations.

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