When Ramesh Ferris speaks in public, which he does a lot, he has an unusual way of getting to the stage. He crawls across the floor.

Ramesh was paralyzed by polio when he was six months old. Today, at age 46, he can walk with crutches and leg braces, but as an advocate for polio eradication, sometimes he chooses not to. He wants his audience to see what the disease does to the human body.

“I’m the voice of the polio survivors that I’ve met crawling in the streets of their communities,” he says. “Showing my legs is the most powerful tool I can use to educate people about the reality of what happens when kids don’t receive the polio vaccine.”

Ramesh contracted polio in 1980, when he was six months old. The first polio vaccine had been invented 25 years earlier, and millions of children had received it, but it still hadn’t reached low-income communities like the one in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, where he was born.

His birth mother had never heard of the disease, much less a vaccine for it. She just knew that her boy kept getting sick, and she couldn’t afford medical care for him, so she made what must have been an agonizing decision. She put him in the care of an orphanage in her community.

A year later, Ramesh was adopted by a Canadian couple who raised him and five other adopted children in the Yukon. Life was hard at times—kids at school mocked and bullied him—but he got expert medical care. Through three surgeries, doctors straightened his legs, and after intensive physical therapy, he learned to walk with crutches and braces.

When Ramesh was 22, he took a trip that changed his life. He went to India to meet his birth mother for the first time, so he could tell her how grateful he was that she had sacrificed so much so he could get the care he needed.

On the same trip, he had another powerful emotional moment. “I saw a fellow human being that had polio because he didn’t receive the polio vaccine as a child,” Ramesh says. “He was crawling around the streets as a beggar.” The person he was traveling with told him: “You’re looking at your life if you weren’t adopted.”

Since that time, Ramesh has been traveling around the world as a volunteer with Rotary International to spread the word about how much progress the world has made and the work that still remains. He’s raised awareness and funds with eye-catching campaigns including a 7,140 km trip across Canada… by hand bike.

We’re close to eradicating the disease—there were 52 cases of wild poliovirus in 2025, down from 350,000 in 1988—but finishing the job is a tough challenge that takes continued funding and effort.

People like Ramesh remind us not only how we can do it, but why we should.