Helping Survivors of Polio in India.

Kovalum, South India. He may have been the first polio survivor I ever saw in India. He was 52 the year we met. He walks on all fours with his hands, always with flip-flops. I went back in March 2026 and could not find him. I have no way to know. 

Kovalam, South India. I saw him for the first time in 2014 — dragging himself down the pavement on a piece of cardboard, flip-flops on his hands. For four years he asked me for a house. In 2019 a house was bought and rebuilt, and on March 22, 2019, his three children walked into their first family home. Sebastian sent them back to orphanages and rented the house. He tried to sell it. He could not. His three children are legal co-owners of that home. That will not change. 

Delhi, India, the Paharganj bazaar, across from the main train station. No use of his legs, his arms, or his hands — he eats with his toes. At night he slept in a friend's 8x8 barber shop. I returned twice to find him, the last time in 2023, walking those streets showing his photograph to shopkeepers. BK is almost certainly gone. 

Jodhpur, India. He lay in the hot sun in the marketplace, without use of arms or legs, carried there each day — begging to earn enough to help his sister marry. Of all of them, Mahendra was the most fragile. The contact information that would have found him again was promised and never delivered, then lost. I do not know what became of him. I hope he is somewhere.