Talk about a productive trip. When Lake Highlands resident and international consultant Win Evans traveled to Uganda last year, he hoped to make a lasting impact on the country’s government and residents. But he made an equally large impact on its chicken population.

No, the president of the White Rock Rotary Club didn’t trade in his business suit for a pair of overalls. He simply started talking with fellow Rotarians in Kampala about ways to help needy families.

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“It just so happened that the city treasurer I was working with was a Rotarian, so she invited me to attend their club,” Evans says. “We ended up discussing the possibility of two Rotary clubs working together on a common project.”

A representative of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) told them about a poultry program developed to aid the hungry, so Evans and his cohorts decided to bring baby chicks to the area.

The project supplied 20 one-day-old chicks to Ugandan families, along with feed, vaccines and training on how to care for the chicks and use their eggs. The objectives, Evans says, were three-fold: to alleviate poverty and hunger, improve nutrition, and encourage self-sufficiency in families.

Significant teamwork among far-flung organizations was required to pull it off. Groups involved included the White Rock Rotary Club, Rotary International’s Dallas District, the Bweyogerere-Namboole Rotary Club in Kampala, the FAO and the Rotary Foundation.

The project, now in place for a little more than a year, has been a success. The birds are laying eggs, with the families using what they need for their own consumption and selling the surplus.

For Evans, it was all just a way of putting the Rotary Club’s motto – “service above self” – into action.

“It’s an incredible sense of satisfaction to work on a project like this and see it come to fruition,” he says. “Having worked it the country and knowing the conditions, I knew the abject poverty that exists there. We live in a relative Utopia here. You don’t have to travel too far away to realize that.”