Talk about a productive trip. When Lake Highlands resident and international consultant Win Evans traveled to last year, he hoped to make a lasting impact on the country’s government and residents.

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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.

 

          “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. Based on that discussion, 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.

 

As far as Evans is concerned, 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 in 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.”