Can Humanitarian Projects Really Enact Positive Change in Two Weeks?

The mission of Rotary International is “to provide service to others, promote integrity, and advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace.” As such, it engages in service projects all over the world. The northern district of Illinois is sending a team of nine professionals to Uganda with a focus on improving the lives of girls. Specifically, the team will focus on improved literacy, develop a resource library, improve medical care, address nutrition through sustainable farming practices and address the negative effects of trauma. This team of professionals will spend two weeks in Uganda.

Uganda is a war-torn country that has been undeveloped for 60 years and also experienced a brutal twenty-year civil war. It lacks an infrastructure that Americans are accustomed to. There is limited electricity, poor water resources, limited telephone capability, limited medical services, and no mental health facilities. What can this nine-person team expect to accomplish in two weeks? Is change possible?

Teaching, coaching, mentoring, modeling, conceptualizing, encouraging – all of these are models of change. The team will likely enact all of these aspects toward positive change. Some changes will be minute; other changes will have a large scale impact.

Furthermore, a project’s success is not always determined by its duration. Sustainability is used as a measure of a project’s long term success. Sustainability is the ability of a project to operate on its own without outside support or intervention. Upon the team’s exit from Uganda, new practices will be enacted independently of the team.

Every now and again, things go right, and you walk away feeling that, for some people, in some places, the world is a better place because of something you did. It doesn’t happen every day, but there is a feeling that what you do is contributing to making the world a better place.