A local Rotarian took on an initiative to write a Rotary International global grant to fund an unfunded mandate for Ssaku Senior Secondary School in the Luwero District in Uganda. This grant will provide: vocational training resources that teach students the skills to sustain local jobs and drive economic development. Construction, agri-business, health care, hospitality, culinary, entrepreneurship to name just several of the career pathways. The very skills needed support scouts and their families in this rural community.
In addition, this grant will also fund a solar-powered borehole water system to complement the classroom resources that will serve the school and the surrounding community for generations. It is the kind of project Rotary excels at — sustainable, community-led, and multiplied by partnership.
The Unexpected Recruiter: Water
Here is where the story takes an unexpected turn — and where we teach our youth about humanity and the model Rotarians live by; Service above Self.
Learning that Uganda counts 5.6 million Scouts among its population opened a new door to understand what our scouts here take for granted and learn about other scouts’ culture and limitations.
A partnership between a local California scout unit (Unit 505) and two schools near Kampala, including Ssaku, took root. Youth on both sides of the world began collaborating on service projects, earning merit badges, planting trees, and practicing “Leave No Trace” principles together — building the kind of international camaraderie that Rotary has championed for more than a century, now seeded directly into the next generation.
From The Water Walk
Scouts in Watsonville, helped raise awareness through “Kutambula Lwamazzi” — a Uganda phrase meaning Water Walk at London Nelson Park at the 35th Juneteenth event. Scouts and participants carried water the way their Ugandan counterparts do every morning before they can attend school. Every step taken is a lesson in global citizenship — and an invitation to serve.
While Rotarians continue to raise the funds, what became of this project was more profound in educating our scouts about how scarce water is to many scouts in other countries. The water walk became a living classroom. Our American scouts learned that more than 80 percent of Uganda’s population lacks access to clean, safe drinking water — not as a statistic in a textbook, but through the physical act of carrying it — something shifts. Service stops being an abstract value and becomes a felt one. That is precisely the moment our youth began to understand the value of water and to begin working on their environmental science merit badge for their Eagle requirement.
The Seeds Rotary Plants
This project illustrates the anatomy of engagement. It does not begin with a grant application. It begins with curiosity, and a vision to help others. Even if it across the continent.
Rotary and scouts greatest recruiting tool has never been a glossy brochure. It has always been proximity to meaningful work. When a Scout carries water to understand what a Ugandan classmate faces before sunrise, they are not just learning about scarcity. They are experiencing, firsthand, what it means to be part of the solution.
Invite a young person into that story — and you may just be handing them the path to thinking beyond their own community across cultural lines and bring humanity into how they learn about the world.
