A cheery Craig Tukey greeted everyone, often outdoors, as each of us, about 35, arrived at the Rotary Building. Innkeeper Mike Thompson helped keep those smiles on our faces prior to the meeting. Craig invoked us with a call to service. We welcomed guests, Trudie Seybold and Tom Hagan, mother and husband of Rotarian and speaker Patty Seybold.

Bill Kautzmann handled the 50-50, much to the delight of winners, Jim Botti and Judy deGraw. Sergeant-at-Arms Bob Pike collected thankful dollars from Steve Demeranville at the expense of Bob Goodrich, who will pay much more dearly at home, at least when word leaks out to his family about his characterization of his wife and dog in Linekin Bay just off his shore. Mike Thompson thanked Daren Graves for his tractor to help start the Rotary deck project. Rick Elder admitted he turned a milestone while lugging sofa beds and other auction jewels this past Aug. 1 at our annual auction, proving either his commitment to community or his avoidance of attaining a half century.

The speaker, our own Patty Seybold, described several innovative programs underway for two decades in western Uganda at the campus of Uganda Rural Training and Development (URDT), the URDT Girls School, the Vocational Institute, and the African Rural University for Women (where Patty serves on the board). These include Back Home Projects led by school girls; educational radio programs; Traditional Wisdom Specialists — elders who share their teachings; grass roots community development that teaches community members how to shift from reactive, to creative orientation and to create the lifestyles they truly want; and educating young women to be community transformation specialists.

The setting is in Uganda, a landlocked East African country known as the Pearl of Africa for its rich soil and lush agriculture, in what was an impoverished western village of Kagadi, where Patty Seybold is a board member. Patty and her husband have traveled several times since 2007, twice every year for Patty.

This November, Patty and her 98-year-young mother plan to return for the first official graduation in this small but growing and more prosperous community, which has been surging in personal and economic development since 2000 and even more so since its radio program started in 2000 and village businesses skyrocketed from 10 in 2000 to 300 in 2007.

Lessons learned from this incredible bottom-up project include: (1) children, particularly girls, are transformative agents in lifting up education, businesses, and families; (2) media, especially radio, sends out stories and lessons to all area Ugandans; (3) elder wisdom is captured and integrated into the society especially through Traditional Wisdom Specialists, a model some of us have been considering here in Boothbay; (4) women partnering with men work with people in their homes to transform lives through connectors: rural transport specialists, community health workers, and community development workers; and (5) gender equality is the lodestar of transformative change, far more than we experience in our own culture.

Many of us Rotarians were buzzing after the meeting with ways to incorporate some of these lessons into our own community and, of course, how we can help make a difference in Kagadi, Uganda.