No matter where her job as a diplomat takes her, Rachel Coupaud knows there will be a Rotary club nearby to welcome her.

Coupaud, currently the minister counselor at the Haitian Embassy in Taiwan, was first introduced to Rotary in Montréal, Canada, at the age of 30.

"I loved the experience. They helped me fit in," she says. "The club exemplified what Rotary is all about: friendship, service, and fun. It was something I was looking for all my life."

When Coupaud returned home to Haiti, she joined the Rotary Club of Port-au-Prince. A couple years later she left for Taiwan and connected with the Rotary Club of Taipei, whose members helped her overcome the language barrier. "I was just lost in translation, lost on the other side of the world," she says of the transition. "And Rotary made it a whole lot easier."

Coupaud appreciates the people, the mentorship, the community service, and the learning. "As Rotary members, we may come together from different countries and cultures, but at a club breakfast, lunch, or dinner we come as one," she says.

Taras Mytkalyk started a Rotaract club as a way to get things done in his hometown of Kyiv, Ukraine. In the past year, his club raised money for an animal shelter, collected clothes for needy children, and visited a nursing home to boost the spirits of elderly residents. Members also gathered for poker nights, cookouts, and holiday parties.

Mytkalyk believes in giving everyone in the club the opportunity to lead. Identifying a community need and finding a solution is empowering to members—and can have a noticeable impact. "Young people in Ukraine are attracted to this movement because they see the results of their work," he says. "There's no need to wait for somebody's approval or to go through bureaucratic procedures—they can just go out and do good, while having fun along the way."

There isn't a place in the world that Richard Huston wouldn't like to see. So when the chance came to visit Taiwan as part of a Rotary Friendship Exchange, he was happy to board the plane with fellow Rotary members from Minnesota. They spent 10 days in Taipei and Yilan, staying with two different host families. It was like nothing he'd ever experienced. "I feel that I now have lifelong friends."

The differences in culture and lifestyle were stark in some ways, says Huston, who is a veterinarian and lives on 150 acres of prairie in a town of 20,000. His new friends live on the 14th floor of an apartment building in a city of 7 million. But they connected on a personal level. "We laugh and we talk about serious things and family and the goals of Rotary," he says.

Since his initial trip to Taiwan, Huston has hosted several of his Taiwanese friends, who visited farms, drove tractors, and watched robots milk cows. They met up again at the Rotary convention in Lisbon and made plans to travel to Africa and Brazil in the next few years. "By traveling the world you get an understanding that other people have the same problems and the same joys that you have."

Path Heang has good reason to work toward peace. His family fled from bombs falling on their village in Cambodia, and he spent part of his childhood toiling in the rice fields of a Khmer Rouge labor camp.

Heang's desire to help his country heal from years of brutality eventually led him to the University of Queensland in Australia, where he studied as a Rotary Peace Fellow. Now, as chief of a UNICEF field office, Heang manages six programs that help improve the lives of millions of women and children in his country's poorest households.

In his studies Heang explored the Khmer Rouge tribunal and security issues in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

"I am in a senior position because of the analytical skills and tools I learned as a peace fellow," Heang says. "Now I can influence national policy for the poor in Cambodia."

Sarita Jarmack is only 25 but her passport is filled with stamps from more than two dozen countries—Honduras, Ireland, Panama, Sri Lanka, China—and the list goes on. But her very first stamp is from Sweden, where she spent a year as a Rotary Youth Exchange student in high school. Youth Exchange fueled her love of meeting new people in new countries. "When I am in certain places for a long enough time I feel like I am part of that place and part of the people," she says. "I learn the languages, I learn the customs, I embrace the love from the mothers, and I play with the little kids."

Jarmack credits Rotary member Michelle Frechette with helping fulfill her quest for adventure, including the chance to earn a master's degree in international relations in Denmark thanks to a Rotary scholarship. "Michelle has led me to opportunities that quite frankly were unimaginable," she says. Frechette sees a similar enthusiasm for learning in all of the students her club has helped sponsor. "I look at the kids we select for Youth Exchange as being able to solve long-term global problems."

Rotary is working to eliminate polio village by village, country by country, and continent by continent. As recently as 1988, polio was paralyzing nearly 1,000 children every day around the world. Since then, Rotary members have led the way in raising funds, advocating for government support, building awareness, and mobilizing volunteers on the ground for massive immunization campaigns.

The fruit of these efforts is evident in the numbers: In the first half of 2015, there were fewer than 40 new polio cases worldwide.

The latest victory comes in Africa, where the last reported case of polio caused by the wild poliovirus occurred in August 2014. If there are no new cases, the World Health Organization can certify Africa as polio-free in 2017.

Despite such impressive gains, the job is not yet finished around the world. Polio is stubbornly hanging on in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"We cannot wind down our efforts now. We need to continue immunizing until the last country is certified polio-free, and thereafter," says Dr. Tunji Funsho, chair of Rotary's Nigeria PolioPlus Committee. "As long as the virus remains anywhere in the world, it is only a plane ride away."

You won't find fancy cocktails or colorful streamers at these parties. But Rotary members in the Seattle area still have a good time at Rotary First Harvest work parties, where they repackage surplus produce for distribution to the hungry. "The work is rewarding and great fun," says David Schooler, Rotary member and president of Rotary First Harvest. The organization collaborates with farmers, truckers, volunteers, and food banks to move food that might otherwise go to waste to food banks and meal programs for those in need.

Schooler and around 100 Rotary members and friends gather at a warehouse twice a month to break down 1,000-pound bins of food into smaller boxes or serving bags. They also volunteer on farms to gather fresh fruits and vegetables that aren't economically viable for farmers to harvest. In one season, Rotary First Harvest coordinated 1,500 volunteers and provided 3 million family meals.

"Every Rotary project anywhere in the world always started with one person who had an idea," says executive director David Bobanick. "They were able to grow and develop that idea by getting other Rotarians engaged and using that powerful network of Rotary to really change the world."

When the children of Ghana shout, "Hey, water! Water!" Michael Anyekase thinks of Rotary International.

Anyekase works for Water for Africa, which partnered with Rotary to provide more than 100 villages in Ghana with clean water through installation of equipment and hygiene training.

More than 85 percent of Ghanaians now have access to clean water, far surpassing the 2015 goals set by the United Nations. Rotary, with its abundant resources and committed global membership, has provided more sources of drinking water in Ghana than any other NGO, Anyekase says.

Samuel Obour, a Rotary leader in Ghana, helped spearhead some projects, and continues to leverage Rotary's proven and highly-successful framework to install latrines and washing stations at schools and markets. After all, Rotary's partnership doesn't end, but rather, gets stronger with time.

Now children don't have to wake up at 4 a.m. to fetch water from miles away. They can go to school. "Children can spend more time being children," says Obour. "Families can spend more time being families. And life can take on a new kind of normalcy.