Rachel Hyche lost her sight at 4 months of age. Her father, David, was then working as an ATF special agent in Alabama, disarming explosives for a living.
When Easter 2005 arrived, David didn’t want his daughter to sit while the other children ran around the yard gathering eggs. He went down to his basement and put together a different one: he added a switch, a 9-volt battery, and a small buzzer. An egg that made a sound so Rachel could find it by ear.
What began as a homemade gesture turned into the Rachel Project, backed by the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators and ATF offices across the country.
Nearly twenty years later, David is now police chief in Calera, Alabama, and every spring continues assembling sound-making eggs for children with visual impairments who, thanks to him, can also go out and hunt for their own.