Blind girl always felt left out when kids went Easter Egg hunting — until her dad came up with ingenious idea

Rachel Hyche was just four months old when her parents found out she had lost her vision — a discovery that meant she would be left out of many activities that other children popularly enjoyed. However, that didn't stop her; she was always determined to do everything by herself, chasing independence without any help from others. When it was time for the annual church Easter egg hunt, her father, David Hyche, knew he had to come up with something that didn’t require anyone guiding his daughter's hand.

While researching online, he came across a man in Los Angeles who had made beeping Easter eggs for blind children. David called him, learned the basics, and used his background as an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agent to tweak the design. He used a piezo beeper, a switch, and a 9-volt battery, and put the whole thing together in 20 minutes at a much cheaper rate of $11.50 per egg, reported ABC News. "They're just beepers, switches, and batteries, so it was pretty natural to me," the father explained during an interview with Fox News in 2015. He built a total of 40 eggs with the help of the local police department and held the first Easter egg hunt in Birmingham, Alabama, for 11 visually impaired children in 2005.

Wanting to spread the joy even further, David decided to show photos of Rachel and other children using the beeping eggs during a presentation at a bomb technician’s conference. A fellow member of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators (IABTI) saw the potential and helped launch what would become The Rachel Project, named after David's daughter. While David's original goal was to make Easter hunts fun and independent for kids like Rachel, teachers for the blind began telling him the eggs had year-round uses. "Their parents and teachers saw how it taught independence, mobility, and location skills. Learning to locate and retrieve items is difficult for a blind or visually impaired child, and the beeping egg was both a valuable educational tool and a lot of fun," reported IABTI.org.

From then on, each year, military and law enforcement bomb squads across the country volunteer their time and money to build and donate these beeping eggs. David told Fox News, "They donate $10,000 a year. Bomb squads around the country now build these eggs and provide them to schools for the blind and different groups like the National Association for Parents of Children with Visual Impairments." Through community partnerships, the support of churches, and the generosity of people who had no personal connection to the blind community, the initiative reached children in more than a dozen states, including the renowned Perkins School for the Blind in Boston.

Reflecting on the massive impact of a small initiative, Hyche told Fox News, "It's spread all over the country. We add a couple of states every year, and I'm so happy." He expressed gratitude for the people who took part in the initiative without any benefit of their own. "I have a blind daughter. But most of the people who do this don’t. They do it just out of the goodness of their heart," he said. Later, David also uploaded the complete instructions onto the website for the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators for others to recreate it.