"That's my most memorable vision -- the children sitting all over the sidewalks, reading these books," Margeson said, speaking via mobile phone from the village. Recalling a sixth-grader reading aloud from a book called "Martin's Big Words," about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., she said, "None of them had had any picture books to look at, so their vision had been very limited."
For Margeson, who has two grown daughters, including one who teaches at Arlington's Taylor Elementary School, Uganda "sort of dropped in my lap like a gift-wrapped package." When she flew back there last month, her bags were packed to the maximum weight allowance with books and other supplies donated by parents and teachers.
Arlington Traditional School students also got into the act, putting together photos of their school cafeteria, gym and computer lab, and writing personal letters to the Ugandan students.
"The photos are a big hit," Margeson said. "They say, 'Oh, show us the pictures of Arlington, show us the pictures of Arlington.' "
The Ugandan children made their own care package -- handcrafted toys, a soccer ball made of plastic bags and banana fibers, and a little doll -- to send to Virginia.
Margeson, too, is seeing plenty that she had never seen before. In the morning, as she and the other teachers walk through the lush bamboo forest toward the school, she sees children running five or six kilometers, often without having eaten breakfast, to get there by 7:30.
"If they see us walking, they'll take our bags for us, but then they'll keep running," she said.
Last week, the big event at the school was the introduction of a generator to supply electricity. "You just can't imagine the excitement when they turned on some lights in the classroom," Margeson said. "They sang, they were clapping, they asked, 'Where does it come from?' "
A new headmaster from Kampala will start in March, when another retired Arlington teacher also will arrive; Margeson plans to stay until May. Nine contributors from Arlington also plan to visit the school in June (the Ugandan school year runs from February to November) and will visit government schools as well to assess their needs.
The Arlington Academy of Hope has not solved all the problems of Bumwalukani's children. It costs $135 a year to attend, a fortune in a place where the average annual income is $150. Most students get scholarships, but some parents pay in corn, beans and tomatoes, which are used in the school lunches. The academy enrolls only a fraction of the area's 3,000 children; government schools take up the slack. But the government schools are also benefiting as the academy passes on extra books and teaching materials to them.
Still, in a place where most buildings are constructed from sticks and mud, the sturdy brick academy is the Rolls-Royce of schools. Its main outer wall displays the names of the school's original donors and a map of the world.
"The children have no sense of where they are in the world, or even that there is a world out there," Margeson said. The map, which is almost finished, will show the Arlington Academy of Hope nestled in the center of Africa. It will also have a little star to mark the spot where Arlington County lies.
