Learning Experience

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Learning Experience
After creating a comfortable life in Arlington, immigrant John Wanda decides to build a school in his home village in Uganda and pass along the rewards of a hard-earned education.

The visitors looked at one another and shook their heads. "We want do what you think is important," Hawthorne said. Wanda grinned. It was what he'd expected, but he was glad to hear it. They continued up the mountain.

When they finally reached the Sakusaku School, about 40 minutes later, the rain had let up. Children in ragged green uniforms surged around them. Many had runny noses and hacking coughs, but the pupils pushed forward to shake hands with the visitors and say mulembe -- hello. A few held back, staring wide-eyed at so many bazungu -- white people -- standing on the wet grass in front of their school.

After a few words of welcome from the principal, the children lined up under the cloud-mottled sky and performed traditional dances. The visitors clapped enthusiastically. Then it was the Americans' turn to perform. Reaching into a gym bag, Wanda handed a bright white soccer ball to a girl. She cradled it in awe. He produced one more, and soon all the visitors were reaching into bags, handing out pristine pencils in red, blue or green, eliciting squeals of delight.

"Now hold up your pencils," Wanda said. Eager hands shot up -- the students were typically lucky to have an inch-long nub to write with. A forest of pencils rose above their heads.

AS A BOY IN THE 1970s, John Wanda trotted barefoot with the other children along the paths of Bumwalukani, a loose collection of mud huts dotting the steep green mountains near the Kenyan border. Children in the village slept on the floor, sharing rough banana-leaf mats with siblings, cousins and other relatives. No child had a bed, let alone his own blanket and pillow.

But Wanda knew about these things; he'd read about them in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, one of a handful of books his father, a coffee farmer, had bought years before in Kampala, the capital, and saved for his children. As far as Wanda knew, his was the only house in the village of 10,000 that contained any books, and they were filled with strange people doing strange things -- like going up a hill to fetch a pail of water, when any child in the village could tell you that to find water you had to go downhill.

The books offered hints that more than he had ever imagined lay beyond Bumwalukani, where farmers tended tiny plots of coffee beans and plantains and where the sharp tip of a volcano called Nusu was the farthest point most people could envision.

Wanda also had something else most village kids didn't have: a father determined to educate his children. The seven siblings attended a patchwork of primary schools, sometimes walking five or six miles each way on empty stomachs. Their father sold off his few possessions to pay for their schooling. Eventually all the siblings graduated from high school (rare in the village), and four of the five brothers were among a handful from their county to go to college.

Wanda figured he would eventually settle in Kampala, where he attended university. But one day his wife, Joyce, a fellow member of the Bugisu tribe he had met in Kampala, saw an ad in the newspaper for a U.S. State Department visa lottery. She applied and was accepted, and in 1995 the couple and their infant son boarded a plane.

Landing in Washington, John Wanda found temporary work at the American Chiropractic Association. The job became permanent, and Wanda, an accountant by training, worked his way up to vice president of finance and administration. He and Joyce bought a two-story house in Arlington, home to some of the nation's top-ranking schools, had three more kids, and sent them to school three blocks away.

At Arlington Traditional School (ATS), the Wanda children worked on computers and took field trips to museums. They got individualized attention, hot meals and as many books as they could devour. It made their father think. If not for a few twists of fate, his kids would have walked shoeless to a school like those he had attended -- a ramshackle structure with no books, no electricity, no windowpanes and hardly any furniture. Teachers often didn't show up. Children sat in cramped rows on a dirt floor, 75 to a room, reciting lessons by rote. Learning was done on empty stomachs, and malaria kept half the students home.

Bumwalukani's schools are not so different in this way from those in countless Third World rural communities, where education comes in dribbles. For the most part, the idea of bringing such schools anywhere near First World standards -- or even closer to some urban Third World standards -- is an impossible dream. But for Wanda, the idea of transforming education in his home town seemed a little less audacious. He was a U.S. citizen now, the father of American children. But he was still a son of Africa.