Learning Experience

The students grinned or stared in awe at the visitors. They had heard so much about Hawthorne, Tierney, Peters and other Americans who had helped make the school possible. The visitors and children danced past the school's terraced lawns, past the wall stenciled with names of donors and sponsors from Arlington, past the cooking hut where cornmeal porridge steamed for the younger students.

In the sunny courtyard, Wanda addressed the students in his lilting English.

"Do you love to learn?"

"Yes-we-love-to-learn," the students responded in unison.

"Are you committed to excellence?"

"Yes-we-are-committed-to-excellence."

"Thank you!"

"You-are-welcome!"

Wanda laughed. "I'm so happy and so moved by the reception that you all gave this morning. This is amazing, for you who have been here just about a year, and it's a very, very moving experience for me to come back and talk to you this week."

He introduced the delegation. The students gave a traditional seven-clap greeting to each visitor.

"I have your picture, a picture of the school, hanging in my office," said a beaming Tierney, "and I think about you every day. You many not see me, and I may not see you, but you are in my heart every day."

"Do you see the shoes that you're all wearing?" Wanda cried out, pointing at the identical black lace-up shoes on each student's feet. "Look down at your shoes. Who do you think gave them to you? Aunt Beatrice!" The students cheered.

A few yards away, behind a barbed-wire fence, a large group of barefoot children in dirty, ragged clothes watched in silence.

These were the children of Bum-walukani who didn't attend AAH. Some hadn't tested well enough to get in; some had parents who are reluctant to pay the fees; some couldn't get in because there simply wasn't room.

Manjiya County, which includes Bumwalukani, is home to 78 government schools that accommodate more than 6,000 children. In most of the schools, expectations are low. Last year, only 17 students in the county passed the national test to move from primary to secondary school (pass rates in Kampala are much higher).

Compared with the government schools, AAH looks like Harvard. Teachers arrive on time. Children wear crisp uniforms and eat hot lunches. The rooms are lined with Venn diagrams, pictures of the human skeleton, water evaporation charts. Walls display photos of Arlington families who are sponsoring AAH kids -- American boys and girls posing in front of their homes, or on sleds in the snow.

AAH hasn't graduated any students yet, but on every measurable scale -- including diagnostic tests and assessments from government examiners -- it is surpassing the surrounding schools. It is also more appealing to the students: The average attendance rate in the county is 50 percent; at AAH it is 97 percent, and Wanda says that if not for malaria it would be 100.

The older AAH students are quietly mindful of their good fortune. In previous schools, they recall being dizzy with hunger. "We were sitting down on the ground," said George Bwaya, 11, perched on a chair in a fifth-form classroom, where chalk dust mingled with pungent adolescent sweat. "We were studying under the tree . . . we were just writing in soil with sticks. Now we're sitting on desks, we eat lunch at school. And I don't be bored here."

Kids who don't attend AAH feel the same way; they often skip their own classes to watch AAH activities through the barbed wire -- especially when foreign visitors are involved. Occasionally these children are invited to AAH for official visits with their own teachers. But mostly they remain on the periphery, wistful spectators whose presence highlights an uncomfortable side effect of building a school like AAH: In the village, access to education had always been more or less equally limited. Since AAH opened, it no longer is.

AT NIGHT IN BUMWALUKANI, the stars loomed large and close. Crickets screeched. Inside the newly built Cynthia Margeson Guesthouse, kerosene lamps cast an eerie glow on the visitors and AAH teachers as they ate peanuts, sipped Senator beer (which locals say is named for Barack Obama, whose father is Kenyan) and discussed the school.

The visitors began by gushing about AAH's achievements, but soon they were making lists of what it lacked. Books. First-aid kits. Gutters to catch rainwater for drinking. Staff quarters for teachers from Kampala and their families. An auditorium. A sick room. Better toilets. A library. Computers. A minivan. An eye chart.

Most troubling, however, were the children who stared through the barbed wire -- some of whom were former AAH students.

"The parents initially get excited," Wanda explained. "They send their kids; then after two months they take their kids out, and in many cases the children refuse to go to any other school. We have children who dropped out of AAH who are sitting at home and not going to any school at all . . . They're still wearing the [AAH] shirts at their other schools. They are begging, 'Please, we want to come back to AAH, but my dad can't afford to pay for the fee.' And I don't know what to say to them."

The village, he added, could fill five more schools with students just as smart and eager.

AAH had attempted to blunt the inequality by sharing resources with other schools, but that had its own problems. "In theory, it's a good idea," said Wanda. "In practice, it may overstretch us . . . Every time you do outreach you create an expectation. If this year we hand out pencils, next year they're going to ask us for pens. We're doing good, but we may be putting ourselves in a difficult position in the future."

The school was still being supported largely by individual Arlingtonians, a problem in itself. "You have to have some way of sustaining it," said Hawthorne, and the others nodded. "You can't expect donations to be coming in for 20 to 30 years."

On top of this, AAH students who would graduate in the fall of 2006 would have no comparable high school to move up to. Local secondary schools were not much better than the primary ones. Should funds be used, then, to expand AAH into secondary school? Or to open more AAH primary schools? But what funds? Right now there was not even enough to pay the teachers' salaries.

Money was not AAH's only problem. "I saw a lot of rote learning," said Hawthorne. "The teacher says something, they say it right back; the teacher says something, they say it right back; the teacher writes something on the board and sits back while they copy it. Well, I dare say there are a lot of kids who don't know what they're writing."

Hawthorne also wanted to know what happened to the 500 books her school sent; none of them seemed to be around now.

And some martial exercises that the children demonstrated on the first day? They bothered some of the Americans, who found them too militaristic.

Wanda had worried that the visitors would compare AAH too much with American schools. "For people who have not been here before and do not know the life, some people can tend to be judgmental," he said later. "I hope that they can see beyond what they see."

But it was the AAH headmaster, Thomas Kisolo Kitandwe, who responded to the criticisms a few days later. He began with the fate of the donated books. "They are written so well, and every sentence is accompanied by a picture. When they see them they feel they want to hold the book forever. So they take them home."

Kitandwe, who was hired away last year from Kampala's top private school, was polite with the Americans, but firm.

"In a year, we are taking children from typically not speaking any English at all to speaking English."

As to rote learning, he said, "a child who doesn't pass P-7 [seventh-form exams], his future is doomed. There is no other outlet, whereas Americans have many chances. Thus the repetitions -- we're forced to drill them into passing exams."

As for the memorization and copying, he said, without enough books, teachers have to write the lesson out on the blackboard and have the kids copy them; that becomes the textbook.

Later, Sarah Godlewski, one of the Americans, grinned at Kitandwe. "Thomas, it must be hard having all these people coming in and telling you what to do."

"Yes, well, it's a balance," he said. "One man's meat is another man's poison."

A SKINNY, ENERGETIC GIRL WITH AN IMPISH SMILE, Rebecca Nandutu was the lead singer and dancer in the AAH choir. Rebecca, 13, was sponsored by someone else in Arlington, but she and board vice president Jaime Mulligan had been friends since last summer, when Mulligan first visited the village.

Mulligan, 24, returned this time with a Discman for Rebecca, and CDs of Stevie Wonder, U2 and Dido. When Mulligan arrived, Rebecca spotted her from the school gate and flew into her arms. Since then they had spent as much time as they could together, and Rebecca's parents had hosted Mulligan in their hut for dinner.

Yet the two didn't exchange many words. "It's not a verbal thing," Mulligan explained. "It's kind of like an intense attachment. You picture sitting down with the kid and talking for hours, but there's something about the brevity of these summer things that we do. Somehow this really deep connection comes out of it."

Mulligan noticed this unarticulated bond in some of the other visitors' relationships with certain AAH students, too.

"Once you get past the questions like 'Do you like school?' and 'Are you going to study?' the next thing you end up doing is to hug them," she said.

"I think they kind of become part of you, and they become part of your family . . . You don't need to say anything because you've already said it through your actions. Through the fact that you've come all this way to be there and the fact that they ran out and threw their arms around you. I mean, that just says it all."

ON THE VISITORS' LAST DAY, Hawthorne gave the fifth-formers a geography lesson, helping them find Virginia and Uganda on a map. Tierney rearranged supply shelves in the back of the first-form classroom. "I made it much more efficient," she said, pointing out tables now labeled as "learning center," "library" and "art area."

On a bench in the courtyard, Mulligan and Godlewski interviewed students for their sponsorship profiles. What is your favorite subject, they asked. What do you do at home? How long does it take you to walk to school? The children responded softly, shyly, rarely offering more than two or three words.

At the end of the day they lined up in the courtyard one last time. The choir regaled the visitors with the school song and then a traditional song of blessing. Dancing and swaying, they called out blessings for Mulligan, Godlewski and everyone else who had made the Arlington Academy rise and stand.

Then they launched into a final song, one they had written for the occasion.

We are going to miss our dear ones

We are going to miss your love

We are going to miss your company

We are going to miss your care

Unlike most of their performances, which were jaunty and upbeat, this one was slow and mournful. The song had no dancing, just a dozen kids standing in a half-circle.

As they sang, their voices began to wobble. A few put their hands to their hearts. Tears began to roll down their cheeks. The visitors smiled, then dabbed at their own eyes. By the end, every singer was crying. So were many of the visitors.

"Let's go give them hugs," Wanda said. His eyes glistening, he rose from his chair and walked over to wrap his arms around each singer.

He shook his head, saying, "This is all so unexpected."

A young girl buried her head in his chest, weeping.

* * *

In the months since the Americans visited AAH, there have been many changes for the school and for Wanda. He recently took a new job, as director of finance for the African Wildlife Foundation, which helps preserve land and animal habitats on the continent. Electricity has finally come to Bumwalukani (though a drought in Uganda currently limits it to a couple of nights a week). The board has decided to concentrate on improving the school rather than on building others. The number of sponsored students has soared, from 31 last summer to 150 as of this month. "Especially now that there is electricity, we can do a lot of things," Wanda says. "The community is sort of just realizing what is possible."

Tara Bahrampour covers education for The Post's Metro section.