Learning Experience
After building a life in Arlington, Ugandan immigrant John Wanda decided to build something more ambitious -- a school for his native village

By Tara Bahrampour
Sunday, May 21, 2006

John Wanda paused on the red mud trail. Above him his 75-year-old father marched on, effortlessly scaling the steep hill in his thick wool blazer. Below him, his guests, a group of Americans in ill-fitting rubber boots, struggled to keep up.

"There is no way I'm going over that bridge," declared Holly Hawthorne, the principal of Arlington Traditional School. The group had stopped before two narrow logs suspended across a swollen creek. Another woman, Beatrice Tierney, who runs Children's International Schools in Arlington and Alexandria, announced that she would not attempt the bridge, either.

Wanda guided the others across, then doubled back. Ignoring what the muddy bank might do to his dark slacks and bright white sneakers, he helped the women wade across, and they all continued up the mountain. They scrambled up vertical plots of coffee trees. They grasped at slippery vegetation.

They kept hiking.

"How much farther is it?" asked one of the Americans.

"Will they have food for us?" asked another.

"The school is just around the next bend," Wanda promised. He was sure it was. He remembered running up and down these paths as a child; the distance had never seemed long. But now every bend opened onto another grove of banana trees, another thatch-roofed hut, another woman stirring a pot over an open flame, but no school.

Rain was starting to fall, a daily summer event in eastern Uganda. Wanda could tell a heavy downpour was coming. He wondered whether it made sense to press on.

The Americans had already seen three other schools in the village that morning last July, including their main purpose for coming to Uganda: to visit a primary school modeled on Northern Virginia's best schools. Wanda, 40, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had recently opened it using donations from these Arlingtonians and others. Now, seeing the rain speckle their shirts, he worried. One of them could easily sprain an ankle, or lose footing and tumble into the river below.

Somewhere up the mountainside, students from two crumbling government-run public schools were waiting to welcome the Americans with singing and dancing. Wanda wanted the visitors to see the smallest, poorest, most remote kind of Ugandan school. He needed them to understand what a contrast it made with the one he had built.

A passing villager with a machete stopped and cut down some giant leaves for umbrellas. When the path crossed another path, Wanda decided to give the Americans an out.

"They are still a distance away from where we are, and I know that some of you are tired and also hungry and may not want to walk in the rain for a long time," he said, "so if you feel like this is good enough for you, and you are ready to go home at this point, I'd like to hear from you." He indicated the new path downhill.

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.

IN 2001, WANDA'S ORIGINAL PLAN was simply to set up scholarships to cover tuition, books and uniforms for children in Bumwalukani's government-run schools. Working through his church, Bethel United Church of Christ in Arlington, and word of mouth, he raised money in handfuls -- a personal check here, a donation of pencils there. ATS sent over books and other supplies, and passed word on to its families.

Two years later, Wanda held a meeting in the classroom of a Bumwalukani school. The parents of scholarship students filed in and sat down on the floor, and the chairman of the scholarship program, a local teacher and one of the few literate adults, read from a prepared speech.

"I take this opportunity to thank our son John Wanda, project patron, for the sweet tongue and hard work performed in America to persuade our dear donors to help Bumwalukani children," he began. But even as the chairman read statistics touting the program's success -- a widening pool of students, an increase in parent interest, a reduction in the number of children sent to do chores at the market during school hours -- Wanda sensed something was missing. The room lacked optimism, any real sense of accomplishment.

As the chairman read on, it became clear why. Even children who got scholarships were still receiving a substandard education. They might have books, but their classmates and teachers didn't. They might be freed from chores to get to school on time, but that didn't mean the teachers and other students would reliably show up.

Then the chairman said the words that told Wanda what he needed to do.

"Parents suggest that the children, at the primary level, would benefit fully from the program if we shall have a model school for the program."

A model school.

WANDA DID NOT ASK PEOPLE FOR MONEY OUTRIGHT. Addressing the Rotary Club or the Kiwanis Club, he would show slides of children from Bumwalukani and describe how hard he had worked as a child to be first in his class so he could win a chicken. His quiet enthusiasm garnered attention -- and donations.

As money began to come in, the enormity of building a school half a world away began to weigh on him. He started pulling 16-hour days, staying in his office after work until midnight to focus on the school. Often he left home in the morning before his children were awake and returned after they were asleep. The family stopped taking vacations.

"For me, doing this is as important as the family -- if probably not more," he said, "because I consider all of these people as my family."

Construction on what would become the Arlington Academy of Hope (www.arlingtonacademyofhope.org) began in Bum-walukani in late 2003, on a plot of land Wanda's father had donated. Teachers were hired from Kampala, 200 miles away, for $200 a month, far more than government schools pay. The board, made up of Americans and Ugandans, included Hawthorne; Wanda's brother Sam in Kampala; an ATS parent representative; and a third-grade teacher, Cynthia Margeson, who was retiring after 32 years in the Arlington schools.

As the building rose, funding was shaky. The first estimate for the school's cost was $15,000. "We sent the money, and this money was not enough to even build half of the school," Wanda said. "And at that time we had no more money. We completely didn't have any money. The building was half done, it was not even roofed; we knew the rains would come and would sort of destroy what we had put together. So it was very worrying."

At that point, Wanda made a "very, very emotional" appeal to the scholarship committee at Bethel church. When he was done, a parishioner named Susan Peters stood up and pledged $5,000. Beatrice Tierney pledged $3,000. It was enough to get the school into a condition that would weather the rains.

By the summer of 2004, the U-shaped concrete building was nearly completed. Accompanied by Jaime Mulligan (a co-worker who is vice president of the board) and by Margeson, Wanda traveled there for the ribbon-cutting and watched 200 children in red-and-white gingham uniforms excitedly begin their first day. A few months later, Margeson returned, spending four months teaching and working as interim headmaster. (Instruction is in English, as it is in most Ugandan schools.)

As word spread, more Arlingtonians got involved. ATS and Arlington Academy of Hope (AAH) children exchanged letters and photos; ATS sent more books; families signed up to sponsor students. One Arlington couple contributed $5,100 for a year of school lunches. A delegation of Arlingtonians decided to join Wanda on his next visit, in July 2005.

Shortly before the group left, Margeson returned from Uganda. She wrapped herself in a rainbow-colored gown called a busuti, and stood before rows of fourth-graders in the ATS gym, showing slides of AAH.

"They don't see any movies, there's no television, there's no idea of what goes on outside the village," Margeson told the students. "The school does not have a globe." On the day the school got a generator and illuminated a classroom for the first time, she said, the children sang and danced and lifted their arms into the air in wonder.

ON THE AMERICANS' FIRST WALK THROUGH BUMWALUKANI, a little boy fell into stride with them.

"I was attending the Arlington Academy of Hope," he said softly to Wanda. "But my father could no longer pay the school fees, so I had to leave. I want to return to Arlington."

Wanda, who had arrived two weeks earlier, had been getting 15 or 20 requests like this every day. Admission to AAH takes more than pulling together the fees -- the school considers applicants' test scores, gender (for balance), and need, with additional consideration given to poor students and orphans.

Speaking in his native Lugisu, Wanda gently encouraged the boy to talk to teachers at Arlington Academy. Wanda promised that if he did well at his own school he would be noticed, and might earn a scholarship to AAH. For now, it was all Wanda could do.

Exuberant singing and flute-playing floated down the path. The visitors rounded a bend and saw a gaggle of children crowded around the school's gate, gyrating, dancing and holding signs of welcome. Village women lined the path, smiling and waving.

Watching his visitors enter the school, Wanda felt a little nervous. Even with all that AAH had accomplished, he feared it might not look so impressive to people accustomed to American standards and amenities. The bathrooms were better than what other schools had, but still they were outhouses with no plumbing; the sinks were plastic containers with taps attached; the classrooms had roofs, but, because of the cost, some still lacked ceilings.

More than anything, though, he feared a cultural breakdown. "I was worried," he said later, "that people will say things that the visitors will not appreciate, that someone will make a comment that the visitors may not understand." For example, some parents had objected to their daughters wearing shorts -- part of the PE uniform, but not part of the Bugisu tribe's culture. "If that is heard out of context," Wanda said, "they may immediately rush to a judgment that girls are not treated equally."

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.