Sonya Reynolds with Lukodi children during a break in classes at the school she helped found in Uganda.

Photo courtesy OF Sheila Reynolds-Boothroyd

Sonya Reynolds of Exeter, 25, returned from Uganda in March. She and four other graduate students from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vt., helped Child Voice International start a school in Lukodi for girls who had been abducted by enemy soldiers, enslaved and later shunned for having children fathered by their captors.

The school they helped start in Uganda’s Gulu district has doubled to 30 students and their children, and classes now include baking, tailoring, hair styling and restaurant management.

Sonya said 90 percent of the young women who were illiterate when they arrived at the school “are now at or above a basic reading level.” The girls and villages in the nearby Internally Displaced Persons camp have formed a greeting card company to sell handmade cards around the world, and the school raises crops as well as goats, bovines and rabbits on land donated by villagers.

About 80 students from Brown University and the University of Maine visited this summer, living in huts while researching agricultural needs for Child Voice, Sonya said.

The mission has added a health clinic, which draws people seeking care from as far as Sudan, and a live-in midwife has helped deliver 30 children, including one set of twins. Of the girls enrolled in the school, three have given birth since starting classes and one has lost a baby to AIDS.

In April, Sonya married fellow missionary Frederic Taly Kouihongbe, with whom she had gone to the Ivory Coast in December 2007 to meet his parents. They have a four-month-old daughter, Aleah Zeranglusse Taly, and live in West Warwick. Both parents are writing theses to finish their degrees at the School of International Training.

Sonya said the school they helped start in Uganda has brought countless advances in maturity, spirituality and self worth.

She can be reached at sonyam_reynolds@yahoo.com.

— Journal Staff Writer Donita Naylor

dnaylor@projo.com