Journal photo / Bob Briedenbach

Sonya Reynolds and Frederic Kouihongbe, of Ivory Coast, work in Northern Uganda to start a school for children abducted from their villages. Reynolds is a 2000 graduate of Exeter-West Greenwich Regional High School and Castleton State College in Vermont.

When Sonya Reynolds, of Exeter, goes to bed each night in Uganda, she sleeps beside a blackboard that “still has questions to a geography test on it,” she wrote. “I have not yet brought myself to erase it. The room has been locked for years and not touched since the massacre there.”

Reynolds, 25, is helping build a refuge for children stolen from the Acholi tribe in the village of Lukodi in the Gulu district of northern Uganda. She and three others are starting a school for 15 child-mothers, girls who were abducted, enslaved and impregnated by the enemy.

No one knows how many little girls were stolen for “brides” and young boys for soldiers by the rebels who have fought Uganda’s government for 21 years, but many sources cite these numbers: an estimated 6,000 child-mothers, 25,000 children who have become “night commuters” to escape being kidnapped, and 80 percent of the rebel army made up of kidnapped children.

A report by The Berkeley-Tulane Initiative on Vulnerable Populations, published in June, says more than 20,000 formerly abducted children and youth have passed through northern Ugandan reception centers since 1994.

The school where Reynolds sleeps was a battlefield in 2004.

“There are still bullet holes in the walls and window shutters,” the 2000 graduate of Exeter-West Greenwich Regional High School, said by e-mail Friday, her once-a-week Internet connection. “We are concerned for some of our students because a few were actually abducted from the classrooms, which will now be their new bedrooms and learning centers.”

A U.N. report says that rebels attacked the Lukodi in 2004, killing 42 civilians, including 15 children. The victims were clubbed or hacked to death with machetes or burned in their huts, the BBC reported in May 2004.

“I have been shown a couple of mango trees and other trees where many people were killed,” Reynolds wrote in Friday’s e-mail. “About 100 to 200 feet from our school/bedrooms, there is a mass grave, which our organization has marked with a nice memorial and held a ceremony with the community.”

Working toward their master’s degrees, Reynolds and three friends from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vt., are writing the new school’s curriculum, hiring a headmaster and a counselor and choosing the first students.

The girls have children fathered by men in the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, described by policy analyst Rory E. Anderson as “a warlord who manipulates traditional beliefs with Islam and Christianity into a spiritual crusade of murder and mutilation.” Anderson works in Washington for World Vision, a Christian relief organization.

Kony, whose child soldiers are sprinkled with holy water that he says makes them invincible to bullets, is wanted by the International Criminal Court.

In the United States, condoms are seen as protection against AIDS. In Uganda, according to one report by IRIN, a news-gathering branch of the U.N.’s office of humanitarian affairs, rebel officers protect themselves from AIDS by kidnapping younger girls, some not even 6, for use as sexual partners.

LEADERS OF THE ACHOLI TRIBE and Action for Children, a social-services agency in Uganda, are working with U.S.-based Child Voice International, a Christian nonprofit group, to build a center in northern Uganda where war-ravaged children “can live … until they are emotionally, spiritually and physically restored; educated; trained in a profession; and prepared to earn a living,” Child Voice says on its Web site.

Reynolds said she met Child Voice director Conrad Mandsager this summer at Soulfest 2007, a Christian music festival in New Hampshire. “It all just sort of fell together,” she said, “and that’s how the four of us got to go.”

With her are Frederic Taly Kouihongbe, from Ivory Coast; D’Andrea Weeks, of Alabama, and Rebecca Mukaire, of Uganda, who met them in Gulu, the major town in the district. They left Aug. 24.

Reynolds wrote on Aug. 26, after landing in Kampala, the capital of Uganda:

“Freddy had a rough flight as his neck was hurting him; we thought that it was a cramp, but it turned out to be acute tonsillitis…. The infection was making its way to his brain. So he has a needle in his hand for a week; this may keep us in the capital for a few more days than we had planned.”

In mid-September, she wrote that she had arrived in the village of Lukodi. She said. “The boda [dirt bikes] rides are not so fun in the rain, plus in a skirt, which I usually have to wear, it can be an added challenge.”

More details came Sept. 21:

“We are getting accustomed to no electricity, bathing in our grass shower, the pit latrines and our pet rats. OK, I am not yet accustomed to the rats or the fact that they bang around in the pots and pans every night. We are trying everything to get rid of them and to keep them out of our food.”

She said a construction group was also living in the school and bringing it back to life.

SHORTLY BEFORE leaving Rhode Island, Reynolds said she was impressed that helping the abducted children was begun by village elders.

“It’s not just coming from the Western perspective,” she said. “It’s something that’s coming from the local community, the elders. Within this tribal culture, they have a large respect for reconciliation. The elders have said, ‘These are our kids, they were abducted; we can’t just abandon them and allow our community to shun them. We need to embrace them.’

“What’s really neat,” she said, is that the tribe has “regular tribal meetings … and they’ve invited us, so they’re really considering us part of the community.”

Reynolds and her three colleagues are earning college credits. “Basically we’re studying how to create, work with and analyze an organization such as this.”

She got her bachelor’s degree in special education and elementary education at Castleton State College, in Vermont, and worked in Nicaragua on Project Cacocente, which moved families from the city dump to a rural village with a school and programs to bring the village to self-sufficiency.

NEXT MONTH, Sonya’s mother will be in a group of 10 that will visit two displaced-persons camps in Uganda. She will also visit her daughter.

Sheila Reynolds-Boothroyd, who lives off Escoheag Road not far from Beach Pond in Exeter, said the group was bringing 500 “peace packs” filled by churches in Hope Valley and New Hampshire.

Child Voice visitors to the camps had seen that children would scramble for discarded water bottles, to be nurtured as dolls or kicked as soccer balls or made into shoes. Child Voice had bags made that can hold about three pounds, Reynolds-Boothroyd said, and donors are filling them with gifts and toiletries for children in the camps.

Melissa Denton, of First Baptist Hope Valley, and Debbie Kreyssig, of New Hope Chapel in Richmond, are distributing the bags in their churches.

Poverty is so severe in the camps that receiving the backpacks might be “the first time anyone ever gave them anything,” Reynolds-Boothroyd said.

REYNOLDS and her colleagues used 200 surveys of child-mothers taken by an earlier set of volunteers “to pick 30 young women to interview further. From these interviews we were then able to pick our first 15 students,” she wrote Sept. 21.

“We needed to prioritize them by their needs, but what was difficult is that we could not take the most needy.

“Let me explain: we do not want to take any child mother who is also caring for her brothers and sisters and cousins, because if we take her out of the house with her children, who will care for the other children?

“So, this has not been so easy. …”

The girls who will be in the first class range in age from 14 to 24, and they have 11 children in total, Reynolds wrote. Four other child-mothers will provide infant and toddler care in return for provisions for themselves and their children.

“I delivered one letter of acceptance to a young girl this morning, who had just returned from the hospital with her two-week-old baby. …

“It has been such a joy to deliver the letters of acceptance this past week. It is amazing to see a girl who is facing so many challenges, look her in the eyes, and tell her things are about to improve.”

dnaylor@projo.com