Sonya Reynolds spends some quality time with Lukodi children during a break in classes.

Photo courtesy Sheila Reynolds-Boothroyd

EXETER — A mother visiting her daughter on another continent loads her suitcase with love.

Sheila Reynolds-Boothroyd visited her daughter, Sonya Reynolds, 25, in Africa, in November. She brought gifts from the heart: Power Bars, potato peelers, rattraps, peanut-butter crackers, Ramen noodles, 100 handmade quilts and a truckload of little backpacks stuffed with gifts for children who had never owned a toy in their lives.

Sonya’s mother left from Boston with three people from New Hampshire and an architect from Iowa. They traveled as a group from ChildVoice International, a humanitarian relief organization that asked Sonya and three fellow graduate students from the School for International Training, in Brattleboro, Vt., to open a school in a building in the Gulu district of Uganda. The school would be for young women who were kidnapped as children and forced to serve as slave-wives for the soldiers who massacred their brothers and fathers, mothers and cousins.

Former child brides who have managed to return home face more hardships than most in the region of north-central Africa laid waste by 20 years of war.

As Reynolds-Boothroyd noted on one eight-hour drive, nearly every person between Kampala, the nation’s capital, and Gulu, the city closest to her daughter’s work, lives in a virtual prison camp. Instead of growing crops, tending livestock and engaging in commerce on farms and in villages, people must live in huts they build themselves in IDP (for Internally Displaced Persons) camps. Whoever ventures into the countryside risks being killed or kidnapped.

SONYA ARRIVED at the village of Lukodi in late August. The school opened in October. Her mother visited in November. The first group of 15 young women and their 25 children finished their first semester in December. Now 15 more former child brides and their 25 children are starting the second class. They live in a school that is relatively safe, fenced in and patrolled by an armed guard at night, but the building’s walls still bear bullet holes from a massacre in 2004. One of the students lived through that massacre.

The day begins with chapel at 8:30 a.m., chores that include hauling water, and classes in, say, decision-making and math. A nursing tea break comes at 10:50. It’s not a class on how to be a nurse; it’s a time for the students to visit the nursery and feed their babies.

Reynolds-Boothroyd, who lives on Old Voluntown Road and works at Kent Hospital studying tissue samples, took photos of the bullet holes, the babies, the blackboard with tea breaks scheduled, her daughter surrounded by children, children crowding to see themselves in the architect’s digital camera, baboons blocking the rutted road, crocodiles and cranes, children from the IDP camp respectfully borrowing the school’s real soccer ball, girls with babies slung on their backs filling in foxholes on the playground, children wearing dresses bought by the dozen at Ocean State Job Lot, and the whole population of the new school sitting on mats in the shade, pulling out of Peace Paks the gifts that people in Hope Valley and New Hampshire had put in.

Tomorrow night in Hope Valley, she is giving a slide show at her church, which supports Sonya’s mission in Lukodi by sending money and filling Peace Paks. With her will be her daughter’s colleague Frederic “Freddy” Taly Kouihongbe, from Ivory Coast, whose student visa at the School for International Training in Vermont required him to return to the United States in January. He is writing a policy manual, part of his contribution to the project and his degree in conflict resolution.

WHEN HER MOTHER and the other ChildVoice supporters visited, Sonya, Freddy and their colleague D’Andrea Weeks, of Alabama, were given a short vacation from the Lukodi School to meet them at the airport in Kampala. It was their first time off since they arrived in late August.

Hiring a bus and driver, the young missionaries introduced their visitors to life in Africa. They took a short safari in a wildlife preserve as big as Rhode Island and then drove to Gulu, visiting schools sponsored by other humanitarian groups. In Gulu, the visitors stayed in the lap of luxury, a hotel with no flush toilets, trucked-in water and only sporadic electricity.

Each day they packed bottled water, bananas and energy bars and traveled by van to the school. They bestowed gifts and helped the children figure out what to do with miniature plastic footballs, Play-Doh, and pacifiers.

They didn’t have to explain what to do with the rag dolls. One little girl immediately tied on a piece of bright red cloth so she could carry her baby doll just as her mother had carried her.

That swath of red fabric is a fragment of the school’s proclamation of victory over despair.

SOON AFTER CLASSES began last fall, but before the uniforms arrived, the school was invited to march in Uganda’s independence day parade.

Sonya had an idea, her mother recounted in early January while using a computer at the Exeter Public Library to click through online photo albums of the mission. On Sonya’s weekly trip to Gulu to visit the ChildVoice office and check her e-mail (assuming Gulu had electricity that day), she bought sheets of red cloth and bounced them back to the school by boda, or motorized mud bike. Presented with the cloth, the students decided to make head wraps for themselves and their children. They marched in the parade. However long the parade route was, it took them from shame to celebrity.

As stolen children who had managed to survive, escape and return, they were burdens on their community. Some had been forced to assist in killing people they loved. Their children were fathered by the army that had enslaved them. But now they slept in safety. They learned hygiene, life skills, math and English. Because of them, jobs were coming to the community. Children who were not part of the school clung to the chainlink fence, hoping to be chosen to help lug water twice a day.

“Within a month,” Reynolds-Boothroyd said, “they went from being persecuted mothers to being students.”

They acted like junior high girls, Reynolds-Boothroyd said. “Girls being girls.”

On a field trip they took with their visitors from America, the girls posed politely on a rock that was once a slave market. Marks in the stone testify to beheadings. Fort Patiko, or Baker’s Fort, is in a remote area near the Sudan border, and it is staffed by the government as a historic site.

Over dinner recently at the Middle of Nowhere Diner, in Exeter, Reynolds-Boothroyd said the ranger at Fort Patiko bounded out to greet their group. “It was so absurd to be out in the middle of nowhere, truly, and he wants us to sign the guest book.”

She returned to Rhode Island just before Thanksgiving. For Christmas, Sonya and Freddy visited his parents in Ivory Coast. In early January, Freddy returned to the United States with D’Andrea, whose appendicitis-like symptoms were treated at the Lahey Clinic as a tropical disease. D’Andrea plans to rejoin the mission with a group leaving Feb. 7.

Sonya and their fourth colleague, Rebecca Mukaire, have moved into their own huts.

A group led by Brodi Herb, a Campus Crusade for Christ International worker at Brown University, will visit the mission this summer.

The slide show starts at 7 p.m. at First Baptist Church, 1059 Main Street, Hope Valley, which is west of Route 95 at Exit 3.

For more information about the project, visit:

ugandanhope.blogspot.com/

www.childvoiceintl.org/index.cfm

dnaylor@projo.com