John Wanda was 14 when he got his first pair of shoes. He bought them second hand from a classmate for less than a dollar.
Up to that point, he had gone barefoot in the eastern Ugandan village of Bumwalukani, mired by chiggers, rocks and thorns as he went door to door selling vegetables from his family’s small farm to neighbors living in huts with dirt floors. Footwear was a luxury most couldn’t afford in this rural, landslide-prone area near the border with Kenya.
The shoes might have provided some relief when John’s family sent him and some of his siblings to a boarding school 30 miles away. To get there, they walked nine hours barefoot through forests and mountains, carrying their suitcases.
Now the shoes (a requirement at his new school) were both a practical and symbolic acquisition. “Having a shoe is more than a piece of protection,” John says. “A shoe tells you you’re going places—you have something to do. You’re a person with a future.”
Though he and his seven siblings had grown up with little, their father was more educated than most, having made it through ninth grade. He checked the kids’ schoolwork, introduced them to music and read them stories and poems. The nursery rhyme about Jack and Jill always seemed nonsensical to John—Why would they go up the hill to get water when everyone knows water runs to the bottom?—but the stories nevertheless piqued his curiosity about other lands and cultures.
“Nobody else from my class ever made it out of that village,” says John, now 59 and himself a father of four. He would go on to earn a degree in accounting in 1988 from Makerere University in Kampala.
In 1992, mutual friends set him up with his future wife, Joyce, and he realized he had met his match. They married, started a family and moved to Arlington a few years later.
Some might have arrived in America and never looked back. The Wandas instead built a bridge to their homeland. The impact of their nonprofit, REACH for Uganda, has been exponential.
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When Joyce Butala was a “girl child,” as they say in Uganda, in the 1980s, the average household income was about $250 per year and roughly half the nation was illiterate. Educating girls was widely viewed as a waste of time and money.
Joyce’s father did not share that belief. “For as long as you want to go to school, I’ll do everything I can, including selling my last shirt on my body,” he told her.
Unswayed by disapproving neighbors in their village, Butinduyi, he sent Joyce to boarding school after determining that the local schools were subpar.
“His belief really helped me to focus and work as hard as I could to be successful,” says Joyce, now 54.
She was one year shy of graduating from Makerere University when she met and married John Wanda. “It was rare to find somebody in the same corner of the world at that level,” she says. Her father made them promise she’d complete her degree in marketing, and she did.
In 1995, the Wandas were living in South Africa when they entered a lottery for a U.S. State Department diversity visa and earned entry to the United States. Less than a year later, they touched down at Reagan National Airport with a toddler in tow and nowhere to live. Joyce was seven months pregnant with their second child.
Within three days, John had landed a temp job with the American Chiropractic Association in Rosslyn, making $13 an hour. “We thought it was the most money that anyone would ever have,” he says. They found low-income housing nearby and started to make connections.
By the time their eldest son, J.J., started first grade at Arlington Traditional School (ATS) in 2000, they were a family of five, soon to be six. John was permanently employed at the association, and Joyce was working nights as a payroll and benefits specialist for Fresh Fields (later Whole Foods).
Captivated by the tidy classrooms and engaged students at ATS, they couldn’t help drawing comparisons with the schools back home. In Uganda’s Bududa region, where both John and Joyce had grown up, it wasn’t unusual for a primary school to have 100 students crammed into one classroom with a dirt floor. Children attended school intermittently, depending on whether their parents needed them to work. Most were hungry, shoeless and poorly clothed. Teachers were sometimes no-shows.
How can we replicate a little bit of this for the kids that we have left in Uganda? they thought as they gazed upon their son’s cheerful classroom. “Because for us,” John explains, “school wasn’t a happy place.”
At that point, the couple was already sending what little money they could home to family. But they had an idea. Appealing to colleagues at work and fellow congregants at their church, they created a scholarship fund to cover school supplies, private school tuition and uniforms for promising students in Bumwalukani. By 2002, they had raised more than $10,000 in support of 142 students.
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John went home to Uganda for a visit a short time later and realized it wasn’t enough. “You need to build a school of your own if you want to make all of these changes permanent,” the local parents told him. “The infrastructure we have here does not support that kind of vision.”
Energized, he and Joyce considered the possibilities. Building a school, they estimated, would cost about $36,000. (In reality, it ended up closer to $90,000, John says, but the naivete of their initial estimate may have prevented the plan from being a nonstarter.)
There were other considerations, too. Though they had established a pathway to funding from American donors, they decided to charge a modest tuition, even if that payment came from villagers in the form of bartered food or labor. It wasn’t an exorbitant amount (less than $10 per year), but the local government schools, by contrast, were free. Creating buy-in would lay the groundwork for a school system that could eventually become self-sustaining.
Making sure government officials saw them as partners—not competitors or a threat to the status quo—also required round-the-clock diplomacy.
In February of 2004, the Wandas opened the Arlington Junior School (AJS) in Bumwalukani with 78 students and eight teachers, having convinced a handful of qualified educators to relocate from Kampala with the promise of housing. Before long, it had more than 300 students and another 150 on a waiting list.
Nine months later, they registered the Arlington Academy of Hope (the school’s umbrella organization) as a 501(c)3 nonprofit in the U.S., with John serving as president.
Holly Hawthorne, then principal of Arlington Traditional School, was struck by the couple’s optimism and determination. ATS became a sister school, and its PTA began fundraising for AJS which—in addition to teaching English language, math, science and social studies—had adopted ATS’ “ABCs of success” framework (academics, behavior, character).
“Our goal was to introduce the same concepts we’d found at ATS,” John says. Students enrolled at AJS were given uniforms, a morning snack, lunch and growing libraries to explore.
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In Uganda, students completing the equivalent of grade 7 must pass a mandatory Primary Leaving Exam to advance to secondary school.
When the oldest students in AJS’s inaugural class took the exam in 2006, the hope was that a handful would matriculate. All 31 students passed the exam, half of them scoring in the highest tier. (Seventeen years later, the school’s Primary Leaving Exam pass rate remains at 100%.)
By then, the Wandas’ nonprofit had implemented a sponsorship program that invited outside donors to cover tuition and expenses for individual students—initially about $300 per year for primary school (now $480). As more AJS students matriculated out of primary school, the sponsorship program expanded, with donors stepping up to cover the cost of secondary school ($1,000 per year) and college or trade school ($2,000).
Georgetown University finance professor Jim Angel and his wife, Amy, became two such sponsors. Amy was already an avid volunteer with a passion for the Wandas’ mission. Sponsoring students and getting to know them took that commitment to the next level.
“When we get letters [from students] it really adds a personal connection,” says Jim, who now serves on the organization’s U.S. board, as does his wife. “It isn’t just that we’re doing this theoretical thing to help people we’ll never meet. We are changing lives for the better.” (The author of this article is also a volunteer and former board member.)
Hawthorne (now retired from ATS and serving as board VP) and her husband, Dean Scribner, sponsored a student named Sarah. As their personal bond with Sarah grew stronger, the Arlington couple paid for her graduate school education to become a CPA. They also covered the cost of installing a cement floor in her family’s home. On one of their many visits to Uganda—which Scribner describes as “life changing”—Sarah joined them on safari in the western part of the country. Hawthorne says she’s like a daughter to them.
Today, the sponsorship program has a waiting list of nearly 800 students.
The nonprofit, meanwhile, continues to find new ways to make an impact. Now known as REACH for Uganda (the acronym stands for Resources, Environment, Academics, Community, Health), it’s governed by two boards in the U.S. and Uganda. The stateside body focuses mainly on fundraising, while the Uganda board directs programs and implementation on the ground.
Though the boards do not always see eye-to-eye—there have been occasional tensions—the dual model is necessary, John says. Long-term, the goal is for REACH to become self-sustaining in Uganda, at which point the U.S. board will no longer be needed.
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Today, REACH is more than a school. Recognizing that poor health is an impediment to learning, the nonprofit built two clinics in eastern Uganda—one of them in honor of Joyce’s four sisters, all of whom died of preventable causes. Together, the clinics serve about 30,000 patients per year, providing vaccinations, malaria treatments, HIV counseling, midwifery and other basic care. Some of the staff at the clinics are AJS graduates who went on to pursue careers in health care.
To support the surrounding community, REACH and its partners also dug a well that provides fresh water, installed solar-powered electricity to reduce the reliance on generators, and brought school-based internet access to an area where the basic infrastructure is unreliable. A second primary school, the Matuwa Junior School, came under the nonprofit’s umbrella in 2019.
“Visionary” is a word that frequently comes up in conversations about the Wandas.
“What really blew us away was that the Wandas, through good fortune, found a way to come to America, and within short order, they started thinking about what they can do back in Uganda,” says Shashi Gupta, who with his wife, Margaret, co-founded the Gupta Family Foundation, a Herndon-based social justice nonprofit that provides financial support to REACH.
“So many people, once they come to America, the land of opportunity, they chase their individual opportunities,” he says. “Not John and Joyce. I’m sure it came at a cost to their professional lives, but this mission was much more important to them than even their careers.”
Nelson Kamoti, an AJS graduate who was sponsored through his secondary school, university and MBA studies, is now the chief operating officer of REACH for Uganda in Bududa. He’s one of 18 program graduates working for the organization after completing their education.
“John is a very democratic leader,” says Kamoti, who oversees some 1,300 students supported directly by REACH programs, more than half of whom are girls. “He involves staff, parents, community and government in making decisions for the organization. He believes that sustainable change is only possible when local people embrace its tenets and are active partners in any decisions that are made to improve their lives.”
Joyce’s impact is just as significant. “She’s extremely effective in convincing people to do what she wants without being pushy,” says Dick Burk, a former Peace Corps volunteer and government executive who has served as president of the nonprofit’s U.S. board since 2009.
Joyce became executive director of REACH in 2022. “For me, it’s not really a job,” she says. “I see it as a passion and an obligation.”
To many, she is an emblem of what is possible. “It’s so important for girls to have role models who look like them that they can relate to. That’s the power Joyce brings to the program,” says Tammy Tibbetts, co-founder of She’s the First, an international women’s advocacy organization based in New York City and a REACH partner since 2010. Together, the nonprofits have collaborated to break down cultural taboos around sex in Uganda so that girls can understand their own bodies and take control of their futures.
Mentoring programs are key to connecting with girls. Last year, REACH had no girls drop out of school due to pregnancy. The organization also supports microfinance programs that have provided loans to some 400 female entrepreneurs.
The equal focus on women and girls is what compelled former Tuckahoe Elementary School teacher Ani Arzoomanian to join REACH’s U.S. board and lead a recent teen service trip to Uganda. “Education helps challenge traditional gender roles and stereotypes by promoting equal opportunities,” she says. “I love that REACH’s programs allow girls the same opportunities as their male counterparts.”
In 2021, REACH was awarded an $800,000 grant from USAID to build a new Arlington Vocation and Secondary School (AVSS) in Bududa. The project broke ground in July.
“Our construction team came on site to begin to build the secondary school and 300 villagers showed up to file for work,” Burk says. “Forty percent of them were women asking to do hard labor. We had used them on the addition to the primary school three years ago. That was a shock to the village, but they accepted.”
Supporters in the U.S. remain an important part of the success story. Following the lead of Arlington Traditional School, other Arlington elementary schools—including Tuckahoe, Nottingham and Discovery—have organized PTA fundraisers for REACH. A partnership with Marymount University sends graduate students to Uganda to conduct teacher trainings at the schools. Volunteers facilitate annual service trips for teens and adults to help out in the schools and clinics.
Continuing to expand its scope, REACH now provides teacher training, school supplies and Primary Leaving Exam test prep to 26 government primary schools in the region, which collectively serve about 20,000 students.
Cynthia Margeson, a retired ATS teacher, has traveled to the country nine times with a brigade of volunteers—for a total of 26 weeks in residence—to provide on-the-ground teacher training. Finding no culture of reading for pleasure during her initial visits, Margeson began leaving piles of books, which were soon “devoured,” she says. Since then, additional donations have provided enough books to build a library.
Financial contributions are also having a lasting impact. Beatrice Tierney Stradling, founder of the Children’s International School in Arlington, provided substantial funding for both of the clinics. An ongoing donation from Arlington residents Carol Ann Bischoff and Mike Regan funds technology training for teachers and students in a new computer lab.
Many of the streetlights in Kikholo, the town closest to AJS, are now solar-powered, thanks to a partnership with Mines Without Borders, an initiative out of the Colorado College of Mines formed by a young REACH supporter who attended college there.
In 2012, 34 years after John Wanda acquired his first pair of shoes, TOMS Shoes partnered with REACH to distribute 30,000 pairs of shoes throughout eastern Uganda.
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REACH for Uganda is a family business, if not a calling. All four of the Wandas’ children—J.J., Craig, Christine and Chris—grew up in Arlington and have been keenly involved in the organization’s mission. They’ve traveled, volunteered and inspired their friends to visit Uganda, sponsor students and fundraise.
In May, John retired from his job as a principal and executive with the digital direct marketing agency Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey in Arlington (now MissionWired), so that he can focus exclusively on REACH, and especially the new secondary school.
Last year, 89% of AJS students who took the Primary Leaving Exam scored in the standardized test’s highest tier. With support from sponsors and grant funding, they’ll be welcomed into Uganda’s best secondary schools. Many are hoping to transfer and return home to Bududa as soon as the new Arlington Vocation and Secondary School is built.
Upon its completion, one of the Wandas’ biggest dreams will become real. What started as a single school is now a thriving community that is taking the reins toward a brighter future.
“One person can change the world. I have seen it firsthand,” says Hawthorne.
Or in this case, two.
Amy Brecount White is a former board member for REACH. She and her family have sponsored several students in Uganda, and her oldest son was on the first teen service trip.