Best & Brightest: African Teacher Excels as Student, Role Model in U.S.: An Ugandan mother attends graduate school in the U.S. while keeping tabs on school she established in her home country.
Joanita Senoga stood on her parent’s porch in her native Uganda in the mid-1990s to teach reading, math, English and science to disadvantaged youth.
With her family’s help, she opened Circle of Peace School to teach 24 low-income and orphaned children in a small building with no bathroom and where meals were cooked on a dirt floor above an open fire.
The school now has 200 children in grades kindergarten through seventh grade and has bathrooms, two stoves and a small dorm for 30 boys and girls.
While raising money to keep the school open, the 39-year-old single mother of two also is a graduate student at the University of Richmond in Virginia, where she received a bachelor’s degree in education in 2006.
“I was a primary school teacher in Uganda. You had to pay to attend school and some kids didn’t have money,” said Senoga, 39, who began teaching at age 22 immediately after she received an education degree at Kibuli Teacher’s College in Uganda. “These kids should receive the best education as everyone else.”
