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.
