Part 1: ... a school serves as an oasis of hope, with roots reaching all the way to Phila.

First of four parts

GULU, NORTHERN UGANDA - Give Abitimo Rebecca Odongkara a shade tree on her fertile African homeland, and she will grow a dream.

Give her pebbles and sticks, and she will teach love, learning, and faith in a peaceful future.

In a region of civil war, Abitimo, 71, has improbably built a haven for children.

Drawing on friendships and philosophies formed in Philadelphia, she gives stability to children trapped amid a war that targets them directly. Her achievement holds meaning far beyond Uganda; it shines a light wherever violence stalks children.

If youngsters across the world, from Africa to Philadelphia, are to be protected from harm, there must be legions of Abitimos. Like her, adults must let no

obstacle stop them from improving the lives of children.

Abitimo operates in a region of Uganda that's defined by obstacles. During 19 years of civil war in the north, at least 28,000 children have been abducted and forced to become soldiers and sex slaves. An estimated 9,000 people have been killed. The fate of thousands of children is unknown.

As many as 1.6 million people - more than 80 percent of the population in Gulu, Kitgum and Pader Districts - have been uprooted from their homes.

The displaced are threatened by illness and malnutrition in the crowded camps where they live. Residents still face rebel attacks, despite promises of government protection.

Against the backdrop of this upheaval - and with the scarcest of resources - Abitimo has built a school that now educates 1,500 children, including 250 orphans whose parents died in the war or from HIV/AIDS.

"She is such a model of someone who believes the children of the world are her children," said Chuck Esser, a close friend who runs a family center in Philadelphia.

The school also has been her own salvation: Helping children has enabled her to overcome a craving for revenge that almost consumed her.

Such temptations are strong here. "I consider northern Uganda to be one of the worst human emergencies in the world today," said Carol Bellamy, whose term just ended as executive director of UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency.

Until there is peace, there is Abitimo.

War is not the only hardship besetting northern Ugandans. Even in the calmest areas of the country, people face daunting challenges that the war exacerbates.

The national rate of HIV/AIDS infection dropped from 30 percent in the early 1990s to 6.2 percent last year, the government says; the rate in northern Uganda is still 17 percent.

Though President Yoweri Museveni has presided over a growing economy, the country remains one of the world's poorest, with a per capita annual income of $250, according to the World Bank. The civil war has cost the national economy $1.33 billion - about $100 million annually, according to a 2002 report commissioned by the Civil Society Organizations for Peace in Northern Uganda.

The war's history is not solely about tribal rivalries, though that has been a constant theme.

Abitimo's Acholi tribe once dominated the military after the country gained independence from Britain in 1962. The first Acholi president took charge in 1985, but his reign was short. The following year, he was overthrown by Museveni, whose father comes from the Banyankole tribe and his mother from the Banyarwanda. Museveni served as minister of defense in an earlier government.

Angry at their president's ouster, and fearing retribution for past military abuses against other tribal groups, some Acholis launched a rebellion. One of those rebels, a self-proclaimed prophet named Joseph Kony, continues the fight today.

Kony's war, though, no longer is aimed at the government. Almost all of the victims in this war are Acholi civilians. And since they long ago rejected him as a messenger of their grievances, the only way Kony can increase his numbers is to kidnap children.

He calls this band of abducted youngsters the Lord's Resistance Army. Kony foments fear among them by claiming mystical powers. He sends raiding parties throughout the north, killing adults, torching and looting villages, and stealing children.

The war between Kony and Museveni caused Abitimo to postpone establishing her school after returning to Uganda in 1983. It took five years until she was able to realize the dream she first envisioned in Philadelphia.

Her initial class had about 10 children, either orphans of war or from displaced families.

The classroom was a dirt-and-grass courtyard in the Gulu compound where Abitimo and other displaced families were living. A large, leafy tree formed the school's ceiling. Acholis revere that type of tree, locally called a kituba, because once planted, it rarely dies.

One of the first teachers was a woman named Angelina Ochola, whom the fighting had displaced. Ochola asked to teach at Abitimo's school, where she works to this day.

They taught with what they found - those sticks and pebbles for counting - and, Abitimo said, "what we had in our minds."

Margaret Alerotek Aloyo, now a communications officer in Uganda with World Vision, was one of the first students. She found Abitimo after her parents had disappeared. "They went, according to what I heard, to buy cattle. They never came back." Neighbors told her Kony's rebels had killed them.

Margaret was about 6 when Abitimo welcomed her. She instantly felt safe and "so much at home. Abitimo replaced my mother."

War has buffeted Abitimo's school even as its good works have grown. Teachers led students in games and songs as gunfire sounded in the distance. If shooting came too close, everyone ran into a house.

Ochola remembers one day, in particular, when gunmen went into a nearby house and took away a boy and a girl. The students were scared, Ochola said. "They were crying for their mummies to come and pick them up."

But children everywhere adapt to the violence around them, and Abitimo's students became accustomed to war's intrusions. When a bomb fell next door, killing one person and injuring others, "the children were good," Abitimo recalled. "We said, 'Be quiet,' and they were just quiet."

Abitimo could not have foreseen that the war would worsen, that tens of thousands of children would be kidnapped, raped, murdered and forced to kill.

Yet she believed that God had blessed her mission. It was like the kituba tree. Firmly planted, it would not die.

Abitimo's mother was the first of her father's eight wives. Abitimo, the eldest daughter, had three full brothers and, she believes, 44 half-siblings.

When she was a teenager in boarding school, her father decided she'd had enough schooling for a girl. She disagreed.

"I told my parents I would go back." She grabbed a mattress and returned to complete her studies. She didn't reconcile with her father for a year.

When Abitimo was about 18, she married a man who became violent. After four years and three children, she left him. Two years later, in 1960, she married John Odongkara, a policeman with four daughters.

John was kind. They blended their children into a new family and together had five more. All the children are adults now; most live around Philadelphia. One lives in Uganda.

John's integrity and professionalism helped him become one of Uganda's highest-ranking police officers.

"He was one of the community leaders in the region. He was highly respected," said George Omona, the Gulu-based country director for the nonprofit Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development.

In the early 1960s, Abitimo began working with the YWCA. In 1964, she participated in a four-month leadership course in the United States, including six weeks of training in Bucks County.

Even though the Philadelphia region's bustle and wealth overwhelmed her, she made deep friendships with Esser, his wife, Pamela Haines, and others.

In 1971, Idi Amin overthrew President Milton Obote. Amin slaughtered 300,000 people during his eight years of dictatorship. His massacres especially targeted the Acholi - and John was one of the most influential.

Amin's soldiers came after John, but he escaped to Uganda's capital city, Kampala. Abitimo, seven months pregnant, was put under house arrest for several days. "You get so afraid," she says of that time, "and you fear death." But God, she believed, "wanted me to have some strength."

To protect her children, she moved them to boarding schools around the country. Money was tight, and life precarious.

In 1972, she heard that John had gone to Tanzania to join Obote's exile group, but when differences arose over the group's plans, he was jailed.

Abitimo rushed to help. She worked the bureaucracy and appealed directly to Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere. After six weeks, John was free.

Fearing for their safety in Uganda or any nearby country, they sought a U.S. visa.

The State Department had to confirm that John "was definitely among the top 10 people Amin wanted to extinguish," said Crane Miller, a Washington lawyer John knew. With the help of Miller and a friend Abitimo had made during her YWCA workshop in Bucks County, the Odongkaras were allowed to enter the United States as refugees.

"I have this wonderful picture of him coming through the gate in Philadelphia," Miller said. "They looked happy as hell. All of them. Great big wonderful grins on their faces."

Abitimo later brought over twin nieces, but immigration authorities in Philadelphia balked when it came time to extend their visas: Who would support them?

Abitimo turned to Miller and new friend Barbara Jordan, who introduced her to her pastor, the Rev. Bill Murphey, who was at Jenkintown's Grace Presbyterian Church.

Abitimo so charmed him with her persistence, friendly flirting and unerring goodness that he sponsored the twins.

"She had me at the end of a string around her finger in about four hours," Murphey said with a laugh. "She would call and say, 'Reverend Murphey,' and I would think, 'Oh, no, what am I in for this time?' "

She and her family slowly settled down in Philadelphia, with friends helping the Odongkaras make a down payment on a Germantown twin home.

A year or two after Abitimo arrived in Philadelphia, news came that Amin had killed three prominent Ugandans, including an archbishop she had admired.

Bitterness welled up in her.

"I decided," she said, "I would buy a gun and fight Amin." She would just work more jobs to earn the money.

But Abitimo, a Seventh Day Adventist, was saved from violence by her religious belief and by a peer counseling method she was learning with her friend Chuck Esser.

In one session, Abitimo "revealed tremendous grief," Esser said.

"He was making me talk about why I came to the U.S.," Abitimo recalled. She recalled the persecution of Ugandans under Amin and broke down.

Overwhelmed by memories of what Amin's brutality had done to her family and her country, she realized she could not add to the violence. She surrendered her plan of revenge and decided instead to start a school.

"The child's mind is not polluted," she reasoned.

John had not adjusted well to working as a mere security guard. In 1979, with Amin out of power, he returned home. Abitimo stayed to care for her children, and to learn how to teach youngsters herself.

In her 50s, Abitimo got her GED after studying long hours at the Chestnut Hill branch of the Free Library. She earned an associate's degree, then a bachelor's degree in human services and a master's in education. In 1983, Abitimo felt ready to rejoin John in Uganda.

She wanted her school to teach what she had learned: Her students would have faith in God, do good deeds, listen, learn and love.

The children of the north, she believed, would forgo fighting only if their minds, hearts and souls were nourished.

Increased fighting and massive abductions in 1992 created a new influx of people to Gulu town. With more children, municipal officials asked Abitimo to add higher grades.

In 1993, her school, the Upper Nile Institute for Appropriate Technology, or UNIFAT, surprised the country with its strong test scores.

"Nobody failed," Abitimo said modestly.

The next year, more students did well. As the school's reputation grew, so did its student body, now with 1,500 in nursery school to middle grades. Local authorities routinely send their children there.

About 1996, the town clerk gave Abitimo some land for a small sum and a monthly rent. With help from friends and U.S. donations, UNIFAT finally has a permanent, if unfinished, home.

"I'm very proud of that school," said Gulu schools inspector Hellen Nyeko. "They perform well in academics and in extracurricular activities."

The school has 14 classrooms in a brick-and-concrete complex. A cement veranda sometimes shelters "night commuters," children who travel from the villages and camps to sleep in greater safety from abductions.

On a hot day last November, more than 60 children sat elbow to elbow at desks listening to their teacher. They were lucky to have such a small class - higher grades have a higher teacher-to-pupil ratio.

The children have their own exercise books and pencils. Charts hang on a hook by the library: a map of Uganda's rivers; an addition table; a poster depicting the composition of blood.

More than anywhere else in the school, the library shows the continuing connections between Abitimo and her second home: Most of the books bear stamps from schools and churches around the Philadelphia region.

But not every child has a textbook, and the school has many needs. Teachers make their own materials and use real-life objects - just as in the school's first days.

Two hundred and fifty students are orphans who pay no tuition. Orphans or displaced youngsters often behave aggressively at first, says Abitimo, because they are used to having to take things by force. But they lack the self-confidence to do well.

"We want them to think beyond just following orders," Abitimo said.

Abitimo instructs her faculty to be patient with these children. Her understanding and desire to help her pupils distinguish her school, said the Gulu school inspector.

Fred Wokorach, 14, is one of the school's orphans.

His parents died around 1999; Lord's Resistance Army rebels took his oldest brother, who hasn't been heard from since 1996. Fred doesn't know what he would be doing if it weren't for Abitimo's school.

Here he plays soccer and enjoys English and social studies, which "reminds us about the things that happened long ago."

He also likes the moral lessons. The school "teaches us to be responsible and to be good pupils, to listen to what our parents tell us," he said. "What I can say is this: With God, everything is possible."

Abitimo traded teaching for being an administrator years ago. She spends her days talking with teachers, visiting municipal officials, assessing the school's needs, getting supplies, and soliciting donations.

She still teaches moral lessons to students. She still helps them with their problems. Any given day finds her with an arm around a girl's shoulder or talking gently to an energetic boy.

Child by child, Abitimo is building a new generation of northern Ugandans. With graying hair and a kindly face, she is her region's grandmother, a sage counsel and refuge.

John died in April 2000 at age 82 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He is buried in the yard of the family home outside of Gulu. The war makes it safe to visit there only during daylight.

She misses her husband and his support.

"I get frustrated when things are not going well. Before I would talk to John about problems. Now, everything is on me," she concedes.

Only lately does she think about retiring. The fighting has worsened again and has moved closer to Gulu, which now has a curfew.

Her youngest child, 30-year-old Anna-Mona Angwec Christian, would be delighted if her mother did slow down. "If I could take my mom away and just go with her to where no one would ever find her, even for a weekend and pamper her, I would.

"She's like Wonder Woman to me."

But Abitimo seems reluctant to relax until she expands to high school classes.

Then, she claims, she will find someone to carry on for her, a better fund-raiser who can give the school a stable future. She will visit Philadelphia to dote on her children and grandchildren, and to sing and dance and cry with her friends. Without those friends, she said, there would be no school in Gulu.

The friends will be glad to see her, too.

Says Rev. Murphey, "When I stand before the Lord God my maker with his sentries at the gate, and they say, 'Murph, I don't think you're going to make it,' I'm going to say, 'Where's my friend? She'll get me in.' "