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Not unlike other teachers, Walter Johnson High School special education assistant Juliana Ziorklui has spent each summer vacation since 1999 working.

Instead of taking classes, working on lesson plans or picking up odd jobs, though, she has traipsed through villages, orphanages and churches in her native Ghana, giving back to a country that so desperately needs it.

"If I don't go, who will do it?" the 61-year-old Gaithersburg resident said. "I use all my money to go every year, and sometimes I can't afford it. But someone has to go."

Each year, Ziorklui solicits donations from across the county, at Walter Johnson and her church, Gaithersburg Presbyterian. She'll literally take anything. Past hauls have included computers, clothes, pencils, paper, even a refrigerator.

Then every May she packs up whatever she has — this past year she collected 215 boxes of supplies —and heads to Ghana to distribute the items. While there, she spends a month traveling and distributing the items, sometimes to schools in need of uniforms, sometimes to a leprosy clinic in need of pencils.

And in a country where the average Ghanaian makes less than $700 a year, her help is needed.

"I am so impressed by her work and how much she gives of herself," said Kristin McKenney, a colleague at Walter Johnson. "She's selfless."

Ziorkuli left Ghana in 1993, after raising four children and teaching elementary school in the country for 20 years. She still has family in the country, who she visits each year "after I finish my duties."

In her classroom at Walter Johnson, Ziorkuli has stacks of pictures from her travels, of children in Ghana wearing old Walter Johnson field hockey jerseys, or a stack of computers waiting to be used at a clinic.

The jerseys are a testament to the support the school has given her over the years.

"When I first came here, I saw the P.E. teachers throwing away old clothes," she said. "I said ‘Why are you doing that?'"

Since then, multiple students have helped Ziorkuli collect items each year as part of their senior projects, and coaches have let her know when the teams are getting new uniforms, sending the old ones on a 5,000-mile flight to Ghana.

"I think a lot of times we think of community service on a local, or maybe national level," said Christopher Garran, principal at Walter Johnson. "But this really gives the students a global perspective, and shows them how their work can help people worldwide."

And while Ziorkuli has the luxury of being able to spend two months in the country each summer, it does come at a cost. Ziorkuli buys her own ticket to Africa each summer, and it costs between $5,000 and $10,000 to ship the boxes to Ghana.

Her next project, though, will cost even more. Ziorkuli hopes to build a compound outside of Accra, Ghana's capital, where she can house teenage mothers, disabled children, and orphans.

"I'll have to buy the plot, though, and it's looking like $30,000 to $40,000," she said.