❒ Benicia residents to dedicate wells, visit schools in Uganda

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

If you’ve ever had occasion to work with Benicia Unified School District — or if your kids go there — you probably know Betty Jensen, chief assistant to the superintendent.

But Jensen also wears another hat: mission coordinator at Northgate Christian Fellowship.

On Monday, Jensen will be wearing that second hat when she joins 16 other Benicia residents — including her husband, Northgate Pastor Ken Jensen — on a mission to Africa.

The two-week mission to work on a nursery school and dedicate wells will be Pastor Jensen’s fifth to the southeastern African nation of Uganda, which lies directly west of Kenya.

But Betty is traveling to Uganda for the first time.

“I actually said that I would never go, because it’s harsh,” she said. “But I was the mission’s coordinator at our church, and I just felt like, ‘How can I be talking about this when I’ve never been there? It would be so much better if I had been there and seen it firsthand.’ So I just decided to go.

“At first I was apprehensive, then I was scared. Now I’m really excited about it.”

The Jensens have a deep connection to Uganda: They’ve sponsored three orphans there through the nonprofit Hope4Kids International.

“When you sponsor an orphan through Hope4Kids, these are children who sometimes have a mother, but they are considered orphans because the father has died of AIDS,” Jensen said.

Sponsoring a child through Hope4Kids means someone takes in the mother and child, Jensen said. The sponsorship also pays for food, a mosquito net, a school uniform — “the only way they can attend school” — and access to medical attention.

But that’s not all. Perhaps most importantly, “They get a goat every year so that when they are of age they have something to barter with,” Jensen said.

Of the three orphans the Jensens have sponsored, she said, one is now in a college boarding school. “We’ve had him since he was 11. We now pay for him to go to boarding school.”

But for the Jensens and the rest of the mission, this trip is not merely a chance to catch up.

They’ll be rolling up their sleeves and getting to work.

After two flights of a combined 20 hours and a six-hour bus ride, the group — which includes five teenagers — will arrive in Tororo, a town in eastern Uganda.

They’ll use a hotel in Tororo as their base, going out from there each day to try to accomplish a long list of activities.

“One day we’re going to visit 400 Karamojong kids. They are nomadic children who have no family, nothing,” Jensen said.

The missionaries will also visit a nursery school to work with the children there, and to do some work on the school itself. And they’ll attend a dedication of wells that Northgate helped raise the money to dig — which Jensen said will be a big celebration.

“It’s like someone getting married. It’s a huge celebration. The kids sing and dance. It’s a really big deal because they’re so excited to get the water,” she said.

Northgate also has sponsored a village in Uganda, called Bukaya. “We built a medical clinic there, we drilled a fresh water well, we provided a pastor and a church for them,” Jensen said. “We’re going to go there and distribute blankets and school supplies, and work on anything that needs work done.”

In addition to some clinic work and other visits, the missionaries hope to finish their trip with one outing for themselves: a safari in Queen Elizabeth National Game Park.

But, Jensen said, the one saying everyone will try to keep in mind while they are in Uganda: “TIA — This Is Africa.”

“Which means that at any moment your plans could completely change,” she said with a laugh. “So you might think you are going to a clinic today and then they’ll say, ‘TIA! We’re going to do something else.’”

Whatever they do, she said, they’ll do it with an eye to help the people they encounter.

Hope4Kids, Jensen said, was established to give poor children the things they need, “but also to give them hope and some sense of confidence, to give them their basic needs and not feel so run down.

“The people in Uganda say that they pray for us in the United States that we will be successful because they know that we will give that back to them, and help them.”