Betty Makes Local News ...Article from Idaho State JOurnal

Ugandan teacher visits
  Woman serves as preschool intern at Grace Lutheran School
  BY JOHN O’CONNELL
    joconnell@journalnet.com  

     POCATELLO — Betty Wasswa has been amazed by the inordinate amount of attention and resources lavished upon dogs and the abundance of salad bars in America.
   The petite Ugandan woman, here to visit Grace Lutheran School, has also discovered she possesses a $1,300 smile — quite literally. At an April 23 auction for Grace Lutheran, the organizers hosted a mini-auction to benefit the preschool in Jinja, Uganda, that Wasswa founded. Thirteen people immediately made $100 bids on the only item she had to sell, her smile.  
   But when Wasswa returns home on May 28, she’ll take with her something far more important than stories of happy experiences. She’ll be joined by a group of residents from the Grace Lutheran community, each packing pounds of medicine and food specially engineered for malnourished children.
   They’ll have enough bags of dried high-protein casserole to provide a daily vitamin-packed meal to all 88 children at her Rock of Ages preschool for an entire year.
   “It will be like gold,” Wasswa said of the food, donated by K2 the Church in Salt Lake City.  
   At best, students at her orphanage, which caters to the offspring of prostitutes, can count on a small snack at school and one meal each day.
   “They are not all that healthy,” Wasswa said.
   The group will also come with a sufficient supply of antimalarials to vaccinate everyone at the   preschool, 500 students at the nearby elementary school and several patients at an area hospital. Wasswa estimates about half of the population at her preschool has malaria.
   As Wasswa explained, Uganda is a country where people don’t have many of the things people take for granted in the U.S. Wasswa is married to an egg and poultry farmer.
   In Uganda, the average person must work three days to earn enough money to buy a dozen eggs.
   With no refrigeration and few stoves available to Ugandans, it takes about seven hours to make dinner, Wasswa said. Preparing chicken, for example, starts with butchering the   animal, and the food is cooked on coals.
   Children love to play soccer, but balls are a luxury few families can afford. Instead, they often   play with a ball made of banana leaves. She’s certain the children back home will no doubt appreciate the stash of real soccer balls the Grace Lutheran students purchased for them. The children in Jinja will also receive 192 dry-erase boards and dry-erase markers, which should prove to be a useful commodity in a place where school’s can’t afford paper.
   Wasswa has spent time working as a preschool intern since arriving at Grace Lutheran on April 22. During the next couple of weeks, she’ll teach the older students about her country’s culture; she’s already offered lessons in counting to 10 in Lugandan   .
   At one point, Wasswa began weeping. Gabe Flicker, executive director of Grace Lutheran, thought she might have   been homesick for her husband and three children, but she set the record straight.
   “I just can’t imagine how many blessings I’m having,” she said.
   The group bound for Uganda will include about 30 people, including teachers, local medical experts and members of the Grace Lutheran parish and a few other churches. They’ll be leaving in two waves on May 28 and June 4, with each group staying in Uganda for about two weeks.
   “We’ve raised about $75,000 just to get our bodies there,” Flicker said, adding Delta Airlines has agreed to let each passenger carry an extra bag without charge in order to accommodate a larger volumes of supplies.  
   One of the many sponsors of the trip has been Maag Prescription and Medical Supply. Robert Raschke, Maag pharmacy manager, explained it costs just $2 to vaccinate a child for an entire year for malaria.