Hope Made Real: The Story of Mama Arlene and the Children of Urukundo

By Arlene D Brown and Patricia D. Brown

The morning Arlene Brown read in her hometown newspaper about the abandoned children in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, she did what few retirees would ever consider doing. She joined with a mission group to make the long journey to Africa. Her memoir, Hope Made Real, is filled with rich experiences and courageous actions. Her writings reveal that the most important journeys we make can't be measured in miles, but in the strength, wisdom, and love found along the way.
Arlene is a deeply revolutionary woman who, in these pages, shares her wild and sometimes frightening adventures. She speaks with refreshing candor, about her own successes and mistakes. This inspiring "eye-opening" book shares all the ups and downs that such a life-changing decision entail. It is soul material, human and tragic, funny and touching, deeply spiritual.
In this book you will not only learn why Arlene gave up everything to travel to Africa, but what continues to drive her in her ongoing vision of a better kinder world. Woven throughout the pages, Arlene shares stories from her childhood that help the reader make sense of her life-changing decision. Her years of raising a family of five, working as a practical nurse, volunteering in the prison system, and her many years laboring in a high-tech factory suddenly come together. All of this, and none of this, prepared her for what was ahead.
Arlene's move to Rwanda, and what she believed would be her final chapter, was the beginning of a whole new book. With many chapters still to come, now at the age of ninety, her life continues to move in strange and wonderful directions. Saving the world may be out of her purview. But, with courage, tenacity and most of all love, Arlene continues to make a difference in the small undertaking allotted to her. When people ask her if she is a missionary, she tells them, "No". Instead she describes herself as, "a woman with a mission." Mama Arlene's quest to help repair the world happens to be in Muhanga, Rwanda—the home of Urukundo Learning Center.
The book draws in the reader as she tells of her escape from an erupting volcano, is smuggled out of the country with the aid of the United States Embassy and runs from angry African bees. Her story reads like a detective novel as she unravels the secrets that lie behind the façade of some of the early players. Hope Made Real is filled with memorable stories of the children whom she touched with her love and from whom she in turn received so much more. Eight pages of pictures illustrate her life from childhood to Founder of Urukundo Foundation and Executive Director of its primary school of over nine-hundred children, the Sewing Center to train seamstresses and tailors, as well as the Dental Clinic, farm and so much more.
Rarely do women take the risk to break away and begin a second chapter post-retirement. Honest and down-to-earth, without apology, she challenges others to answer their own calling to servant leadership. Mama Arlene's extraordinary story is a lightning rod to the head and heart stimulating us to get out of our easy chairs and challenges us to do something meaningful with our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098305475

Book preview

Copyright ©2020 by Arlene D. Brown and Patricia D. Brown

All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-09830-546-8 Ebook ISBN 978-1-09830-547-5

Printed in the United States of America. First Edition

DEDICATIONS

I dedicate this book of love (Urukundo) to:

All the people who have walked with me and helped me to know who I was, who I am, and who I am yet to become

Parents who raised me—Jacob and Ada and my vast extended family

My strong faithful supporters who always lift me up

My loyal staff and mamas who continue to make me proud

___________

To the loves of my life:

Teddy, Tricia, Jerry, Barbara, and Jacque—my precious jewels

All the children who have blessed my life…you know who you are

___________

To my mother from your daughter:

He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.

—Mom, You’re my hero.

You’re my Mother Theresa.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

PART 1: THE BEGINNING

Trip #1—Taking a Giant Step (1996)

Home Is Not What It Used to Be

A Penny for a Piggy

Make New Friends, Keep the Old

Trip #2—Trip Extraordinaire

Brush with Death

Rosamond Carr—a Role Model

Celebrity at Large

Trip #3—Leader of the Pack

Trip #4—Loneliness and Hunger

Days of Adjustment

You Get a Car!

Red Flag Warnings

Wanted Dead or Alive

PART 2: BEGINNING AGAIN

Founding a Home for Girls

A Place to Start: Divine, Lucia, Deborah, Lilliane, and Esperance

Best Performing: Deborah

I Did Not Die: Solange

Sisters Reunited: Florentine and Belise

Mama Are We Rich Now?: Belise

One Loving Grandparent: Dada

Enamored and Wedded: Anett

Boys Are Children Too: Amin, Claude, Abais, Bosco,

Diescor, Alexander, and Oliver

Clever Grandmother: Alexander

Breaker of Rules: Amin

Hungering for Education: Tresor

Two Homes for Aline to Molly

Space for Mama

Compassion for Baby Marian

Steven Will Run

Necessary Move

Bees Are Not All Honey

The Amused Policemen

Founding HopeMadeReal, INC

Extreme Motion Sickness: Divine

Location, Location

Top of the Mountain

Urukundo Is Real

Political Pros and Cons

Creating a Community of Spirit

Developing Self-Sufficiency

New Addition: Jean Paul

Babies on the Doorstep: David and Johnny

Out with the Old

One Lucky Boy: Luki

A Good Samaritan: Sarah and Rebekah

Sad Moto Ride: Soso

Miracle Child: Claudine

Testing Twins: Kenny and Kenilla

Prison Experience: Claude

Mission with a Purpose: Lilliane

Homecoming at Urukundo

Party for the President: Claude, Luki, and David

Death in Rwanda

Children Come in Spurts: Egide, Diane, Claude, Nelly, and Kavine

Wonders of Wonders

Mama’s House

Every Door Has a Key: Johnny and Kenilla

Lighting Strike

Visitors from Belgium

Boiling Water Pot

Tradition of My Own

I Can See!: Claudine

University Women and Nicky

Bright and Shining Star: Jacob

Last Babies: Jannette and Jason

Candles vs Solar: Nelly and Becca

Soso’s Promise and the Wedding Party

Perfect Birthday Celebration

Missing Money Mystery: Belise and Florentine

Mama Africa at Victory Home

Invisible Danger

The Dangerous Spit

Flower and Flour Holiday Confusion

Christmases Long Ago

The Hurt of Traditional Healers

Unbelievable Eighty-Four

Weddings Present and Past

Runaway Car vs Mama: Esperance

Dental Clinic Begins

Tom’s Sewing Center

Storms in Real Life

His Greed, Her Love

Because Someone Cared: Chantal

Honoring the President

Of Snakes and Worms

Mountain of 10,000 Faces

What is Heartbreak?

Keeping Up with Changes

Distressing Absences: Jacob

Our Extended School-Family

Some Final Thoughts

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

FOREWORD

I met Mama Arlene five years ago on March 27, 2015; it was my second day in Rwanda. My best friend, Kathy, and I were there to visit Kathy’s daughter, Lauren, who was working with the Peace Corps. Here’s what I wrote to begin my journal entry that day to summarize our experience meeting and visiting Mama: This day can be summed up in four words—the amazing Mama Arlene.

We spent that day touring her mountainside Urukundo Home for Children, just reveling in the smiles and the love. So much love. In fact, that’s what Urukundo means in the native language of Rwanda.

I’m going to let her tell you what brought her there. What I want to emphasize is when it all began, she was sixty-five, an age so many use as an excuse for slowing down.

We talked in the car yesterday on our ride from Harrisburg about the importance of living an impactful life. Mama Arlene has touched more lives in retirement than she has as a mother of five, nursing others, and a supervisor at a Sylvania plant. 

Rather than resting, she’s building lives. Along the way, she has battled a government directive that forced all but a handful of her kids to be placed in private residences. That includes the precocious Benita, whom we’ll tell you about.

And we’ll talk about Divine, whose picture is taped to my work computer to remind me there’s a reason (beyond paying my rent) that I come to work. We’ve gotten Divine through university, and I’m determined to help Mama help Divine realize her goal of enrolling in a flight school. We MUST find the money.

Again, let me emphasize this is all part of Mama Arlene’s SECOND act. As she said yesterday, Waiting to die is not an acceptable retirement for me.

Let us all be inspired to choose living and giving.

—Diane Mastrull,

The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News

Preface

I have been told that these are the twilight years of my life. So, why then are the lights so bright and the days so full? There is no twilight, only a bright sun shining through and a powerful vision that will not leave me. A vision that started as a small speck almost twenty-five years ago in a refugee camp in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo; it is a vision that now extends to the far reaches of Rwanda and all its children.

This book is my response to people who’ve said to me, You should write a book about your life and Urukundo Village. Several years ago I wrote A Small Pebble in a Big Pond that tells the story of my initial forays into Zaire and Kenya, but that book ends before the establishment of Urukundo. And a future book may be strictly my biography, but not this one. This book is primarily the story of Urukundo, meaning love in Kinyarwanda, the language spoken in Rwanda, and about the children, school, and community with whom I’ve worked.

When I sat down at my computer to begin to write, I thought it would be easy. It’s not. I plan to write somewhat, but not strictly, chronologically, allowing me the freedom to ramble. To be a storyteller. To go back and forward in time. You’ll find that intertwined with the stories of Urukundo children are a few of my own childhood memories. I discovered many parallels between my life in Rwanda and that in rural Pennsylvania. So, you’ll be reading a bit about my early life.

I realized there didn’t seem to be a good place to begin the story and I would have to die for there to be an end—and I am certainly not ready for that. There’s still too much to do. I find I am more excited for what the future holds. There is so much more I want to accomplish. Writing about these past couple decades has helped me see how far I’ve come, which gets me even more excited for the possibilities of the future.

In December 2020, I’ll turn ninety years old. I have no idea how that could be. I look in the mirror and sometimes don’t recognize the older face with its gentle wrinkles looking back at me. I don’t feel that old, but then I am not sure how ninety should feel. It may very well be a mystery solved only once I reach that milestone. It just goes to show, no matter what stage of life you’re in, that there’s always so much more to come.

The life I’m living now would have seemed an impossibility to me back in 1930. I was born a coal miner’s daughter during the Great Depression in Commodore, a small mining town in Indiana County, Pennsylvania. My mom, a farmer’s daughter, was the youngest of twelve kids and lived to be ninety-six years old. My dad, a coal miner, died of black lung at fifty-one.

Growing up, I’d had my fill of children. I really didn’t like kids much. Perhaps this was because throughout my own childhood and teen years, I was always looking after children. And as the oldest of six siblings, three sisters and three brothers, I was responsible for their actions because, I should have known better.

My brothers were Allen, twenty-one months younger than me, David, five years younger than me, and Robert Jacob, the youngest who was named for Dad. I’m sad when I think that they are all dead now. I don’t recommend being the oldest in a large family, but you don’t get to choose when to be born or when to die. I think you should go out in the order you came in, but it doesn’t always work that way. All three left this earth long before I thought possible. I truly miss them. My three sisters Joanne, Emma Louise, and Sherry are all well and still living in Pennsylvania. Seems the women in my family inherit their long lives from my mother.

As many have witnessed, my love for children was revived. I believe this reemergence came from my Welsh father who sang and played with us kids. I’m thankful Dad kept us in food and with a roof over our heads. I just wish he hadn’t had to do so by working long, dark hours underground in the coal mines. I attribute my strength and determination to my German mother. She was the solid disciplinarian who held the family together. There was never much money, but we kids were well fed and knew we were loved.

Wow, 1930, when I was born is a long time ago. In my first sixty-five years I got an education, attended nursing school, raised a family, earned a living, and became a grandmother and then a great-grandmother. For over twenty-five years I’d lived with an alcoholic husband whom I divorced twice, and then married another dependent man with major health problems who died in 1992. I’d birthed five children. Their offspring have produced seventeen grandchildren, happily some from blended families, and those seventeen have blessed me with twenty-six great-grandchildren, and at last count, four great-great-grandchildren. I have it all. Many women my age know exactly what I am talking about. I am, like many others at my stage in life, an older woman with a young soul. I think myself very ordinary, to say the least.

At age sixty-three, I was eager to retire. I’d sleep late, shop, travel where and when I pleased, eat out, and take life easy. An ideal way to live. I would be content, sit back, and rest. I’d earned it. I wanted to travel, and I did. I saw the Holy Land of the Middle East and the rolling hills of England and France. I covered twenty-one of the contiguous United States, including the glaciers of Alaska and the islands of Hawaii. I enjoyed the sights of Israel, Canada, Europe. Traveling was fun, but one day I reached my limit. It was no longer satisfying.

I wish I could say my decision to leave it all behind came in one tremendous ah-ha moment. But, in reality the vision to live life differently came in a series of little epiphanies. Three ah-ha moments stand out in my mind and I’ll share them here with you. The first was on Christmas 1995. I attended the annual Christmas Eve candlelight church service and entertained my usual multitude of family members on Christmas Day. Christmas night I sat and cried, questioning what it all meant—the excessive gifts, gluttonous meal, and deluge of cast-off wrappings.

The second epiphany occurred while attending a women’s mission school with my daughter Patricia. I signed up for lessons on the Hebrew Scriptures, the book of Ecclesiastes, and sat down in class not expecting much, if anything. But on the second day, as we read together the words attributed to King Solomon, an alarm went off in my soul. Solomon’s prophetic writing crashed in on me. What kind of life is worth living? it asked.

What occurred next was not my usual mode of participation in groups. My heart opened and I shared the hopelessness and heartache I’d been feeling—the need for something more. The women responded, not with judgment, but with compassion and love. Then, one by one, they too shared their stories of broken homes and lives, sudden deaths, and financial disasters. We were sisters. They gave me a gift. These women saw in me the promise of a future mission that would give my life new meaning.

The third epiphany came in 1996, when I was sixty-five as I returned from my first foray; a three-month stint working with the displaced children in the Goma and Uvaria refugee camps, Zaire. The terminal in the small hometown airport of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, was filled with family and friends and a homemade banner that read, WELCOME HOME. Tears of relief were shed, and hugs of comfort and warm kisses were extended. What an honor. I felt like a celebrity.

In the midst of the celebration, my granddaughter Becki said tearfully, Gram, don’t you ever do this again. I was thankful for her warm embrace and I held her tight. But promising to never return to Africa was an assurance I could not give. I had changed and there was no going back.

I was tearful and sad about what I’d seen and witnessed. I was angry, somewhat disillusioned, and frustrated with the waste and the luxury of my own home and country after seeing such poverty. Before my African experience, I’d complained about high taxes, even though I knew that my school taxes provided public school for all children. Those same children complained because they didn’t want to attend classes, whereas the refugee children would have given anything for an education. I am blessed to be a United States citizen. But oh, I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful to share just a small portion of our public education system with this developing country?

The permanent move to Rwanda, Africa was a bit much. Looking back at my decision I wonder if I was in my right mind? My idea of Africa came from the movies starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan, Me Tarzan. You Jane; I thought of Africa as a land of thick jungles and ferocious wild animals. In my day, Africa was considered too far away, too remote, too different. Why would I choose to leave the comforts of the States to live in a country with few flush toilets, scarce electricity, occasional running water, and a dearth of paved roads? It certainly wasn’t because I needed someone to mother. I had plenty of children and grandchildren already. Yet I questioned what more life could offer. My days were already full, but discontent stirred inside me. I needed more. My journey with a new life purpose began in 1996 in the country of Zaire. But the end of my journey would be in Rwanda.

In the coming weeks and months many more small epiphanies followed, until one day it became clear. There was something more. That something more turned out to be the children of Rwanda.

Let me give you, who may not know, a quick summary to help you understand why I went to Goma and Uvaria in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, to work with children in 1996. A dehumanizing genocide devastated neighboring Rwanda in 1994. Much has been written about the genocide and the historic events leading up to it. Eight hundred thousand to one million people were slaughtered in one hundred days. The capital, Kigali, lay in ruins; many towns and villages consisted of little more than destroyed houses and buildings, and dazed, traumatized survivors. The perpetrators fled, mostly west, to the Congo. Some militants fled to regroup; other people feared retaliation for the horrors inflicted during the genocide. The Western world, which had largely turned its back on Rwanda in its hour of need, finally responded by helping those fleeing the country. I for one didn’t understand how these adult refugees were the perpetrators, and not the victims. Yet in this case, as always, innocent children suffered the most.

I started Urukundo Home for Children in 2006 to help children orphaned because of the aftermath of the genocide. Many of the children were without parents or were abandoned because the parent could no longer care for them.

Today Urukundo is my life. People ask me if I’m a missionary. I tell them no. I’m a woman with a mission. An important difference. Saving the world is out of my purview. That’s too big a job for one person. But, I can make a difference in the small undertaking allotted to me. My quest to help repair the world happens to be in Muhanga, Rwanda, an hour or so south of the capital of Kigali, depending on weather and traffic.

So, as you continue to read, forgive me if I ramble. Just chalk it up to old age. My thanks to you who are reading this. I’m guessing this book probably won’t make the bestseller list, but you, my friends and family, may be kind and read it. Rambling on, I wonder how many times one person can start a new chapter in life and make it more adventurous than the last. The permanent move to Rwanda, and what I believed would be my final chapter, was the beginning of a whole new book with many chapters to come as my life continues to move in strange and wonderful directions.

January 2020

PART 1

THE BEGINNING

Trip #1—Taking a Giant Step (1996)

In our final approach to the airfield, our pilot received reports of imminent danger. Our plane swiftly climbed up and flew us back to the safety of Nairobi. For two weeks we waited for clearance. During our layover I had time to once again think about what I was doing. Why was I going to Africa? It was true that I’d been a bit lost since the end of my working life. I’d always found fulfillment in helping others. Now I longed for a new purpose in my retirement years. Refugee camps in Africa seemed a good place to start. Could this be it? Was there a mission I had yet to fulfill? I had no idea. All I knew was that I had to find out.

This was in 1996, the year I volunteered with a non-governmental organization (NGO), the General Board of Global Ministries’ short-term mission team, who were traveling to refugee camps in Zaire. From my home in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, I flew to New York City to join the United Methodist group for the flight to Nairobi, Kenya. From there we would travel to Goma in Zaire, a county of Central Africa that is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is the second largest country in Africa and the eleventh largest in the world, with a population of over seventy-five million.

After seemingly endless days, word finally came that the danger had passed, and we could now move to Goma. We were instructed that our mission was to aid the Rwandan refugees who had fled into this neighboring country seeking safety. The experience was an eye-opener. The refugee camps were devastating. I was assigned to work at two—Mugunga camp and Goma tent village camp. People in the Mugunga camp were dying of hunger and thirst. Many slept in the dirt with no covering. Others were sick with fever and disease.

The Goma tent village camp, where I mostly worked, was primarily for the street children of Goma. Here we worked as best as we could. Some of these little ones were lost; separated from their families. Others were orphaned; their parents had been killed in the genocide or had died in the camps in the aftermath. For three months I worked with the team whose mission was to feed hungry mouths, teach school lessons, and distribute clothing.

The urgent plight of the children touched my heart in ways I did not expect. I loved them. I found Mugga, a three-year-old, wandering around wearing only a shirt. She was so thin, and when I offered her a bowl of food, she slowly scooped the porridge into her mouth as if she had no energy. She didn’t. Ophra, a mother of six, came to the tent and timidly approached me with her hands folded as if in prayer begging for something for her children to eat. Women and children are the victims in any conflict, and these had lost everything, including their husbands, fathers, or entire families.

I served with The United Methodist Committee on Relief. Other relief organizations included Food for the Hungry, Doctors Without Borders, and many others. Each supplied a service. The aid was in the form of food for the camps, although never quite enough, and some medical help, again not enough. But what little existed was better than none at all.

On the second night of our stay at our appointed guesthouse, Pastor Paul Anjaka from The United Methodist congregation of Goma visited us. He and a number of women from his congregation welcomed us.

Anjaka also introduced another clergyman, Reverend Kaberuka Jupa is the pastor of the Mugunga refugee camp. He is in charge of the vulnerable, Anjaka said.

I learned the vulnerable were the elderly, sick, maimed and crippled, widows, pregnant women, victims of rape, and orphaned children from the genocide.

Jupa was a man of God. He was most sincere and told us how he was teaching young men to be pastors. He was involved in the government’s plan to aid the return of the refugees to Rwanda and begin the healing from the genocide. I greatly admired Reverend Jupa and the work he was doing.

Later in the week we met with John Logan. Logan was serving as chief of Field Support Service in the United Nations Department of Safety and Security and is an ex-US Navy officer.

John warned us about those with whom we were working.

"Refugees are dangerous, desperate people who are survivors. They have survived because