Saturday - Urukundo Home for Children

Our drive out to Gitarama was on surprisingly empty roads, and it wasn’t just because it was early on a Saturday morning. It turns out that the last Saturday of every month is Umuganda (community day), which means that everyone is supposed to spend the morning making their community a cleaner, better place…in essence, it’s a Make a Difference Day. Shops and restaurants are almost all closed (except for the major hotels), and people aren’t even allowed to drive on the streets without a special permit. We told our driver, William, that if we had known, we would have set up our schedule so that we could have participated in Umuganda, too. So when he was stopped by the police twice during our 90-minute drive to Gitarama, he laughingly told the police that we wanted to be part of Umuganda as he showed them his permit. They just smiled and waved us on.

Just as I anticipated, our day at the Urukundo Home for Children was the highlight of the whole journey for me. Meeting Mama Arlene Brown, the founder of this ministry, was like catching up with an old friend (and I don’t mean her age, although this energetic, hard-to-keep-up with ball of fire is 78 years old!). She walked us around the 8 acre campus that less than a year ago was simply 5 separate pieces of land on the mountainside. There are buildings everywhere now, with the plans for more to be built very soon.

In April, 2006, Arlene began her home for girls with just 1 girl, Divine. The home she was renting didn’t have a possibility for housing both girls and boys, and because (as she jokingly says) boys are children too, in early 2007, she rented a second house. Soon after, in May, 2007, the district authorities brought her 7 street boys. Within a short period of time, they were starting to run out of space, so the next step was to purchase land to build what they’d need. On the day that they were signing papers to purchase the land, others kept coming offering to sell her some of their land, too, so in one day, she purchased 5 parcels of land. It is almost unheard of to complete a land transaction in one day, so to complete 5 land transactions in one day is so miraculous, it’s almost laughable.

At the beginning of this year, the landlord informed Arlene that the rent on the house where the boys were living was going to triple in price, which pushed Arlene's team into action for building the boys’ home. Kicking into high gear, they designed what they needed to house the boys, and by April, (in just 3 months) it was built. Since then, they have also built the small house where Mama Arlene stays, which also functions as the library and the gathering space for the children. They built the “kitchen”, which has a wood oven and stove for cooking the meals each day, they have almost completed the girls’ home (the girls will move in next week), and they are also in the process of building a guest house for the work teams that will be coming to help with this ever-expanding ministry. They have built a stable for the 3 cows that they are raising to provide milk for the children, and a chicken house for the 500 chickens that provide eggs for them to use for the children as well as to sell in the community. In 3 months, the roasters (chickens that are eaten as meat) will be sold in the market, and they will then purchase more roasters so this can become an income-generating project. They have planted a large vegetable garden and a banana orchard to supply some of the food that they’ll use to feed all these kids.

The school year goes from January through October, which means the kids have just begun their 2 month school holiday. Yesterday, the boys decided that they needed a project, so unbeknownst to any of the staff, they started taking the mud bricks from a building project that had been torn down, and they started building their own “house”. Because they’ve been watching all the construction that has been going on over the past 10 months, the boys had a general idea of how to go about this project, and it’s pretty amazing to think that they have the ingenuity to create a clubhouse of sorts, and that they are doing this all on their own.

To see how much has been accomplished at the Urukundo Home for Children, and taking into consideration that all of this has been done through manual labor (no bulldozer for clearing the land and leveling the mountain, no electric saws or drills for building, etc), it is really an unbelievable story. I especially loved the part about the bricks that they are using, which they are purchasing from a woman’s organization for widows of the genocide. The widows of the genocide were so grateful for the first order of bricks, which gave them enough money to get a bigger truck, that when Arlene needed more bricks but didn’t have the money to pay for them yet, they brought her the bricks she needed and told her that she could pay them when she had the money.

The Urukundo Home for Children hadn’t been planning on taking in babies, but this summer, the police brought her an infant that had been abandoned in the bushes, so Mama Arlene has 4-month old little David in addition to the 16 boys and 21 girls that she and her staff care for.

They continue to dream big. Their plan is to build a medical clinic on the property, and they would also like to purchase a separate piece of land to begin a goat farm and beehive colony for an income-generating opportunity for genocide widows. In addition to providing for all the children at Urukundo Home for Children, Hope Made Real (the non-profit organization that Arlene and others created to be the “umbrella” for her work in Rwanda), also provides scholarships for 250 children from desperately poor families to go to government-run schools, provides assistance to HIV widows and their affected families, and brings in food for prisoners. Prisoners without families have no one else to bring in their meals, and meals are not provided by the prisons. Someday, she’d also love to build an elementary school and secondary school, because education is such an important piece in bringing hope to these children.

Arlene’s ministry here has been totally built on faith that God will provide, but there are times (like now), when the struggling global economy is deeply impacting the amount of support that they are receiving. Although she is using her social security income to continue to live in Rwanda, it definitely isn’t enough to supplement when the donations run low for running Urukundo Home. I promised her that we would continue to pray for Hope Made Real and the work that God has called them to do.

Looking to the future, Arlene has surrounded herself with a staff of Rwandans who care for the children and help run the home. Her chief administrator, John, will be returning to school in January so that he can get his degree in business administration. Assuming that she’ll live to be 110, but knowing that at 78 she won’t be around forever, she is making sure that if anything ever happens to her, this work can continue without a glitch.

We ended our day together by taking a drive to King David Academy in Kigali. I had written to Arlene last month to let her know that we were wanting to do something special to honor our Sunday School teachers and nursery volunteers, so our idea was to provide a scholarship in their honor for one of her kids to go to secondary school. Secondary school is grades 7-12, and it is almost always a boarding school. She chose Anett to be the recipient of this scholarship, but hadn't told Anett anything about this. During our lunch with the girls yesterday, Mama Arlene made the announcement that Anett would be going to the King David Academy starting in January. Anett was stunned and overwhelmed. She came with us for the 90-minute drive to the academy so that she could see where she will be living and going to school next semester. By the time we finished our tour of the academy, Anett had a stunning smile that lit up her whole face.

Arlene voiced her hope that all five girls who have just completed primary school this month will be able to join Anett at King David in January. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

This was the best day!!!!