Orphanage founder to speak

Devine is 12 years old, and under a fat winter jacket, she’s wearing a flimsy, sparkly dress a lot of girls would envy. Her necklace reads “Princess,” and as she sits in the lobby of the Davenport Hotel playing with a digital camera, softly singing to herself, she looks like any other young girl.
Yet she’s far from home. An orphan from Rwanda, Devine is visiting Spokane with her “Mama,” Arlene Brown, who’ll give a presentation tonight at the Bing Crosby Theater about Rwanda and the orphanage she runs there.
“God has been training me for this job for a long time,” said Brown, 77, a mother of five, grandmother of 16 and great-grandmother of 13 – and that’s not counting the 37 orphans she takes care of at the Urukundo Home for Children in the Muhanga district of Rwanda. “My first child was Devine. That doesn’t mean she’s the oldest at the orphanage, it just means that she was the first to come to us.”
Born and raised in the small town of Commodore, Pa., Brown has a background working as a nurse, raising her family and working as a business manager for GTE Sylvania. She was also a substitute teacher.
In 1996, she went to Africa for the first time on a missionary trip through the Methodist Church.
Upon her return to the U.S. she began collecting baby bottles, medicine and other supplies needed in what was then called Zaire but today is known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“I always knew I was going to come back to Africa,” she said, and in 2002 she returned with another missionary team from the United Christian Parish of Reston, Va.
At the time, Rwanda was slowly recovering from decades of tribal conflict, genocide, war and chaos. Brown raised $100,000 from 2002 to 2004 and built an orphanage and a school.
“There is a lot of corruption in Africa, and in my case it developed into a situation where I wasn’t safe and couldn’t work with the people at the school,” Brown said. “It was heartbreaking for me, but I couldn’t work with what was going on.”
Though she returned to the United States for a spell she didn’t give up on her personal mission in Africa.
“I couldn’t rest,” she said. “God was not done with me.”
She returned to Rwanda and to the capital, Kigali, where she started the Urukundo Home for Children.
There are an estimated 1 million orphans in Rwanda, and many have no family because of war or HIV/AIDS.
“Initially, we just looked for a small house,” Brown said, “but we ended up with a big house, with two apartments in the back and more bedrooms than a little woman like me would need – so I thought this was the perfect place to start a home for girls.”
Today, Urukundo also takes boys. And though it’s still mainly housed in rented buildings, Brown has started building the first of 10 planned houses.
“We can build a small house for $25,000,” she said. “I hope to build 10 houses that can house 10 children and a mama each.” She’s already constructed a chicken farm and a basketball court for the children. A community center is next on the list.
Brown’s trip to the U.S. is focused on fundraising, but she says it’s her faith that has gotten her this far. “I do some heavy-duty praying,” she said.