Joe and Julianne Kurowski knew they had found their mission when they met Adhiambo, a very small five-year-old girl with a very large tumor above her right eye, a mix of fear and sadness enveloping her face.

An orphan left behind by parents who had died of AIDS, Adhiambo had been brought to a clinic near Kisumu Town in western Kenya where the Kurowskis worked as volunteers. This little girl who immediately captured their hearts had been living in the bush country with a destitute grandmother.

“We just looked at her and said, ‘Let’s take her,’” said Joe Kurowski. “It was a no-brainer.”

It was March of 2000 and the Kurowskis, members of Holy Trinity Parish in El Dorado Hills, had begun a four-year mission of love that would take hundreds of Kenyan orphans off the streets, enroll them in schools and give them a future.

A former Franciscan Sister of Penance and Christian Charity, Julianne Kurowski has been making it a habit to serve to poor for some time now.

She worked for several years as a woman religious at the Frances Center in Portland, Ore.

“Serving the poor was our charism, working for the underdog, the marginalized, the poor,” Kurowski said. “I’ve always loved doing that.”

In the late 1980s Kurowski left her religious community but not her calling to serve the poor. She began working at a network of retreat centers in California for the Sisters of St. Joseph.

Then she met and married Joe in 1999, having discovered he shared her dream of doing missionary work in Africa. Through her friendship with the Sisters of St. Joseph, Julianne Kurowski received financial support for the trip to Kenya from Global Education Associates, a New York-based organization committed to working with the poor on projects to improve their lives and economic well-being.

“We just began to look into it and Kenya came to us so fast, you could not believe it,” Kurowski said. “God sent us there.”

Their home in Kenya, located in a Catholic hospital compound, was provided by the Archdiocese of Kisumu. From the beginning, the Kurowskis concentrated their efforts on a Global Education Association project assisting AIDS orphans.

They began with Adhiambo.

“We took her to doctors everywhere in Kenya, to specialists in the capital city of Nairobi, and nobody knew how to do surgery on the tumor on her eye,” Julianne Kurowski said.

Once doctors determined the tumor was not malignant, Adhiambo was enrolled in school, initially cared for by a Kenyan woman and then moved into the Kurowski’s home.

Julianne Kurowski, who had been appointed director of the orphan children’s program by the Archdiocese of Kisumu, knew before she arrived in Kenya that 500 people died there daily of AIDS. But nothing prepared the Kurowskis for what they saw on the streets in Kisumu Town.

“Your car is surrounded by 40 ‘street boys,’ children and youth whose parents had died. They follow you begging for food,” Julianne Kurowski said. “Suddenly I knew each step of the way what I was to do.”

What she did was literally one by one take boys ranging in age from seven to 24 off the streets and enroll them in boarding schools where they would have a place to live, be educated and have three meals a day.

Julianne Kurowski explained the brutal pattern which has left 700,000 AIDs orphans in Kenya: the father typically dies first followed by the mother, who is often survived by six or seven children.

“These are kids coming to the streets for food,” she said.

She organized a survey of one of the larger parishes in the archdiocese which found there were 5,000 orphans. She then formed a community-based organization led by a team of 14 Kenyan men and women whose task was to take orphans from the streets and put them in school.

“The idea was to get the Kenyans to help their own people as much as they could,” said Julianne Kurowski, who raised funds to enroll 900 children in school.

Women in the parish were commissioned to make the uniforms and collect school supplies.

The focus of Joe Kurowski’s work with Global Education Associates projects was to bring clean, safe and affordable water to people in three areas in the Archdiocese of Kisumu. He found funding to initiate a project which decontaminated water in Lake Victoria, making it safe to drink for 30,000 people. With his leadership, a new well was dug for another community.

By collaborating with a Catholic Relief Services’ program which lends money to Third World countries to start businesses, he started two community banks owned by local people which made low-interest loans to small business owners.

Three years into their work in Kenya, the Kurowskis were running out of time in their efforts to locate a hospital or doctor to do the surgery on the tumor that continued to grow around Adhiambo’s eye. Finally in December 2002 a doctor at a children’s hospital in Atlanta, GA agreed.

“I told Joe I had to take Adhiambo to Nairobi now,” Julianne Kurowski said. “We scheduled surgery on Dec. 13, the Feast of St. Lucy, patroness of eyesight.”

She and Adhiambo flew to Atlanta, leaving Joe behind to oversee the parish project of making uniforms for 900 children who would for the first time be attending school in the Kisumu Archdiocese.

The operation was successful and as an added blessing Adhiambo was baptized and made her first Communion during her two-month recuperation at a convent run by the Good Shepherd Sisters. Kurowski and Adhiambo then returned to Kenya.

The project of moving orphans, 11 of whom they informally adopted, off the streets and into schools had been launched and was now supported by a trained team of parishioners.

“We had told the kids the game plan is we care for you and educate you and will give you some kind of trade, but as soon as you graduate you must get a job and be on your own,” Julianne Kurowski said.

One of the boys wrote a letter of thanks to the Kurowskis “for putting in our minds the hope of success.”

The Kenyan missionaries departed from Kisumu Town in July 2003 leaving Adhiambo behind to complete her school year. In December, they returned for the child who had become their daughter, renamed Maurine, and moved into a home in Cameron Park.

Now a fourth grader attending an elementary school in Cameron Park, Maurine has met the considerable challenges of adapting to a new culture and a second surgery with amazing spirit and strength. She enjoys ballet and swimming lessons, shows early signs of artistic talent and has found a best friend in school.

On Sept. 29 she went to El Dorado Superior Court in Placerville where the Kurowskis signed adoption papers making Maurine officially the daughter she had been all along.

“Everything about her is just miraculous,” Julianne Kurowski said.

To make a donation to the African Orphans of Kenya, checks made payable to Christian Community Foundation No. 9092 may be sent to Julianne Kurowski, 3718 Antilles Dr., Cameron Park CA 95682.

Copyright © 2004 Diocese of Sacramento - All Rights Reserved