As mentioned in the Dorelo post, Townsend is another of the three hostels sharing a large, common yard area, including Dorelo. I wasn’t planning on describing any of the others besides Dorelo, but on the Saturday before we left, July 5, Charlie and Amie decided to accept an opportunity they had to move from Dorelo into Townsend.
Townsend is a newer and nicer house than Dorelo, with some limitations. Dorelo has a nice, big porch with open onto the yard where all the kids congregate and play. From that porch, you can see the Brown’s trampoline, the dead tree in the yard which kids climb on, the rope swing down between Teen Manor and Townsend, and the basketball court. You also have a nice view of the “Upper Circle” – the street Dorelo is on, and the large open field within the circle where volleyball was being played a couple of days while we were there. Townsend’s porch is small, more of a large landing than a porch, and doesn’t overlook these areas. Townsend is also two-story, so you have to climb stairs to get into the main living area. The rec room is downstairs, so kids using the rec room cannot be easily ‘chaperoned’ as they can in Dorelo, where the rec room is adjacent to the living room, with window openings between the two rooms.
On the plus side, however, Townsend has seven student bedrooms as opposed to Dorelo’s six, and all seven of these are in the student hallways, whereas one of Dorelo’s student bedrooms is in a separate hallway, which means the folks staying in that room have to walk into a “common” area to go from the bedroom to the bathroom. Due to the Townsend’s arrangement, there is a door that can be swung and locked to place one of the seven bedrooms in either the girls’ wing or the boys’ wing, depending on the requirements. There are advantages for the Brown family, outlined below, but Charlie was very reluctant to make a decision based on “selfish” reasons, and the additional capacity for temporary housing of students who might stay for just a week or so was the deciding factor in his decision to allow his family to move into Townsend.
Another major advantage of Townsend is the family living quarters. Dorelo’s family quarters is almost “shotgun-house” in style – you enter thru a small office which Krista used as her bedroom, walk straight through that into the small living room area, and then straight back there into a small bedroom shared by the four younger Brown children. Also off the Dorelo family quarters living room is the entrance to the
master bedroom, through which you access the family quarters bathroom. In Townsend, however, you enter the family quarters into a spacious living room, which is currently doubling as the common computer room/library with a small area for a TV, and pass through to a hallway off of which the bathroom and two children’s bedrooms are located. Each of these two bedrooms is larger than the bedroom shared by Chase, Jeff, Kate, and Phillip, and is probably as large as the “master” bedroom in Dorelo. At the end of the hallway is the large master bedroom, which is laid out with the bed to the right as you enter, in an area larger than the master bedroom in Dorelo, and to the left is an office area, which is set up with two desks.
Both the kitchen and the pantry are more spacious, with a large island in the middle. After watching Charlie and Amie make meals from scratch in the small Dorelo kitchen, I think the additional counter space will be a noteworthy time-saver and stress-reducer in meal preparation. The kitchen is accessed from Townsend’s front door through a spacious living/dining room with a fireplace, sitting area with TV, and an absolutely magnificent 
round dining table with a huge lazy susan in the middle. There were 12 chairs turned upside down on this table when we visited, and it clearly could seat 14 or perhaps more people. There is an additional rectangular table for overflow dining. There is a large window/counter between the dining area and the kitchen. Off the living room are not only the kitchen and the opening into the family quarters, but the entries to the student hallways. As you enter from the front door, the girls’ hallway is across in the left corner, next to the entry to the family quarters, and the boys’ hallway is in the right corner, near the kitchen, adjacent to the back door.
The back door leads to an outside porch in an enclosed courtyard created by the student bedroom wings. 
The porch has a swing, a table and chairs, a couch, a refrigerator, and a grill. There is a stairway off the porch to a small garden with a concrete walk through the garden to the downstairs part of the main building, where the laundry room, rec room, and several workshop/storage areas are located.This porch/courtyard is a great area in which to relax, enjoy a meal, or play a game. It provides privacy and a sense of security, which is something some folks really need in Ukarumpa. While Charlie and Amie are not so much in need of the sense of security, and Amie in particular likes the social aspect of the “open porch” at Dorelo, I think some of the Brown children will appreciate this sanctuary from time to time, as would I if I were living there.
The two-story arrangement, while making access to the main quarters somewhat more difficult, does have some advantages. There is a laundry chute at the entrance to the boys’ hallway down to the first-floor laundry room, and that laundry chute also has an opening in the kitchen pantry. (A thought just struck me – the pantry opening is a lid with a straight drop – perhaps an opportunity for a dumb-waiter arrangement of some sort.) 
Also much of the downstairs area provides more locked storage for motorcycles and bicycles, and there are, I think, four separate workshop-style rooms downstairs in addition to the laundry and recreation rooms. The large rec room includes a ping pong table and a piano.
Charlie and Amie really wrestled over the decision to move from Dorelo to Townsend. They were concerned about the disruption to the prior residents of each, but it turned out that since there is not a fourth set of hostel parents coming to Ukarumpa for the first term, and because the parents at another hostel were changing, most of the students who hadn’t graduated were being re-allocated anyway. As previously mentioned, they also were concerned about the inability to watch the kids playing in the yard, and to interact socially with the folks that so frequently stop by when they’re sitting on the Dorelo porch. They haven’t yet figured out how to deal with that issue, but determined after much prayer and discussion that the extra space in Townsend, both for their family (Chase especially needs some “alone time” occasionally) and for students, was key to their decision.
