Sr. Pauline Amulen was born in February 1993 in Kongopo-Kalungar village, in Eastern Uganda. She was the third born of eight children.

She comes from a devoted Catholic family of humble background and her father is a catechist. It is a very respectful, simple, loving and social family. Her father started a Catholic church community at her home under a large mango tree because there was no church anywhere nearby, and Christians usually walked for a very long distance for prayers.

Later, after twenty years, it shifted to Akulony where the St Charles Borromeo orphanage was established because her father had no land to construct a church, and yet the number of Christians was increasing rapidly.  This was the start of a positive influence in her life.

Her childhood life was very difficult and painful. None of her parents or relatives attained a reasonable level of education in their days, hence no one got any kind of employment to support the family. Unfortunately, her father was born into a polygamous family where her grandfather had seven wives. Her grandmother had seven sons and one daughter.  Subsistence farming was the major activity, but this was a dream in her family, because there was not enough land.  Each of her uncles, including her father, received only one small piece of land which could not even sustain the family with food.  Being a catechist, her father always ministered in different places where he could cultivate on church land, and some Christians offered him land to cultivate while there. And this gave her family some backup.

Due to the wars that were in Uganda, especially in their region, very many families were separated and disorganized. Property was destroyed, lives lost, and livestock of the people was looted by the Karimojongs (a tribe of warriers in Uganda). War left people with barely any means of survival.  After the war, her parents had to start life from scratch. These sufferings helped Pauline become a focused and resilient child. She never wanted to suffer again when she grew up, nor see others suffer the same way.

In 2000,  her mother and her two siblings Edmund and Celia were involved in a car accident. They had travelled to her home village for the funeral of a cousin who had also died in a car accident.  Her mother was badly injured, and she spent about three months in the hospital.  The absence of her mother at home forced Pauline to become a mother at a tender age.  Hence, she grew up knowing that she must meet the needs of her family and this is actually what she was doing before joining religious life.

In 2005, Fr Charles Osire started a project, the St Charles Borromeo Foundation, for orphans whose parents had died during the war.   Fr Charles was also offering scholarships to the pupils who performed very well in their primary leaving examinations and, in 2007, Pauline was the top student in Atutur Sub- County and was offered the scholarship. St Charles Borromeo Orphanage sustained her education until she finished university studies. She studied Business computing in university.

With experience of war, poverty and witnessing a lot of violence, Pauline got a solid formation in faith, following the example of her father.  Pauline tells it this way:
“Praying for the world to be a happy place for all. I sought ways I could express my humanitarian services to the suffering people. I joined the Uganda Red Cross Society and worked with them for years. But I kept recalling a religious sister who was touching more lives of the most marginalized whom I saw during my childhood. She was so talented in many areas, and she had trained many women, youth and little children. I wished to be like her. This lit a fire in me to search for a religious congregation. I finally met MMM from the book “Come follow me”.  My experience and formation in the Medical Missionaries of Mary has so far helped me to grow spiritually, emotionally, physically and intellectually.”

In September, Sr. Pauline arrived in Ireland to upgrade her studies in Maynooth University.  She has been working in hospital administration in Lilongwe, Malawi.