Going the Distance

By caring for those a disease has left orphaned,
she's found her own life transformed
By Bella English, Boston Globe Staff, January 24, 2005

It was November 2000, and Ellen McCurley, an advertising and marketing executive, was going to Malawi to do a pro bono film on the AIDS epidemic. It was her do-good effort; she'd produce the film and come back to her corporate accounts and her six-figure salary. She couldn't know that she was about to embark on a journey that would turn her comfortable suburban life upside down.

"Everyone thought I had lost it," is the way she puts it today.

Shortly after returning, she left her husband and her award-winning work. She exchanged her pumps for hiking boots, her briefcase for a backpack. She went back to school and earned a master's degree in social work from Boston University; she will finish a second master's in public health in May.

But the main thing McCurley began has no deadline; she considers it her life's work. In 2001, she started a nonprofit organization that helps children infected with or affected by AIDS in Africa.

In Malawi, McCurley had stared suffering in the eye and could not look away. She saw people dying in hospitals that had few employees, little equipment, and no food. She saw starving babies, emaciated adults. She saw people eaten up by Kaposi's sarcoma, a virulent form of AIDS-related cancer. And everywhere she looked, she saw AIDS orphans.

Shortly after she returned from Africa, she founded the Pendulum Project, which gives grants to grass-roots groups working with children in three African countries. In the charity world, the project is the equivalent of a small start-up; it's pretty much McCurley, who takes no salary, and one part-time staffer shaking dollars out of anyone who will listen.

"I think what happened to me in Malawi is that I realized I had to seize my life. It was a moment of awareness, and once you have that, you can't go back. I know it sounds trite, but I really felt called," says McCurley, who attended Catholic schools and graduated from Holy Cross. "I consider Malawi my spiritual home."

On one visit to Malawi, she met a mother dying of AIDS who begged her to help her year-old baby who weighed 6 pounds. Both mother and child died soon after. "You walk the halls, and it doesn't matter what time of day or night it is -- someone will die," says McCurley, 45, who lives in an apartment on the Newton-Brighton line.

In Malawi, a country of 11 million, it is estimated that a million children have been left orphaned by the AIDS epidemic, some themselves infected. Some, as young as 10, care for even younger siblings. Others are cared for by a grandmother. Households are now headed by the young or the old: AIDS has created a lost generation. Today, 40 percent of Malawi's population is under the age of 15.

These fractured families are the focus of McCurley's work. The Pendulum Project awards grants to community programs in Malawi, South Africa, and Uganda that deal with children whose parents have died from a disease that is relentlessly gnawing away at sub-Saharan Africa. The grants, like the programs they serve, are modest: $500 to $5,000.

Last year, the project gave away $85,000. McCurley knows that it's a drop in the bucket, but a bucket that is otherwise bone-dry. The average salary in Malawi is $160 a year. "We're tiny. We'd like to be bigger, but we want to stay true to who we are," says McCurley. "We want to support grass-roots groups."

The projects she funds are always headed by villagers who set up shop in local churches, former bars, whatever space they can find. The programs offer basics such as food and soap to the children. Some of them teach life skills, some teach kids how to deal with grief. Others help the grandmothers, some of whom are caring for as many as 30 children.

"It's the women who are really carrying the burden of the HIV pandemic," says McCurley, pointing to an old woman in her photo album. "That's Marian, and she's taking care of 15 orphans." Of another picture: "These two women both lost their husbands to AIDS. They're taking care of a bunch of kids, their own and others." The women had come to McCurley with an idea: If she could get them a paper-making machine, they could earn a living selling homemade cards. In the album are several of the colorful cards with African batik prints on them that the women have made, with the help of the Pendulum Project.

At Cape Maclear in Malawi, McCurley awarded a $5,000 grant for a village man to start an orphan-care center in a building abandoned by an international nonprofit. The area is remote, with roads that are little more than potholed paths; the nearest clinic is a day's travel away. "He's now taking care of 1,000 kids a day, and every day there are more and more knocking on his door," says McCurley, who continues to support the center. "He feeds them and educates them; many can't make it the 5 miles to school." Besides, many of their teachers have died from AIDS, she says.

On the phone from Cape Maclear, Levi Kalumba says the Pendulum Project is his only source of funds; he is desperate for dollars to feed, clothe, and counsel the increasing caseload. The children return to their own homes at night, as he has no beds. "But inside the house there is little or nothing," he says. "No blankets, no food, no clothing. There's no means of these children getting income so they can support themselves."

High school is not free in Malawi, so the Pendulum Project helps pay tuition for teenagers. Sometimes, during a dry financial spell, McCurley has taken the money for them from her own pocket. Such is the case with Chicco, who lost both parents to AIDS. "He mails me his school reports," she says.

Then there's Emmanuel, 11, an orphan who lived on the streets until one of McCurley's programs found him housing. He now takes care of five other orphans, all younger than he is. "They have a little garden, and they all do chores," she says. "I get really worried about what is going to happen to all these children. We need to start saving some parents."

'You have to have hope'

Though she is white, middle-class, and healthy, McCurley says she can identify on one level with the orphans. Her father abandoned her family when she was 5, and her mother was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for most of her childhood. McCurley was raised by her grandmother and aunt.

"I would never begin to say that I understand the [African] experience, but I feel a connection to it," she says. "I lived with extended family members, too."

Still, she credits her mother with being her inspiration: "She struggled with depression and anxiety, yet she never gave up. When she could, she helped others. She also instilled in me that you have to have hope. In Africa, in the midst of all this suffering, I see amazing joy and spirit and hope."

When McCurley first discovered Africa and set about changing her life, her daughter was 15, her son 13. They didn't understand at the time, she says, but today they are supportive of her work. Her daughter, now 19, has been to Malawi with her, and her son will go in June.

It wasn't Africa per se that broke up her marriage of 18 years. "My husband and I had been traveling on divergent paths around our values and spirituality and what to do with our lives -- family, work," she says. The couple had founded an advertising and media company that had become successful. They lived in a comfortable house in Chestnut Hill. They had belonged to a country club. But the creature comforts weren't enough for McCurley, and Africa made her realize she needed to make the break.

It was difficult, at first, for the children to accept their mother leaving their father and her career. That first year, they chose to live with their father. "I did not understand, and for a long time my mom and I did not get along," says Nori Donovan. "I just did not have a good understanding of why it was happening; I just knew my family was breaking up."

Though McCurley tried for years to get her daughter to travel to Africa, the girl refused until two years ago. Then, when Nori was a junior in high school, she decided to accompany her mother to Malawi. The first day there, they walked into a hospital and witnessed the death of a baby from AIDS. Nori was stunned at the sight, and then impressed by how her mother reacted: giving money for the burial, comforting the grief-stricken mother. Another early impression: visiting an orphan care project and seeing her mom swarmed by children calling out her name.

"It was a real eye-opening experience for me," says Nori, a freshman at the University of Puget Sound. "I'm so proud of her. You can see the impact she has. I'm sure she has lost friends she and my dad had together. A lot of people don't understand why she's doing this." Because of Malawi, Nori says, she is majoring in international studies and hopes to become more involved with the Pendulum Project.

Her younger brother Jim, who is 16, is looking forward to going to Malawi in June. "At first, I really didn't like it too much because it kind of threw everything off," he says. "But now I understand. People talk about helping out, but she's actually doing it." McCurley's ex-husband, Michael Donovan, contributes to the Pendulum Project but declined to be interviewed by the Globe.

Compassion in action

Though she has been living off her savings, McCurley says she hopes to pay herself a salary soon. For now, she is able only to pay a part-time salary to John Alberts, whom she hired in September as director of US operations. Alberts, a filmmaker who also works with mentally retarded adults, had seen a short news clip on the Pendulum Project a couple of years ago. "I was completely glued to the story," he says. "I jotted down the name." A year later, he and his wife were planning a photography trip abroad, "something socially minded." He remembered that scrap of paper and called McCurley, who sent him to some of the centers she funds in Malawi.

Like McCurley, he was transformed by what he saw: "It was such a tremendous experience, one of those where you aren't the same when you come back." Of McCurley, he says, "Not only is she articulate about the AIDS issue, but she has a heartfelt compassion the likes of which I've never seen." Alberts's home photo lab serves as the project office.

The two recently sent out a fund-raising letter; until now, McCurley has mostly raised money through grant writing and speeches she gives about the project. She says she'd like to add new programs and better fund the ones she already has: 10 in Malawi, 25 in South Africa, and one in Uganda. She doesn't tell the groups how to spend the money, though she does ask for reports.

As part of her public health degree requirements, she works at the Children's AIDS Program, an inner-city program run by Boston Medical Center. On a recent day, she engages in play therapy with a 3-year-old boy who lags in speech and other development. "Ellen has a high energy commitment to this work. She's learning everything she can in an effort to translate her work here to her work in Africa," says Martha Vibbert, the program's executive director.

McCurley visits Africa twice a year, bringing crates of supplies: vitamins, Band-Aids, paper and pens, used laptops and printers. She stays with friends and keeps an old car in Malawi so she can visit the programs, most of them in remote areas. "I'll go into a village and there's no one there," she says. "The houses have been closed up. The village is wiped out, like a wildfire came through."

As much as she loves the people and places, it's difficult to watch the suffering. One of the hardest tasks, she says, is taking people to be tested for the AIDS virus: "When they get positive results, I know there's not a lot of options, and they know that, too."

Friends will ask her if she finds the work too depressing. She doesn't. "I feel it's real and truthful and I see this amazing spirit," she says. "My daughter told me, 'They have so little, but they have so much.' It's so true."