THE SUNDAY PROFILE : A Circuitous Path Leads Cindy Buckles-Schmidt From O.C. to Africa

Seated on her living room couch in Laguna Beach, Cindy Buckles-Schmidt is as comfortable as a safari director can be this far from the African bush. To feel more at home, she surrounds herself with photographs of Masai warriors, snarling tigers and very angry baboons.

“They’re even scarier when they’re in your tent,” she says, pointing at an enlargement of a fang-baring baboon. “They can unzip any zipper on any tent, and they like to eat your makeup.”

Buckles-Schmidt, 47, has commuted between the continents for nearly eight years, escorting more than 35 safaris on and off the beaten path. Clients have ranged from a group of thrill-seeking dentists to a pair of starry-eyed honeymooners. She has led a 44-camel convoy through the wilds of Kenya and found herself in the middle of a civil war in Rwanda.

Her life’s path, like her safaris, has been unpredictable. She has had several marriages and seen her two children grow up in ever-changing environments. In Africa, she has had the adventures of a lifetime but also narrowly survived severe cases of tuberculosis and meningitis, and, following hospitalization in primitive conditions, she now carries the AIDS virus.

Those who know Buckles-Schmidt say she has taken Africa by storm since beginning her safaris into the remote tribal villages there.

“She’s extremely adventurous; that’s what I like most about her,” says Cal State Dominguez Hills economics professor Leonard Moite, who took Buckles-Schmidt on her first trip to Africa in 1988 with a group of students.

“Cindy has that kind of personality that draws people toward her,” says longtime friend Wachira Gethaiga, professor of African American studies at Cal State Fullerton. “She’s a fantastic person, very outgoing.”

It wasn’t long after she began her safaris that Buckles-Schmidt received recognition for her work with Africa’s poor. Gethaiga and Moite were among the educators, politicians, Peace Corps representatives and other guests in attendance at the home of African industrialist Lucas Ndungi when Buckles-Schmidt and others were honored for their humanitarian and educational contributions in Africa.

“She’s not afraid to go deep into the bush and interact with the people,” said Moite, in an interview from Nairobi. “Her involvement with the very poor is unlimited, and her affection for them is infinite.”

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Buckles-Schmidt, who runs her business from her Laguna Beach apartment, has come to know Africa well--it feels to her, she says, almost like a small town.

Her company, Kenya Wildlife Safaris, is among about two dozen in California that specialize in custom safaris, according to the Assn. for the Promotion of Tourism to Africa.

Before she set out to lead safaris, she spent time getting acquainted with the land and people; she learned Swahili and made a habit of taking local means of transportation. That meant traveling by matatus --cheap buses--stuffed with “coughing people, crying babies and chickens” across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania.

It was in the slums and ghettos, Buckles-Schmidt says, that she met the most interesting people.

“Africans are so strong; they have this spirit about them. They can be surrounded by starvation, their babies are dying, but they always have something positive to say,” she says. “They sing, they dance and they pray.”

Carol MacClean, 74, a retired teacher who went on safari with Buckles-Schmidt three years ago, says that the African people’s respect for the safari director was very apparent.

“Everywhere Cindy went, someone was waving to her or stopping to talk to her,” MacClean says. “She knew everybody.”

MacClean says the safari was truly memorable. “We had a great time,” she says. “We even went on a balloon ride over the Masai Mara. . . . It was great.”

Also on that two-week trip was Buckles-Schmidt’s mother, Consuelo Lewis, then 64, and another woman who was 82 years old.

“I put my mother on a camel and sent her off over the horizon,” Buckles-Schmidt recalls. “My mother is certainly one for great adventure. . . . I guess I’m most like her.”

MacClean, who lives in Riverside, recalls a stop at Samburu, a small village that Buckles-Schmidt had taken under her wing. “When we went there, the word had gotten out that Cindy was coming, and all of the children were singing an American song when we arrived,” MacClean says. “The elder of the tribe presented her with a bracelet when we were there.”

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Buckles-Schmidt was born Cynthia Jane Lewis in Riverside in 1948. Her childhood was shaped in large part by severe dyslexia and auditory processing disabilities that went undiagnosed.

She didn’t learn to read until age 28.

“No one knew much about dyslexia back then; there was no label for it. I was just punished. I was punished at home, at school. . . . They would all say, ‘You just don’t try hard enough,’ ” she says.

Her teen-age behavioral problems were compounded by the fact that her two younger sisters were very good students.

Frustrated, Buckles-Schmidt says, she hated school and ran away from home on countless occasions. “My sisters were getting straight A’s, and I couldn’t read, so I just left,” she says.

She became pregnant with the first of her two sons when she was just shy of her 18th birthday.

Buckles-Schmidt says she managed to get her high school diploma and married the baby’s father, a childhood friend she had known since seventh grade. Not long after the birth of their son, Christopher, now 27, the marriage came apart. Buckles-Schmidt remembers hitchhiking to Newport Beach with her baby to stay with friends and find a job.

Once there and desperate to find work, she persuaded a friend to read the help-wanted ads to her.

“I needed to feed my son, and I wasn’t about to go on welfare,” she says.

The ad sounded good: “Dental Assistant--Will Train.”

Considering her dyslexia, the two planned to take the bus to the Garden Grove dental office right before closing. That way, explains Buckles-Schmidt, she could have her friend read the application to her and they could complete and return it the next day.

But things didn’t go as planned.

“I remember I was wearing raggedy Levi’s,” she says. “We walked into the office, I’m sure looking like hell, with this baby under my arm. The lady at the desk took one look at me and said the job had been filled.”

With trademark determination, the young mother refused to leave, telling the receptionist that she wanted to apply anyway, in case the new employee didn’t work out.

“One of the dentists peeked in and saw what was going on. . . . He later told me that the sight of me in there with my baby broke his heart,” she says.

Buckles-Schmidt, who got the job, kept a “beach-rat apartment” during that time and worked at “a million other dental offices” thereafter.

She met her second husband, a businessman and speedboat racer, in the mid-1970s. They had a son, David, now 22, but that marriage was also short-lived.

In 1979, she married again, this time to a Newport Beach dentist, and entered a world of society parties and fund-raisers. “I was this girl who did research on hitchhiking and homelessness, tailored into a designer dress,” says Buckles-Schmidt. “I did my best to fit in, but I wanted something else.”

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What she wanted was a ranch.

She took ranching and agriculture classes at Orange Coast College for a year, still struggling with reading. She also went to a Springville, Calif., ranch to “learn the ropes.”

“I bucked hay, I roped cattle, I did all the things the cowboys did,” she says.

Armed with new skills, she and her husband bought an 84-acre ranch in Templeton, Calif. Buckles-Schmidt and her youngest son moved to the ranch, the plan being that her husband and Christopher, then 14, would join them in a year. But they never did.

“One year turned into five, and he always had a reason for not coming,” she recalls. “My mistake was that I thought the ranch was our dream. It was really only my dream.”

While she was at the ranch, Christopher ran away from home, determined to make his own way in life. “It seemed like he was always on his own,” says Buckles-Schmidt of her elder son, who now goes to school, drives a truck and lives in Costa Mesa. “He turned out great, though. I’m so proud of him.”

After five years on the ranch, Buckles-Schmidt says, she returned to Newport Beach to help her husband with his practice.

It was difficult to leave the ranch behind, she says, but the move ultimately brought her closer to another lifelong dream: to go to Africa.

A friend in the dental business told her about Leonard Moite’s student safaris. The friend had been on one and raved about the experience; Buckles-Schmidt knew it was something she just had to do and contacted Moite to book a spot on his next safari.

“I got to experience things I’d never known, and I was a real participant,” she recalls. “When everyone would be asleep, I would want to go places.”

When she returned, she knew she belonged in Africa.

Her marriage “was pretty much over,” she says, and her children nearly grown. Christopher was living in Hawaii on his own, and David was living with his stepfather, working and finishing high school.

When she announced to family and friends her intentions to live in Africa, “everyone tried to discourage me. They said, ‘Are you crazy?’ I said, ‘Yeah! Just watch me.’ ”

To accomplish her goal, she began learning all she could about Africa and started leading safaris herself.

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On one of those safaris, she met a Rwandan with whom she would fall in love and who would have a dramatic impact on her life.

Ntukanyagwe, who introduced himself simply as Charley, was a member of the Tutsi tribe. He and his family “opened my eyes to a whole new beautiful world,” she says.

Buckles-Schmidt lived in a gated townhouse outside Nairobi for a while, rooming with members of the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, which are now opposing factions in a civil war.

It was in Rwanda that she fell ill with meningitis and almost died.

The conditions in the hospital she entered there were horrible, she says. “There were bodies stacked in the corner, urine-soaked sheets, dirty needles. My friends and Charley’s family brought in medicine men, people rocked me in their arms. . . . They saved my life.”

However, Buckles-Schmidt believes it was in that Rwandan hospital that she contracted HIV, which was diagnosed after she returned to the United States.

“At first I thought I was dead,” she says, recalling how she felt when she learned she was HIV-positive. “I just wanted to sit on a mountain in Africa and let the lions eat me. But when I wasn’t sick after six months, that changed. I don’t even think about it anymore.”

While she was in the United States, Buckles-Schmidt learned that Charley had been arrested in Rwanda for smuggling children out of the war-torn country. She flew back to Rwanda to try to use her political connections to get him out of jail. She was successful, but the tall and strong man she had grown to love was sick and weak, having been beaten and tortured while in custody. He died in her arms Aug. 22, 1991. Buckles-Schmidt has never been back to Rwanda.

“He had the gift of making me believe in miracles,” she says.

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Despite five years of being HIV-positive, during which time she spent a year in treatment for tuberculosis, Buckles-Schmidt says she feels stronger than ever. She works out, eats the right foods and doesn’t take drugs “of any kind.”

In her future travels, however, she will stay on the beaten path, she says. She will especially avoid those areas deep in the African bush known for malaria, areas that she once worried little about while traveling alone.

“Others get very sick if they get malaria,” she says. “If I get it, I’m a goner.”

Right now, she’s staying closer to home and writing a book about her experiences in Africa.

“I’m not capable of slowing down,” she says, adding that she is preparing to set up Kenya safaris for next year during the migration of the wildebeest, occurring from late June to early September.

During the annual migration, almost 2 million wildebeest come from the Serengeti Plain into the grasslands, along with about 500,000 gazelles and 250,000 zebras.

“The giraffes are all around with lions, hyenas, jackals, cheetahs and the predatory animals,” Buckles-Schmidt says, and the best vantage point is in the middle of it all.

“I can’t wait to go back,” she says. “I’m not done there yet.”

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Cindy Buckles-Schmidt

Personal: Age 47, lives in Laguna Beach. Two sons, Christopher, 27, David, 22.

Passions: “Anything wild and untamed. Wild countries, wild people, wild animals.”

On the safari experience: “People go on safari expecting to see animals, and they end up falling in love with the people. . . . By the fifth day, I’ve usually convinced most of them to take off their watches. Time means nothing to Africans.”

On her dyslexia: “Because of my dyslexia, I never got to read about Africa like other people. But it was a gift in a way, I just jumped right in with both feet and experienced it. That’s the way I have to do things.”

On living with HIV: “It makes you appreciate every moment that you’ve got and how important family and friends are. I’m aware that I have a timeline now.”