Working with primates
One fall day in 1982, Michele proudly guided her brother — my husband Kevin — and me through the Gladys Porter Zoo in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, where she’d become a volunteer when she was 12. Dressed in khaki pants and zookeeper’s shirt, the petite teen strode confidently from exhibit to exhibit, telling us all about the animals.

The youngest volunteer to go through the training program, Michele had received the second highest grade in the class, giving her the privilege of working in the zoo’s nursery where she tended to a baby jaguar, zebra, fennec foxes, tamarins, sloths and small antelopes called duikers. Her favorite charges, though, were the primates: chimps, monkeys, gibbons and especially the great apes.

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Hummmmm, bump. Hummmmm, bump.

Michele barely noticed the noise of late night vacuuming anymore. She glanced at the antique clock in her well-appointed office overlooking Peachtree Street — 11:23 p.m. In her trash were five empty Coke cans, a Lean Cuisine box from lunch and a Cheetos bag that had contained her dinner.

When you going home? You work too hard, said the woman cleaning Michele’s office.

Michele sighed. I’ll be here a little longer, she said.

You don’t become a law partner by the age of 29 by having a social life. Although she was fresh from a difficult divorce, Michele wasn’t complaining. She was a well-respected litigation lawyer with a new condo in the heart of Buckhead, a new car and a retirement plan.

Hummmm, bump. Hummmm, bump.

The vibration of the vacuum caused something to fall from Michele’s bookshelf: a framed photograph of her as a teen at the Brownsville zoo playing with a young gorilla named Kimba. Tears sprang to her eyes as she remembered the troubled gorilla who spent her days rocking aimlessly in a corner.

Michele recalled how she used to race through her chores in the zoo’s nursery so she could go sit with the 2-year-old gorilla, rejected by her mother at birth, as she rocked and rocked.

One hot and humid day, Kimba stopped rocking. Slowly and deliberately she gently placed her large hands on either side of Michele’s face, looked deep into her eyes and softly stroked the girl’s face. From that day on, the two often played together, tickling and tumbling around and exchanging hugs and kiss.

When her father’s job transferred the family to South Carolina, Michele was sad to leave Kimba behind. One month after she left, she learned Kimba had died.

That night in 1999, as she sat in her office reminiscing about her old friend, Michele wondered how she had gotten so far away from her passion for animals. Despite having accomplished more than she ever imagined she would, there was something missing, something big.

The next day she began searching for a way to put her legal skills to work and rekindle her passion. She learned about Gorilla Haven, a primate sanctuary that was in the planning stages in the North Georgia mountains for captive gorillas with temperaments ill-suited to zoos. She began providing pro bono legal services to the organization and was thrilled when one of the founders invited her to visit a wildlife sanctuary in Africa.

Trip to Africa
Four months later, Michele waved goodbye to her new boyfriend, Kerry Stumpe, as she boarded the packed flight to Douala, Cameroon.

Located just two degrees above the equator in Central Africa, Cameroon is one of the richest countries on the continent in terms of biodiversity with 900 bird species and 300 mammal species. Cameroon’s wildlife is rivaled only by its culturally diversity with more than 200 distinct linguistic groups. Michele could scarcely believe she was about to spend three-and-a-half weeks working with gorillas in Africa.

As she got off the plane, the hot humid air reminded her of Brownsville. On the drive to the wildlife center, she was filled with anticipation, but her heart sank at what she witnessed: streets pocked with potholes, a fleet of taxis honking their horns, open sewers and impoverished people selling dilapidated wares and emaciated cattle along the roadside.

Soon the thick, polluted city air gave way to banana plantations as she headed toward the Gulf of Guinea. Late that evening, as she listened to the waves crashing against the rocks outside of her room and a midnight thunderstorm roared in the distance, Michele had the strange sensation of feeling at home.

A week into the trip, Michele wrote a letter to the man who shared her passion for animals and would ultimately become her husband, extolling the joy of having made two friends. One was a young gorilla named Evindi.

“Nostalgia fills the air every morning as I am greeted by the familiar musky smell of gorilla,” she wrote. “Isn’t it amazing how a smell you haven’t experienced in over 20 years can be so immediately recognizable that it has the power to take you back to a time you’d almost forgotten?”

The other friend was a little boy named Michael.

“On the first day, I offered him a handful of Starbursts. He took one (yes, one) and you would have thought it was the most expensive chocolate truffle you could buy, the way he savored it,” she wrote. “Each day I tell him that he can have more than one (he likes lemon) and each day he politely says, ‘No, I’ll let you save them for the other children.’ There’s just something about this place!”

By the time she returned to Atlanta, Michele was dreaming up ways to help wildlife sanctuaries in Africa. She and Kerry decided to quit their jobs — he was an architect — and start their own law firm and consulting business from which some of the proceeds would be funneled toward wildlife sanctuaries. They opened their doors to Evindi Inc. in October 2000.

Two years later the couple married at Gorilla Haven.

A way to help
It was spring 2009, Michele’s favorite time of year. Azaleas and dogwoods bloomed everywhere. She was on her way to coach her step-daughter’s pole vault team at Riverwood High School. Kerry’s daughter, Kourtney had moved in with them when she was 12.

Heavy raindrops splattered on the windshield when Michele pulled into the parking lot, and a sense of despair settled over her. Kourtney would be graduating soon and Michele was overcome with fear that she was running out of time. She and Kerry had made financial contributions to Limbe. Michele volunteered with a number of organizations. Still, she didn’t feel a significant sense of accomplishment. She picked up the phone and called her father.

Dad, I was put on this earth for a reason, she said. I’m supposed to be out there changing the world, but I’m not doing it. I’m making small strides, but I’m not making a big splash. I feel so inadequate and powerless.

Don’t expend all of your energy trying to move mountains and change the world, said her father. Focus instead on changing one person’s world at a time. You might be surprised at how big an impact you can make if you allow yourself to take it one step at a time.

That same year Michele’s firm won a major settlement for a client. It’s not often you have a $2.4 million check sitting on your desk. Michele and Kerry knew they wanted to use a portion of their percentage of the money to help wildlife conservation, but how?

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Limbe had grown familiar by now. Each time Michele visited, she noticed that the city and the banana plantations got bigger and the rainforest got smaller.

Ayyoooowwww! The outburst reverberated through the wildlife center, followed by a panicked chorus of ooo, oooo, oooos from the chimps, signifying that one of their own was in need.

It was Jacob Tebo, head of construction at Limbe for more than 20 years. He had smashed his hand with a hammer. It wasn’t like him to make a mistake like that. Michele later learned he was off his game because he’d been getting up at 5 a.m. three times a week to walk one-and-a-half hours to his daughter’s school to beg the administrators to let her stay. She was in the top 5 percent of her class, but Jacob’s family didn’t have the money to pay the next installment on her tuition and the school was getting ready to kick her out again.

The yearly tuition in Cameroon was the equivalent of the average wildlife center workers’ annual salary — $500 — and it would be a month before the family could pull together the rest of the money for the semester. Michele learned that for the few workers who managed to send their children in school, this was a common plight.

It suddenly became clear to Michele how she and Kerry could help. They would provide scholarships for the children of Limbe’s sanctuary workers. Not only could they educate the children, but they could remove a significant burden from the workers’ lives, which was affecting their ability to care for the wildlife.

Michele and Kerry immediately established 18 scholarships for the children of Limbe workers and promised to support each recipient through high school if they performed well academically. One of their first scholarship recipients was the lemon-Starburst-lover Michael, now 15, who was behind in school because of his family’s inability to consistently pay tuition.

By 2011, the Stumpes worked through the hurdles to solidify their pilot program, and the foundation was converted into a 501-c3 nonprofit called Children of Conservation. Since that time, the program has expanded to seven sanctuaries in Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Zambia. And it has contributed to the education of 200 children.

But it’s also elevated the role of the wildlife sanctuary worker, making it a sought-after position of respect.