San Francisco Chronicle - The Voice of the West, 901 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94119 - Wednesday, February 27, 1991; Edition: FINAL Section: PEOPLE Page: B3 Word Count: 1,990
Torri Minton, Chronicle Staff Writer

She was touched only during twice-a-day feedings and diaper changes. Her food was mush from a bottle. A few weeks ago, at 2 years, 4 months old, she weighed just eight pounds. Dana Rica has the AIDS virus. She lives in Romania.

Nicole spent her first 2 years in a room alone, captive in the hospital where she was born. She couldn't walk, her muscles weak from lack of exercise. She had never been outside. She was afraid of strangers.

Nicole has the AIDS virus. She does not live in Romania. She was born in New York.

"People at the hospital said they were very sorry that this happened to her, but they were really expecting her to die. That was the symbol for me for what we wanted to do, to provide a home, to sort of liberate her," says Sister Marti Aggeler. "Sometimes when we get righteous about Romania, I think we should remember that our conditions aren't stellar either."

Aggeler, a former flight attendant, is a member of Starcross, a monastic order of three lay Catholics in Sonoma County who are devoting their lives to caring for children with AIDS. They are the legal parents and guardians to five children. Four have the AIDS virus.

That devotion has recently spread to Romania, where Starcross-trained American volunteers are forming the first foster-parent families for some of the hundreds of abandoned children with AIDS, children whose futures they never will discuss.

Starcross offers a simple remedy. An ordinary life. Familiar hands to hold. The love of parents. The feel of the sun and the wind and grass on bare feet. The excitement of watching the garbage man on Wednesdays.

The Starcross Community of Brother Toby McCarroll, Sister Marti and Sister Julie DeRossi are parents of a different kind, with Birkenstocks on their feet, crosses around their necks and a chapel in their home.

The three were each once married. Now they have taken vows of poverty and celibacy and support their work selling wreaths and Christmas trees from their farm in Annapolis, on the coast.

A few days a week, their home is an average big house on Cherry Street in Santa Rosa, a blue-trimmed Victorian with a pink cherry tree in the yard and a guinea pig named Eric in the hallway. The rest of the time they live on their farm, with 12 cats, five cows, one dog and one guanaco, a crabby llama-like animal.

Their small community has drawn international attention. Television helicopters used to land regularly in the pasture, scheduled so as not to interfere with the milking of the cows. When the Romanian children ran out of disposable diapers recently, an Austrian group agreed to help out. Visitors are constant, from politicians to potential volunteers to Romanians, one of whom cried in the supermarket -- when she saw a banana for the first time in 20 years.

Business is not allowed to interrupt parenthood.

McCarroll leans back behind his desk in the house between the Romania maps and the teddy bear lounging on a stack of papers. He is a former lawyer, former member of Sonoma County's AIDS Commission and author of "Morning Glory Babies," about life at Starcross.

He is talking about the "cosmically gross" AIDS epidemic in Romania, his visits there, the red tape, the dead-ends, the children he will never forget.

DeRossi walks in unannounced, carrying Tina, 2, just back from the doctor. She is very sick. She rests her tired head on Brother Toby's beard.

Someone must help Tina with everything. They hold her upright so she can dig in the grass with an orange shovel. They sleep next to her crib all night, turning her over, rubbing her back, scratching the ulcerated sores on her arm when they itch.

"You want to rock?" he says. "Mommy," she says. Sister Julie comes in. "You don't want Mommy?" he says. "No," she says.

The family relationships are a little complicated:

Sister Julie is mother to Tina, Michelle, 4, and Nicole, 5. Sister Marti is mother to Holly, 10 months, and David, 5, the child of a relative and the only one who is not HIV-positive. Brother Toby acts as father to all five children.

Legally, only David was adopted by two people -- Brother Toby and Sister Marti -- because adoptions by two singles is difficult. Sister Marti adopted 10-month-old Holly and is the legal guardian of Nicole (but Sister Julie is the one Nicole sees as her mother.) Sister Julie adopted Tina and is the legal guardian of Michelle.

LEARNING TO LOVE

In the plain yellow room next door, DeRossi is conducting a seminar for five volunteers. Starcross is training them to go to Romania to be foster mothers.

Allow these children control over their lives, give them memories, the soft-spoken DeRossi is saying.

"They're people, not patients, and there's so much more to their life than medical regimes. Despite this horrendous illness, they have a pretty normal life," she says.

They have parties every week. Even Tina still can decide things such as whether the light in her room is on or off and what to wear that day.

CENTER FOR ABUSED KIDS

DeRossi was studying to become a grade school teacher at the University of California at Berkeley when she joined the community after taking classes at McCarroll and Aggeler's Humanist Institute in San Francisco.

They started Starcross in 1976 to care for abused and neglected children. Ten years later, they saw a news report about a little boy with AIDS, forced to live alone in an American hospital. Their mission changed. In 1986, they began to provide a permanent home for children with AIDS.

The volunteers around the table in the yellow room are all mothers from across the United States. They quit jobs and said good-by to grown children and grandchildren and pets and will go to Constanta, Romania, an unknown place where the temperature recently averaged a high of 17 and the sun had not been seen in three weeks.

The pay: $100 a month. Each will be a foster mother for at least a year, until the next volunteer takes over.

"There don't seem to be that many people here who want to move there forever," says Sister Marti. "I'm surprised we have anyone willing to be there at all."

One volunteer, Ann Baker of Hershey, Pa., sold everything to do this. "I want a family again," she says.

Seeing Brother Toby on national television -- with child after child with shaven heads and big eyes, in wall-to-wall cribs in Romanian institutions where they had been left to die, still managing to smile at his touch -- was what did it for them. Most decided to volunteer immediately. They did not look back.

"I just knew that none of us should go through life alone, and especially to end it alone," says Karen Theobald of Petaluma, mother of three and grandmother of one, who quit her job as a trust officer for a bank. "It's just like the heart says 'yes.' "

HORRORS IN ROMANIA

The number of Romanian children with AIDS could reach 2,000, says the World Health Organization. (In the United States, 2,841 cases of AIDS in children younger than 13 were reported as of January to the federal Centers for Disease Control.)

Many malnourished Romanian children, especially orphans, routinely received blood transfusions to fortify them and help fight poverty-caused illnesses. But medical supplies were scarce and information about AIDS was nonexistent. Needles were regularly reused, and blood donors were not checked for signs of the fatal disease. It was reported that Romania had only one blood-screening machine.

News of the AIDS epidemic was suppressed until Ceausescu was overthrown.

"The attitude is, 'Well, when the kids are all dead, that's the end of the problem,' " McCarroll says, his voice getting angry.

It was in one of the convalescent homes packed with abandoned children who had never been outside, never been nurtured, that he found a fragile little girl named Dana Rica.

"I used to dream about her," he says. "I used to worry about her. I used to think maybe she was the one who screamed up to heaven -- and we got the message."

On January 16, Starcross volunteers took the first five children, including Dana, to live with their new family, upstairs in a convalescent home.

"I was afraid, she was so fragile," says McCarroll. "She couldn't sit up. The oldest boy came and sat on her head.

"She laughed. By the end of the day, she just sat up. She'd never done that before. It was hard for her to eat because they were used to sucking mush out of a bottle. The first time in the apartment was the first time they had spoons or a bowl."

THE SONOMA SETTING

In Sonoma County, the days are filled with simple celebrations of life.

Every Sunday there is a service in the farm chapel and a picnic or an outing. There is hay to be dumped on the heads of the cows. There are milkings to be watched. There are cats to be fed. There is compost to be made and a garden to plant. There is preschool to go to. "Sesame Street" is at 5 p.m. and dinner is at 6.

If everyone is well, there are sometimes weeklong trips to exotic places like Disneyland.

There are signs that everyone is not well.

Starcross lost one of the children four years ago. Aaron died of AIDS when he was 1 year and 19 days old.

Giant syringes lie on a little girl's dresser. A child laughs loudly one day and develops a cough the next and goes off to a faraway hospital. Two go to the doctor once a month for three- to four-hour gamma globulin injections.

Nicole has a severe heart condition, epilepsy and diabetes. It took her a year to learn to walk after she left the New York hospital to live at Starcross.

One recent afternoon, she was running around in sweats in the grass under the pink cherry tree, asking people if they were wearing belts, the discovery of the day. She is no longer afraid of strangers.

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SHELTER NEEDS STAFF, MONEY

The good news is the Romanian government has lent Starcross a site to house the families the monastic community is creating for abandoned children with AIDS.

The plan is to care for 150 children. Romanians eventually will take over their care from the American volunteers. The site, lent for 50 years, is in the town of Plazu Marie, near the Black Sea resorts.

The bad news is Starcross does not have the $200,000 it needs to build the center.

Life is less than pleasant at the convalescent home, where the first two families are living temporarily. The staff downstairs has been harassing the Starcross volunteers, apparently afraid they will lose their jobs if the volunteers start taking care of their children, says Sister Marti Aggeler.

"They turned off the hot water for two weeks. The kids had diarrhea. They were told there were no diapers, no water to wash the kids in. It was just hell," Aggeler says. "The food was delayed, and the children were hungry. They seemed to be wanting to demoralize them."

Starcross needs both donations and mature, capable mothers to volunteer to go to Romania for a minimum one-year stay. Write to the Starcross Community, P.O. Box 14279, Santa Rosa, Calif. 95402.

CAPTION: PHOTO (2)

(1) Volunteer-trainee Marolen Mullinax of Longview, Texas, cuddles Nicole, who didn't see the outside until she was 2 years old., (2) The children need constant care. They get it./PHOTOS BY TOM LEVY/THE CHRONICLE

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