A Traveler of Many Roads

A desire to see the world led Chad MacArthur ’70 on a meandering journey to his life’s work in public health

Chad MacArthur, St. George's School Class of 1970, during his commercial fishing days in Alaska.

Chad MacArthur ’70 has lived and/or worked in more than 30 countries and, after decades in the public health field, is now considered one of the world’s experts in preventing the spread of an infectious disease called trachoma, which causes blindness. If you happened to come across him in 1980, however, you may have seen him juggling in a West Berlin circus.

MacArthur has taken a serendipitous journey to his current career — mostly the result of his desire to explore the world.

“To me it was just wanting to see new vistas and to look at different ways of life — culturally, socially. I was also drawn to the physical beauty of a lot of different countries,” he said. “[Travel] just kind of infected me and grew — and eventually it helped me make career choices.”

MacArthur had his first overseas travel experience as a sixth-former at SG, when he and classmate Stuart Ross ’70 studied abroad in Belgium with the Experiment in International Living program.

After SG, MacArthur went to Bucknell University and majored in English and history. Then he “ended up just kind of wandering for probably 10 years,” he said. Taken by the theater, he set off for New York, where he studied acting, “but mostly ended up driving a taxi.”

So he headed to South Paris, Maine, where he studied mime, juggling, and clowning at the Celebration Barn Theatre.

Performing as a clown in Barcelona.

It was during a subsequent monthslong trip to Mexico and Guatemala when he got the idea for his next job. The weather was very, very hot, he recalled, and one of his travel companions told him about her experiences working in Alaska. “I looked at a road map I had and Alaska looked all so bright and cool and everything, so I said ‘I think I'll just go up there.’”

Chad in his commercial fishing days in Alaska.

Within weeks he had made his way to Seattle, where dozens of commercial fishing boats were getting ready for the season. For the next four years, MacArthur worked many 20-hour days fishing for salmon out of Ketchikan, Alaska.

“And those four months of the fishing season … provided me with sufficient funds just to go travel around and explore the world,” said MacArthur, who used the downtime to journey to Central and South America as well as Europe. Sometimes, he would do street theatre to earn some extra cash and for two hunting seasons he worked as a cook in a camp outside Yellowstone National Park.

In 1980, MacArthur moved to West Berlin, Germany, where for two years he was a juggler and clown in a circus tent next to the Berlin Wall and on the streets of the city. He also taught circus skills at a local theater school.

The Tempodrom in Berlin, a circus tent where Chad performed as a juggler and clown in the early 1980s.

“When all of that ended, I decided it was time to find a profession that allowed me to be overseas and abroad and traveling, but that didn't force me to keep running away to get another visa,” he said. MacArthur got a master’s degree in education and taught English in Barcelona, Spain, and worked for four years as an education supervisor at the Philippine Refugee Processing Center in Bataan, a camp for refugees who had been accepted for resettlement in the U.S.

“There was something that really impressed me about living in a very remote area with a number of different cultures,” he recalled. “The refugees were Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian, and most of the staff was Filipino.”

By the time MacArthur joined Helen Keller International in 1997, he had gotten another master’s degree, in public health, at the University of Alabama/ Birmingham and worked for five years at ORBIS International, an NGO focused on the prevention of blindness.

Throughout his 16 years with Helen Keller, what the World Health Organization called “neglected tropical diseases” became a focus of MacArthur’s work. He lived in Mozambique for four years and South Africa for more than a year working with ministries of health “to plan how they're going to reach the [World Health Organization] goal of elimination of trachoma as a public health problem,” he said.

The human suffering MacArthur has seen while working in underdeveloped countries is heart-wrenching. “They are [sights] that are highly disturbing,” he said, “not only because of what the individual is experiencing, but the fact that anyone has to experience this at all.”

These days, MacArthur lives with his wife, Lisa Tapert, in South Harpswell, Maine, about 40 miles from Portland, and he still travels about a week to 10 days every month for the firm he founded in 2014, MacArthur/Tapert Global Health Consulting.

Chad at a January workshop he conducted in Kapoeta State, South Sudan.

When we spoke this spring, MacArthur had just returned from South Sudan. In the previous year he had been in Burkina Faso, Mozambique, South Africa, Cameroon, Zanzibar, Central African Republic, Papua New Guinea, and Oman.

He was pondering a trip back to Cameroon and to Burkina Faso, and perhaps Mauritania this year.

With community members in Kapoeta State, South Sudan.

He’s optimistic that public health organizations in lower-income nations are making good progress in eliminating neglected tropical diseases, particularly with increases in funding and drug donations. Pfizer, for instance, donates its antibiotic Zithromax, which helps combat trachoma.

Looking back, is this the career MacArthur thought he would have?

“No, not at all, I always imagined that ...” he trails off. “Actually I have no idea what I imagined.”

But he can still juggle. ■