COVER STORY | IN
THE NEWS | OPINION
| ARTBEAT | STAGE
MATTERS
TALK OF THE
TABLE | THE
HUM | CALENDAR
SUMMER ACTIVITIES FOR KIDS
| SUMMER FESTIVAL GUIDE
June 1, 2006
DEER SAVER: Maybe Ranger Bob Murphy gets
a bad rap. He's been vilified as that ticket-issuing ogre by
the loose-dog-consorting humans who wander the Arcata Community
Forest while their unleashed canines romp and poop at will. And
some people, perhaps miffed at being booted from illegal campsites
in the forest, have called him mean — note this nugget from
an April 2005 report from a focus group at the Arcata Homeless
Night Shelter: "Arcata also has negative or bad qualities
that the participants expressed. First was `Ranger Bob' who threw
a pail of cold water on a sleeping homeless individual in the
woods. He was characterized as `mean' and the tone used to describe
him by several individuals was indicative of his perceived callousness."
But last Friday? Ranger Bob, he rocked. Well, he
tackled — an 80-pound young injured deer that, at midday, had
lacerated its forelegs to the bone after leaping through the
sliding glass door of a Sunnybrae apartment. The Arcata Police
Department sent Ranger Bob to its rescue, and Ranger Bob ordered
backup from a Wildlife Care Center volunteer, Amanda Auston.
On Tuesday, Ranger Bob was off-duty, so Auston,
at her job at Arcata Pet, recounted the tale. She said by the
time she got out to the site on Samoa Boulevard, a crowd had
gathered and the hurt deer was hiding in the bushes. A young
male with still a couple of spots left, it had apparently wandered
confusedly into an apartment, then freaked out and leaped through
the glass. Ranger Bob got his snare out and went after it in
the bushes. "And it jumped over him and onto the second-story
balcony of an apartment, about 12 feet up or so," said Auston.
So Ranger Bob ran up the stairs after it. The deer, sensibly,
bucked like a horse and flailed its sharp little hind hooves
at Ranger Bob — who came away with impressive bruises on his
arms and legs, said Auston. But he nabbed the deer, and Auston,
who'd run up after him, threw a towel over its head so it would
calm down.
Long story short: Auston found a vet to stitch
up the deer, then she brought the big, frustrated, feisty, cage-ramming
young deer home for the night to let it recover from the anesthesia.
(She's trained, she's an HSU wildlife grad, she's worked with
vets — in other words, she doesn't encourage just anyone to
take in a wild animal.) The next evening Auston released the
deer into the forest near the Jacoby Creek School. The self-absorbing
sutures will take care of themselves.
But what about Ranger Bob? Was he nice?
"He's always been a really nice guy when it
comes to bringing me hurt animals," Auston said. He's brought
her cormorants and loons injured on the highway, and other critters.
"When he came to help me take the deer to the vet, he said
to me, `You know, it's funny, I go hunting all the time, but
if I see something that's injured, I feel like I have to help
it.'"
Still, that didn't stop the Arcata PD from infusing
its news release on the deer incident with a faint air of criminality:
"Ranger Bob was able to take the deer into custody without
further injury...." You want to ask if it passed the sobriety
test, or if it had any outstanding warrants.
Anyway. Good job, Bob.
— Heidi Walters
DA'S NEW SUIT: If District Attorney Paul
Gallegos' lawsuit is an indicator of the quality of care available
at local nursing homes, you might think twice before sending
grandpa to Granada or the other four area facilities owned by
Skilled Healthcare. The legal complaint alleges that the nursing
homes — Granada, Eureka Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center,
Pacific Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center, Sea View Healthcare
and Rehabilitation Center and St. Luke's have an "unacceptably
high number of complaints, deficiencies and citations" and
that the facilities have not met state-mandated staffing levels
requiring patients receive personal care for 3.2 hours per day,
every day. Quoth the May 25 press release: "The District
Attorney seeks a court order that requires the facilities to
raise their staffing levels ... and asks for statutory penalties
for past violations." Devin Shelby, regional manager for
Skilled Healthcare, said that the first he heard of the DA's
lawsuit was from local reporters. "[The District Attorney's
office] has not contacted us whatsoever, nor served us with papers,"
Shelby said. "If there had been a real concern, honestly,
on the DA's part, I think there probably would have been some
communication." For previous coverage on Eureka nursing
homes see the Journal's award-winning investigative story
from November 2000: "Nursing Home Neglect."
— Helen Sanderson
INN BUSINESS?: Rumors have attached themselves
to the Scotia Inn before, like the one about Julia Butterfly
Hill sneaking down from her tree to feast on corned beef at the
hotel's dining room. The latest back-fence talk is that the Inn
— previously the lone source of nightlife in the tiny town —
is back in business after having been shuttered for the past
two years.
Not exactly, says Palco. "We are open only
for special events, like weddings or class reunions, not for
dining and lodging," said Kathy Wigginton, Palco's community
relations manager, on Tuesday. In 2004 the 22-room Inn closed
after its management company, Humboldt Hospitality & Entertainment,
faced bankruptcy and defaulted on its lease. Since then, much
cleaning has taken place, the garden has been redone and new
bedding bought. Currently, the lumber company is in the process
of securing a liquor license for the establishment, and plans
to hire a chef in the near future, though Wigginton could not
pin down a date for an official reopening. She assured us a media
release would be issued if and when anything exciting happens.
— Helen Sanderson
CORRECTIONS: Last week's story on Measure
T, a campaign finance reform bill that will appear on the June
6 ballot, misstated the amount businessman Bill Pierson, his
family and his companies donated to the reelection campaign of
Eureka City Councilmember Chris Kerrigan in 2004. The figure
of $20,000 given in the article was significantly high; in fact,
the number is slightly more or less than half that, depending
on whether the donations made by employees of Pierson's are taken
into account.
In addition, a round-up of local Farmers' Markets
in last week's "Talk of the Table" column inadvertently
left out the Tuesday market at Wildberries Marketplace in Arcata.
The Wildberries Farmers' Market runs from 3:30-6:30 p.m. each
Tuesday, from now until the end of October. The Journal
regrets the errors.
TOP
Lionheart
SoHum chef Raymond Thoya's safaris help orphans in Africa
by CATHY MILLER
When
Raymond Thoya (pictured at right) was a 5 year-old boy in rural
eastern Kenya, he was tending his father's goats one day when
he heard a cry of distress. A hyena was dragging a bleeding goat
between its legs off into the bush. Raymond's grandfather had
told him about hyenas, how if he came upon one in the bush, he'd
need to run toward it, yell and show no fear. Otherwise, it would
attack him. So Raymond ran toward the animal, waving his arms
and screaming with all his might. But the animal took one look
back at skinny little Raymond, paid him no mind and dragged his
prize away into the bush.
Later, after his father had arrived and examined
the prints on the ground, Raymond asked him whether he'd done
the right thing by scaring the hyena away. "It wasn't a
hyena," his father told him. "It was a lion."
Now 52 and living in southern Humboldt, Thoya is
co-owner of Humboldt Natural Foods (along with Peter Connelly,
owner of Calico's Café in Garberville), but his connection
with his homeland has never flagged. Earlier this year, I went
on a safari in Kenya, a life-long dream for me. The safari was
one of many Thoya has led for the last several years, as a benefit
for an orphanage he founded there four years ago, the Thoya-Oya
Childrens Centre. Though he's come a long way from his rural
village in Kenya, his life remains firmly rooted in two cultures
that literally could not be farther apart.
Raymond Thoya was born in 1954 in a small village
outside of Malindi, in eastern Kenya. By the time he was 5, he'd
learned how to carve, to weave hats, baskets, and sleeping mats,
to milk and herd goats, to look after his younger siblings, grow
vegetables, hunt rabbits and birds and to harvest and dry fruit
to be sold at market. In short, "things he'd need to know
to be a man."
When he was 6 years old, his father died of tuberculosis.
Soon after his father's death, seeing that his mother couldn't
afford to feed all her children, 6-year-old Raymond, the oldest
of the four children, left home in search of a job. He had an
uncle who was a goat herder in Mambrui, a Muslim town on the
coast, about 20 miles from his village. For his first paying
job as goat herder little Raymond was paid 15 shillings a week,
which he sent home to his mother and siblings, whom he would
help support for many years to come.
About a year later, homeless and hungry, Raymond
met a Swiss couple living near the beach in Malindi. Alfred Ruesch
had won an Olympic Gold Medal for Switzerland in the 1930s for
horseback riding — dressage and jumping. The Ruesches, who were
childless, took Raymond under their wing, and included the 7-year-old
in a team of four children whom he trained to ride, jump and
do acrobatics on horseback in synchronized performances. The
team dressed in brightly colored outfits and performed in several
shows a year in Nairobi and Malindi before large crowds. He was
paid for the performances, and continued to send much-needed
money home to his siblings.
Ria and Alfred Ruesch raised Raymond as their son.
When he was 10, Ria, who'd been a language teacher in Switzerland,
took Raymond out of school and began home-schooling him. Meanwhile,
under Alfred's tutelage, Raymond developed into a very skilled
rider. In 1968, at age 14, he won the National Junior Championship
in Kenya for dressage and jumping, the first black to win this
title in Kenya. (Although he qualified for the Olympics, an outbreak
of hoof and mouth disease in Kenya prevented him from taking
his champion horse out of the country, and he was unable to participate).
When Raymond was 16, he and the Rueschs, moved
to Nairobi, Kenya's capital city, and started the largest riding
school in Eastern Africa, with 150 horses and 50 employees. Even
though he was still a teenager, Raymond managed the employees
and served as head riding instructor.
For two years Raymond's life revolved around the
riding school and competitions in Kenya and other African countries,
but it was to take yet another dramatic turn. Although he had
lived apart from his birth family and tribe in eastern Kenya
for nearly all his life, he was presented with a choice that
would sharply test his loyalty to his heritage. He would have
to decide whether to undergo the rite of passage that was required
of all males in his tribe. When two of his uncles came to Nairobi
to take him back to his village to be initiated into adulthood,
Raymond chose to go back and participate in the three-month ritual.
First the young men went through a few weeks of
training to learn how to slay a lion using a spear, the act that
would mark the successful conclusion of the ritual. But before
they could attempt that feat there were other painful steps to
be endured. Without the benefit of anesthesia, Raymond and five
other boys were circumcised by an elder using a sharp knife,
as two men on either side of them held them still. Then they
were taken to a remote area, where they would survive by eating
the animals they would hunt. They were given a herbal mixture
to drink designed to induce nightmares and hallucinations. Until
they were able to go through more than a night without crying
out in fear from the dreams, they would not be allowed to hunt
a lion.
Of the six boys in Raymond's group, three were
never deemed ready to slay a lion because of their fear, one
was eaten by the lion he attempted to slay, and one speared the
lion but allowed it to escape. Raymond was the only one who actually
killed the lion with the use of a spear and a machete.
When the lion dies, it chokes out a hairball. The
hairball is allowed to dry, then put into a small medicine pouch
made of hide and resin with herbs and hair from the lion's mane.
The medicine pouch is then beautifully beaded and is worn around
the neck to protect the wearer from evil spirits. It's called
a "Moyo WaSimba," which means "lion's heart."
Raymond returned to the village a hero and the
tribe celebrated his accomplishment. In keeping with the tribal
custom, a marriage was arranged between Raymond and a young woman
from his village. She and Raymond moved into a traditional grass
hut, and nine months later they had a baby girl. Unfortunately,
though, it was becoming increasingly clear to Raymond that his
ambitions were larger than what could ever be accommodated in
the confines of the tribal life, and his wife was a very traditional
Giriama young woman, who was not open to learning anything different.
So he made the decision to leave the village and his marriage,
although with a vow to support his daughter until she was grown.
At the age of 19, he returned to Nairobi and resumed his duties
at the riding school.
In 1973, Ria and Alfred decided to sell the school
and move back to Switzerland to be with Ria's ailing parents.
They offered to take Raymond with them and put him through school
at an equestrian college. So he went to live with them in Switzerland
and attended the college, where he earned his credentials to
teach internationally. After four years there, he returned to
Malindi to teach and coach competitive riders and runners. One
of the runners he coached became a five-time world champion and
a silver medalist at the Olympics in Seoul. Another one of his
riding students was Jane Kenyatta, the daughter of Jomo Kenyatta,
the legendary president of post-colonial Kenya.
Raymond continued to expand his horizons. In 1980,
at the age of 26, Raymond met a German expatriate living in Nairobi
named Rolff Schmitt who was a chef at an upscale restaurant.
In exchange for teaching Schmitt's daughter how to ride, Schmitt
taught Raymond how to cook. He took flying lessons and got his
pilot's license. He took up judo, and eventually received a second-degree
black belt. He had a chance to represent his country in a national
distance running competition, until a riding accident interrupted
his training. Working for Schmitt's restaurant and catering business
he helped feed the cast and crew on several movie sets in Kenya,
most notably that of Gorillas in the Mist and Out of
Africa.
After three years in the restaurant business, he
accepted an offer by Safaris Unlimited to lead horseback and
Range Rover safaris through the beautiful terrain of Kenya's
nature and wild game reserves. It was on one of these two-week
safaris he lead that Raymond met Hillary Shea, from Fort Bragg,
California. Shea is the organizer of the World Ride and Tie Championship,
a sport that combines trail running, endurance riding and strategy.
Shea, who is a two-time world champion of the sport, also breeds
and sells Russian horses on her ranch outside Mendocino. Impressed
by Raymond's riding style, she invited him to a race in Santa
Cruz. Raymond took her up on the offer. His team came in fifth
of the 125 teams in that first race. He liked California and
decided to stay, work on Shea's ranch, and race. At the end of
his first year here, he had placed first in the 25-mile course
of the 12th Annual Mendocino 50 and 25 Mile Endurance Rides.
Over the next couple years, he taught judo at the
Mendocino Recreation Center while working in local restaurants
and cafes. He worked at Café Beaujolais in Mendocino,
and then opened his own restaurant in Fort Bragg. He was married
for five years while living in Fort Bragg and had another child.
In 1996, at age 42, Raymond decided to take a break
and go back to Africa to visit family and friends. War was raging
in Central Africa and, after visiting family, he decided to join
a caravan of Red Cross and United Nations trucks going to Rwanda
to bring food and medical attention, and to assess how well the
refugees were being protected. When their caravan rolled up to
the refugee camp, they found the camp had run out of food three
days before and it was total mayhem. "The UN Forces were
like bulldogs with no teeth," Raymond told me. "They
were completely outnumbered. It was all terrible. That was the
turning point for me. All I wanted to focus on was stopping the
violence and being a part of the healing of Africa."
The next morning he caught a ride with a convoy
that was returning to Nairobi. From there he went back to Malindi
determined to start an orphanage to save African children from
violence and starvation, and give them comfort, education and
a chance to lead a better life. Having formed a board of directors
in Kenya, he flew back to Mendocino and in his typical bi-continental
fashion formed a U.S. board made up of Hillary Shea and some
of his other friends in Northern California.
In the year 2000 the Thoya-Oya Childrens Centre
was opened in a four-bedroom upstairs flat in Malindi. Today
there are nine orphaned children from ages 7 to 13 who are now
being fed, nurtured, educated and protected from harm in a new
house with lots of room, a fenced yard to play in with fruit
trees and a big front porch. They go to the local school each
day, and are all in the top 10 percent of their classes. "It's
wonderful to know that we are making a difference in the lives
of nine children who were homeless and destitute," Raymond
said, "but there are still so many more."
There's an abandoned resort outside of Malindi.
It needs a little work, but it has four large buildings on it
that could house as many as 65 children. It sits on a few acres,
enough for a big garden and maybe even horses. It will take $120,000
— a formidable challenge — but Raymond Thoya, who bravely charged
a lion at the age of 5, is clearly not daunted by challenges.
TOP
COVER STORY | IN
THE NEWS | OPINION
| ARTBEAT | STAGE
MATTERS
TALK OF THE
TABLE | THE
HUM | CALENDAR
SUMMER ACTIVITIES FOR KIDS
| SUMMER FESTIVAL GUIDE
Comments? Write
a letter!
© Copyright 2006, North Coast Journal,
Inc.
|