Awash in the wake

By Robert Mangelsdorf


I wasn't even supposed to be there the night Carmen died, and when Roseanne came downstairs, choked in tears, she let out a startled scream when I poked my head around the corner to see what the commotion was.

She ran back upstairs and shut the door behind her.
I looked at Gary, and he looked back at me blankly.

"What's going on, man?" I asked him. "What's the matter with your mom?"

"It's Carmen," he said flatly, as though he was talking about the weather.
"I think he committed suicide. He's in the garage."

We stepped outside and the smell of exhaust lingered faintly in the cold, still air, intensifying as we neared the old wooden structure. Only the moonlight lit the yard and the grass was already moist with dew.
Gary opened the door to the garage and black smoke billowed out and around our feet. The lights were off inside, but we didn’t bother to turn them on: we held our shirts over our mouths and entered in near darkness.

The door to the Oldsmobile was unlocked. Gary’s step-father was sitting upright in the back seat wearing a winter jacket zipped up to his chin. His arms were crossed and he wore gloves.

I grabbed his wrist with my index and thumb to take his pulse, but there was no need. His skin was cold and waxy, and instantly my brain recognized that whatever it was that I was holding, it wasn't alive.

"Jesus," Gary muttered.

"Did your mom come in here?" I asked him.

"No," he replied. "At least, she said she didn't."

***

Roseanne had become somewhat of a surrogate mother for me after my own mom moved to Vancouver Island a few years earlier. I was in my early 20s, living alone and going to university, so she would invite me over for dinner, often without Gary even knowing. That usually meant he had to share, something of a new experience for him, being an only child.
One time at dinner Carmen made himself a drink using a raspberry vinegar Roseanne had made, mistaking it for cordial.
He winced slightly as he drank it.
"This is delicious Rosie," Carmen said with all earnestness.
He was a lawyer in New Westminster, and worked mainly with legal aid.
After barely five years of marriage, Roseanne told him she wanted a divorce. We learned later that he had stopped taking his anti-depressants.
He left no note. The paramedic said that was a good thing.

***


Gary took charge right away. He consoled his now-widowed mother. He made the phone calls that needed to be made. He put on a pot of tea.
I stood by, dumbstruck, clutching a notepad and a pen.
“You’ll need this,” I offered him. “For… something.”
Roseanne varied between uncontrolled sobbing and seething invectives, and every time our eyes met she burst into tears anew.
The police and ambulance were the first to arrive, along with the victim support workers. Friends and family came in the second wave. With each arrival Roseanne had to tearfully relive what had happened.
“This is so typical of him,” Carmen’s brother said as he walked in the door, his jacket and shoes still on. “He could never finish anything."
More than a dozen bawling strangers crammed into Gary and Roseanne’s tiny kitchen. Every cell in my body wanted to leave that house and never come back.
The sheer amount of grief was overwhelming.
Gary and I went for a walk to escape the chaos.
"I think you should stay," Gary said, handing me a flask of something. 
"Yeah,” I said, taking a pull.
“This is pretty fucked up,” I added.
“Yeah,” he said, taking a drink.
Around two in the morning the crowd in the kitchen began thinning out and Gary and I headed back downstairs to the relative calm of his bedroom.
He immediately sat down at his computer and started typing.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
"Homework,” he said, not turning around from his computer. “I have an assignment due tomorrow and I have to hand it in.”
I picked up a book and started reading.  
Gary turned around and pointed to the picture of the Hindenburg disaster on the cover.
“That’s pretty incredible, eh?” he said with forced enthusiasm. “I can’t believe they actually flew those things. And full of hydrogen too! Of course it exploded."
“I know, right?” I replied. “What were they thinking? Why wouldn’t you use helium?”
We grasped at anything to distract us from what we had witnessed.
Gary played a collection of stand-up comedy on his computer speakers to listen to as we tried to sleep. The comedian screamed and ranted and we laughed, Gary lying in his bed, me on the floor beside him, just out of sight, the two of us in tears.
Later, I thought of Roseanne laying in bed alone, the sound of faint laughter creeping up from the basement, her husband dead but hours.
In the morning, Gary awoke before dawn and began the hour and a half long trek to Langara College on the bus to hand in his journalism assignment. I pretended to sleep, and after he left I slinked out the back door, hopped on my scooter and pushed it down the alley before starting it up.
Days later, they had the car towed away to get the battery charged and the stench of exhaust washed out of the seats. When the mechanic started the car, the radio started playing. It was set to the oldies station.
It was the last thing Carmen had heard.
That exhaust stench still lingered though. Neither Gary or Roseanne ever drove that car again, and within weeks it was sold.
The house too. Gary talked his mom out of leveling the garage, but she never went in there again. Less than a year later she bought a small townhouse in Cloverdale, and parked on the street.

***

I came by the house regularly over the next few days. Gary and I talked at length, but Roseanne and I spoke little and avoided eye contact. She liked having the house filled with people though, the awkward conversations took her mind off what she had been through.
I don't remember much about the funeral, except that it didn't last very long. The service was held in the basement of a church in Maillardville and I sat near the front of the room, across from Gary and Roseanne.
She had aged terribly in the past week. The black dress she wore matched the bags under her eyes. Her skin was pale and when I held her hand it was cold and clammy to the touch. What little rest she'd had was from exhaustion, the kind of fitful sleep you have when your body gives up, but your mind races on.

***

That winter Gary and I spent most nights at a rundown bar downtown that catered to travelers. We both ignored our schoolwork; I dropped out of school, Gary was kicked out.
One night Gary was coming home from a friend’s birthday party, and collapsed in a drunken mess on the sidewalk, all six-foot-five, 300 pounds of him sprawled out on the concrete.
Despite the pleas of his 130-pound girlfriend Saskia, he wouldn’t be moved.
"Just leave me here," he managed to spit out. "I want to die. I want to kill myself."
I was relieved when he told me what happened. For the better part of a year I’d been having suicidal thoughts, and had told no one.
Lying in bed after a drinking binge, I’d visualize my head being blown away with a shotgun, splattering all over my bedroom wall. I’d drive over a bridge after a stressful day at work and imagine myself jumping off of it into the cold, black waters below. I’d scream into my pillow and hyperventilate, but the images would persist.
Knowing that I wasn't alone was a great comfort.
Gary started going to therapy, and we talked about his sessions.
His therapist explained that the brain acts like a scratched record when something traumatic like this happens. It’s trying to make sense of this crazy thing, but it can’t, so the needle can’t move on, and it keeps skipping back.
Over time images and thoughts about the event begin to appear out of context.
Having some sort of knowledge of what was going on in my head was an immense comfort to me. The thoughts persisted, but I understood them now.
"In a way, I'm glad you were there," Gary told me once. 

"Yeah," I told him. "In a way, I am too."

Tillman Alfred Briggs, 1930 - 2009

It is impossible to tell the story of Tillman Alfred Briggs without first telling the story Maxine Lois Stokes, and the profound effect this amazing woman had on his life.
Everything Tillman did, everything he accomplished would have been impossible without her love and support.
He told me so himself in the final months of his life.
The lessons of teamwork work he so ardently preached, on the pitch and off, he learned in the Stokes' families small house in Union Bay.
Life was not easy for the Stokes upon arriving in British Columbia.
In search of a climate more suitable to Maxine's mother's tuberculosis, Maxine's father, a locomotive engineer with a large coal company was able to wrangle a transfer from Alberta to Vancouver Island.
However, the home they had been promised was little more than a shack, half reclaimed by the forest in which it lay. Originally built for Asian labourers, Tillman had to duck to enter the home when he came to pick up Maxine for their dates. The living room, if you could call it that, contained but a couch, which had to be moved to open the front door.
As Maxine's mother's tuberculosis worsened, Maxine became the glue that held the Stokes together.
She tended to the home. She cooked, she cleaned. Every morning, she would send her father on his way to work for readying little John for school.
Only after all the chores had been done would she prepare for her day, hitch-hiking all the way to her high school in Courtneay.
While the other girls her age were off playing, Maxine was busy being a mother instead of a child.
Yet she never complained, she never felt sorry for herself, and she never begrudged her family for the position she was in.
And this was not lost on Tillman.
Although theirs was not an easy life, there was love in that little Stokes house.
There was love in the sacrifices they made for each other. There was joy in the music they played together. And there was a strength of character that held them together in the face of adversity.
Tillman felthis family was aloof and distant by comparison. Despite their financial success, they were missing something money could never buy.
And in that little house Tillman saw a life with far more value.
And in Maxine he saw a woman with boundless strength and a seemingly endless capacity for love.
Together they created a loving family, and it was their greatest success.
The accolades Tillman received throughout his career were Maxine's as well, and he knew this.
For in rugby, as in life, great things are accomplished by working together.

Beloved farmer passes

By Robert Mangelsdorf
Maple Ridge News

Decked in his white and blue engineer’s cap and dusty overalls, for decades Bill Hampton was a common sight in the fields west of 210th Street and 128th Avenue.

Whether working the field with his team of draught horses, or herding his dairy cattle from pasture to pasture with his beloved border collies, Hampton stayed true to the old ways of farming, providing a living link to the past.

William Thomas Hampton passed away late Monday night with his beloved wife Lil by his side. The cancer he had beaten four years previous had returned and proved to much for this humble caretaker of Maple Ridge’s history.

He was 75 years old.

Long before ribbons of asphalt criss-crossed the Alouette River lowlands, Bill Hampton’s grandfather, the original William Hampton, for whom he was named, tilled the earth in much the same way, and Bill never really did see the need the change.

“A lot of people thought he was Amish,” said long-time neighbour Paul Laity. “He just loved animals.”

The Hampton and Laity families travelled together to Canada from Cornwall, England in 1879, floating their belongings by boat down the Fraser River.

In England, they were miners, and they didn’t want to be miners anymore. On the rolling verdant hillside next to the Alouette River, the families settled side-by-side and began a new life as farmers, and there their descendants live to this day, working the same fields.

And in Bill Hampton’s case, using the same methods.

After all, what sort of companionship could a tractor provide, and there’s no sense in whispering to a baler? Instead, Hampton worked his 75-acre dairy farm with the animals he loved, and enjoyed the simple peace the absence of mechanization provided.

However, in recent years he saw that peace shattered, as the construction of the Abernethy connector cut through the middle of his farm.

The clatter and commotion of the heavy machinery spooked the horses, and the construction left his lower fields all but inaccessible.

He was devastated, and from his bed he wondered aloud what kind of future his farm would have.

“The farm was his life and that’s what he loved,” says Lil.

The pair had only just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary Sept. 13.

“It was killing him not being outside with his animals.”

Hampton’s son Dennis took to working the fields in February, honouring his father in doing so, but Lil wonders how long that will last.

To this day, the Hampton Farm has yet to see mechanization.

In addition to Lil and Dennis, Bill Hampton leaves behind his sons Rodney, and Mark, his sister Jean, brother Ray, and his grandchildren Kiah and Makenna.

He is predeceased by his son Barry.

A memorial service will be held Monday, Nov. 10, at 2 p.m. at the Maple Ridge Funeral Chapel, 11969 216th St.

Family wants Coroner's Inquest

May 22, 2008

By Robert Mangelsdorf
Maple Ridge News

The final years of Karen Beck’s life were spent living in fear of the man she married and helped raise a family with.
Despite a restraining order, Beck’s husband Richard intimidated her, terrorized her, threatened her life, and ultimately, took it from her.
When Karen’s adult son Robert heard that his father had strangled his mother to death, before setting their Maple Ridge home on fire and hanging himself last November, all he could think was, “He finally did it.”
Robert Beck and his grandmother Phyllis Chichenko, Karen’s mother, held a press conference at the Ridge Meadows Senior’s Centre on Thursday and asked the B.C. Coroner’s Office to conduct an inquest into the case. They feel the RCMP could have done more to protect Karen and hope a coroner’s inquest may recommend steps to help prevent a similar situation from happening again.
“The main reason why we’re here is so we can at least protect some future Karens,” said Robert. “The biggest thing we can do is hope for change, and we can all push for it.”
RCMP still haven’t released their official account of what happened that day, and the file remains open.
In November, police said they were not in a position to offer intimate details of the murder-suicide, and there would be no further information released.
The family claims Karen, 52, suffered for years under her husband’s thumb, and the system let her down.
Some of Richard Beck’s methods of intimidation were subtle, some not-so.
His rifle, for instance, was always kept in the bedroom, in the back of the closet. But some days, the rifle would be right there at the front, taken out of its case for Karen to see, says Robert.
Another time, he held the gun to her head.
Put all your all things in a box, Karen had said Richard told her, where we’re going we won’t need them anymore.
Police were called to the house and confiscated a rifle from Richard, which he gave up willingly.
He was not arrested, though, as RCMP say there was nothing to substantiate criminal charges. The family was told the police could do nothing unless Richard physically harmed Karen.
After 33 years of marriage, she fled the relationship in June 2005 and was referred to the Cythera transition house by RCMP. She filed for divorce shortly thereafter.
The couple were involved in a number of civil suits as Karen tried to force the sale of their house. Although the civil court laid down a restraining order against Richard Beck, RCMP had no knowledge of it, because it was a civil and not a criminal restraining order.
After fleeing to Calgary, where she stayed with family, Karen returned to Maple Ridge, at the urging of her lawyer, to prepare their house for sale after Richard refused to do so.
On Nov. 15, 2007, she visited the home she shared with her husband in the upscale Whispering Falls neighbourhood for the last time, and was murdered by Richard Beck, 54.
Chichenko didn’t think Richard had it in him, she didn’t think he was capable of something so heinous.
“We never thought it would go this far,” she said, her eyes welling with tears.
Robert Beck said his mother did her best to shield the family from their father, but sadly there was no one to shield her from him.
“My mother had a way of protecting all of us, she didn’t want us thinking our dad was an animal,” said Robert Beck on Thursday. “Maybe we didn’t do enough.”
Beck and Chichenko were joined by Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows NDP MLA Michael Sather at the press conference, who said that questions still remain about the RCMP’s role in Karen’s death.
“I think there should have been a criminal charge of harassment against Mr. Beck,” Sather said.
Because Richard Beck never physically assaulted Karen, no charges were laid.
“One of the biggest questions that I got asked by the police officers was, ‘Was your mom ever hurt, or beaten?’ And the answer was, No,” said Beck. “But you never know when that person is going over the edge.”
Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows RCMP Cpl. Ryan Schlecker said, while he sympathizes with the family’s loss, police did all that was within their power
“We work within the laws that we are bound to protect,” said Schlecker. “As police officers, we work within the system. At the end of the day, it’s up to the public to determine what kind of policing system or justice system they want.”
Robert Beck believes better communication between all the agencies involved in his mother’s case could have prevented her death. He hopes an inquest, which does not designate blame, will at least draw attention to this problem, and offer a possible solution.
“If you are in an abusive relationship, run like heck,” said Beck. “Hopefully, we can protect people better in the future.”

Nowhere to Call Home

March 15, 2008

By Robert Mangelsdorf
Maple Ridge News

Everyone makes mistakes, says Pete Johnson, and then you end up out here.
For him, that is the woods behind Catalina Pools and Spas, off the Haney Bypass in downtown Maple Ridge, where Johnson calls home.
On Tuesday, dozens of volunteers scoured local streets, back alleys and shelters looking for people like Johnson, those living without a home in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows as part of the Metro Vancouver Homeless Count.
While official numbers won’t be released until April 8, many involved with the count said the local numbers were up from the last count in 2005.
“Some people will be shocked with the results,” says David Spears, project manager with Alouette Home Start, who was helping to co-ordinate efforts locally.
Johnson doesn’t need a survey to tell him what he already knows.
“There’s a lot more, a hell of a lot more out here these days,” he says. “A lot people hate it, they don’t want to be out here. They just want a home, but they can’t afford one.”
Johnson has been homeless for more than five years, by choice.
“My wife kicked me out one day,” he says, lying down on a cardboard refrigerator box, sharpening a large metal blade with a whittled whetstone. “She thought I’d come back, but I learned to like it out here.”
Johnson stayed at the Salvation Army shelter for a while, but was asked to leave after getting in a skirmish with his wife, who still stays there.
Rob McGowan stayed at the shelter and was also kicked out. He camps with Johnson now and says he also prefers living in the woods.
“I’m an advocate for freedom,” says McGowan. “It’s a lifestyle.”
Both say they love to sleep under the stars, not having to answer to anyone and doing as they please, but they are not young men any more.
“It’s getting harder and harder,” to live outside, says Johnson. “I’m getting old and I’m sore.”
He is in his 40s and has spent much of his adult life in and out of jail, mainly for parole violations, he says.
“Jail is like a vacation, especially in the winter time. It’s warm, they feed you, and no one messes with you if you don’t mess with them.”
McGowan just turned 50, though his face belies a man who has seen many more years. His coal-grey hands are hard and dirty, and flecked with cuts and scabs. A crescent of ripe pink flesh surrounds the finger nail of his left index finger, it’s clean freshness a sharp contrast to his dark, weathered skin.
“My finger’s all infected,” he says. “So I had to cut away all the rotten flesh.”
McGowan would like to get a place to stay, if he could, but there’s not much available for guys like him.
Most single resident occupancy units are $300 a month, but in Maple Ridge there’s nothing under $500.
“How are we supposed to afford that?” McGowan says.
Johnson has tried to find accommodation, but says he’s always turned away because of his criminal record. Some landlords won’t have anything to do with him because they’ve seen him on the streets, “And they have their own opinions about me.”
The homeless count is an important way to gauge a community’s need for shelters and support, says Spears.
“Essentially, it provides a snap-shot of the homeless situation. If a community shows a need, there will be resources given to them.”
The count also looks to identify trends in homelessness by asking people living on the street what are their reasons for being homeless, how long have they been homeless, where are they from, where they stay at night, and what services they use.
Spears said the definition of a homeless person used in the count is someone who lacks a fixed, regular and/or adequate nighttime residence.
However, the “hidden homeless” are harder to count.
“Someone might have a roof over their head, but no fixed address,” Spears says. “They can’t afford, or don’t have the ability to pay rent, so they’re couchsurfing.”
“Unless they contact us, it’s hard for us to count them.”
Johnson says he talked to the canvassers on Tuesday, but McGowan says he didn’t see them.
In the 2005 count, 42 people were counted as being homeless in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows, down from 62 in 2002.
Despite the drop in homeless numbers, Sheila McLaughlin, president of the Alouette Home Start Society, says the problem is getting worse, and will keep getting worse until there is more adequate low-income housing in the community.
She’s spearheading a project to construct a three- to four-storey supportive housing apartment complex with on-site outreach staff.
Currently, there is no supportive housing in Maple Ridge.
Her group already has a $5.4 million grant from the Provincial Homelessness Initiative to build the facility, but it is hoping the District of Maple Ridge will provide a site for free.
“That kind of money doesn’t go too far in this construction market,” she said.
Three years ago, Alouette Home Start proposed a similar project on Burnett Street, but that fell through after funding was turned down and neighbours complained.
Salvation Army Captain Kathie Chiu said this year’s numbers at the 18-bed Caring Place shelter she runs were double what they were in 2005, and until there is more affordable housing, those numbers will keep going up.
“No matter how much shelter space there is, there’s still a lack of affordable housing,” Chiu says. “Staying here forever is not an option.”
She says that even if someone gets off the streets and goes into rehab, when they get out, there is nowhere for them to live, and they inevitably relapse.
“It’s a very frustrating cycle.”
She says she supports McLaughlin’s project and hopes this year’s homeless count will help people realize what is happening on the streets.
“Hopefully the community will see what happens without supportive housing and get behind the project.”
Both Johnson and McGowan say they would be interested.
“I think it would help,” says Johnson “It’s just getting crazy out here.”

The Kid is Alright

Jan. 26, 2008

By Robert Mangelsdorf
Staff Reporter

Excited murmurs and whispers run through the small crowd of parents gathered in the Gold Rink at the Pitt Meadows Arena to watch their sons play hockey on a chilly Thursday night.
Number 10 is on, and the second his skates touch the ice, what local hockey dads and WHL scouts alike have been saying for months, becomes apparent.
The kid is good.
He takes off, and after only a couple of strides he’s skating at full speed down the boards, chasing after the puck. He glides calmly, and his movements are efficient, showing none of the teenage awkwardness most 14-year-old’s experience.
As the defence collapses in front of the Coquitlam net, he picks up a rebound and wrists it through traffic, somehow finding the back of the net.
It’s not the prettiest goal, but it counts. So did the other 70 goals Connor Sanvido has scored so far this season with the Ridge Meadows Rustlers.
“He’s a special player,” says Tim Knight, coach of the AAA bantam team.
Although Sanvido is only in Grade 9 at Archbishop Carney Catholic School in Port Coquitlam, he is already on his way to career in hockey.
Sanvido first started raising eyebrows last season as a rookie with the AAA bantam Rustlers, when he led them in scoring with 102 points in 67 games. This season, he’s already got 109 points in 46 games.
Jason Ripplinger, head scout for the WHL’s Vancouver Giants, first saw Sanvido’s potential at the Chilliwack Invitational Bantam Hockey Tournament in October.
“His competition level was very high, and he wasn’t scared to get into the dirty areas and fight for the puck,” says Ripplinger.
Which is not surprising, since Sanvido says the player he looks up to the most is the Washington Capital’s high-scoring and hard-hitting star forward Alexander Ovechkin.
Knight also remembers the tournament as being a break-out for Sanvido.
“With his offensive talent, he often gets labelled as one-way player. But in Chilliwack he was finishing his hits, getting in on the back-check, and playing some really good two-way hockey,” he says. “Connor is a hungry player, but he was even hungrier than usual at that tournament.”
But what really sets him apart on the ice is his speed.
“He’s got that second gear and that really helps him out there,” says Ripplinger. “And teams are always looking for someone with hands like that who can score.”
Ripplinger thinks Sanvido will go in the first two rounds of the 2008 WHL bantam draft in Calgary this May, which means he could be going anywhere from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan to Seattle, Washington.
While the hockey player in Sanvido is excited about the prospect of playing in a high calibre league with 20-year-olds, the ninth-grader in him is nervous about the prospect of leaving home.
“It’s so early to be making these decisions,” he says. He wants to play with the Giants in the WHL, but that means forgoing the possibility of an NCAA scholarship and moving away from home. And while going to the BCHL might mean being a little closer to home, he could be hurting his chances of getting drafted into the NHL someday, his ultimate goal.
“I mean, I don’t want to commit to anything too early,” he says.
It can all be a little overwhelming for someone just two years out of elementary school.
For his parents, Bonny and Ray Sanvido, their son is still growing up, and now they are faced with the prospect of being apart from him for eight months of the year.
“Sometimes you feel like you’re losing your kid,” says Ray. “We just have to make the best of our time together before he’s gone.”
Bonny and Ray are at all of Connor’s games, and anything he’s needed along the way they’ve provided. Including giving him the skills to keep his ego in check, says Knight, and that might be his best selling point of all as potential professional hockey player.
“The kind of success he’s having can go to your head if you're not grounded, but Connor’s not like that,” he says. “He doesn’t celebrate his victories too long and he doesn’t mourn his losses too long either. Anyone who’s steady like that can handle adversity”
Knight, who has coached Sanvido for the past four years, credits the player's parents for bringing him up right, and instilling in him a down-to-earth sensibility that he thinks will keep him from getting swept away with all the attention lavished upon professional athletes.
His parents say they are more proud of the focus and hard work he has put into his goal of playing professional hockey than of any of his actual on-ice achievements.
But the one thing his parents have never done, Knight says, is push Sanvido.
“Everything he has ever accomplished is because he wanted it, and he put in the hours and worked for it,” he says.
Sanvido first realized hockey was his future when he was playing in his second year of peewee, and decided he was going to take it seriously. Still in elementary school, he decided to start doing push-ups and working out in his room just to get stronger.
The scouts first started showing up to his games last season, and this season Sanvido’s had to get used to playing in front of crowds who’ve come to see the phenom play.
“I like the crowds a lot, it really gets me pumped up” he says. “I just love playing and I love being on a team, and I love scoring and hitting.”
In addition to playing two to three hockey games every week, weekly practices, and playing on his school’s senior soccer team, Sanvido works out nearly every day, be it dry-land training or lifting weights, or cardio.
And of course, there’s high school.
“There’s not a lot of free time and sometimes my schoolwork suffers,” says Sanvido. “I don’t have a lot of time to study.”
Be that as it may, his parents say his grades are good and he’s doing well in school.
It’s a good thing too. On the Rustlers, poor grades get you a one-way ticket to the bench.
“Our philosophy is that school comes first,” says Knight. “But I don’t think Connor has to worry about being a healthy scratch.”
Having coached a slew of players now playing in the WHL – Garet Hunt, Mike Piluso, and Matt Ius among them – Knight sees similarities between them and Sanvido.
And while Knight says Sanvido’s scoring output and skill level is comparable, what really puts him in their company is his never-say-die attitude and his commitment to the game.
“He’s a game breaker,” says Knight, who was named the Rustlers’ MVP when he played for them in 1994. “When the team is down, he can lift you out of the mud and carry the whole team on his back.”
That attitude has helped the Rustlers to a 29-19-5 record overall this season.
For now, Sanvido will remain at home, with his family, and they are happy for that. He will find out which team he will be joining in the WHL at the bantam draft in May, but will likely start next season with the major midget hockey next season with the local Vancouver North East Chiefs.
In the meantime, he will be representing the Fraser Valley at the B.C. Winter Games in February, and enjoying the fleeting days and months of his childhood as he grows up, perhaps, a little before his time.

A Place to Belong

March 26, 2008

By Robert Mangelsdorf
Maple Ridge News

Some people spend their entire lives looking for where they belong and still don’t find it. But in the dusty town of Ruhengeri, in Northern Rwanda, Cathy Emmerson found her place.
High in the jungle-covered hills, she runs a preschool for the village children, teaching them to read, feeding them and helping in any way she can to better the lives of a people decimated by war and genocide.
It was not long ago Rwanda’s dusty red soil was drenched with the blood of more than 800,000 people, systematically killed during the civil war between the ruling Tutsi minority and the Hutu majority.
It’s pretty much the furthest place you could get from Maple Ridge, but for the former real estate agent, it’s home, and she couldn’t be happier.
“My friends thought I was going through a middle-aged crisis, but they understand now,” Emmerson says. “This is where I belong.”
She first came to Africa four years ago on vacation with friends and travelled to Rwanda to visit the wild mountain gorillas.
She wanted to get off the beaten track, but fell in love with the country and its people.
“I couldn’t get Rwanda out of my mind.”
Within six months, she was back, for good.
For the first year in what was to become her adopted home, Emmerson volunteered with the Imbabazi Orphanage, run by American humanitarian Rosamond Carr.
“Her intention was to retire and then I could take over the orphanage,” says Emerson. “But then she said one day, ‘I’m only 94, I’m just not ready to retire yet.’”
Emmerson then went to Ruhengeri, where she had friends, and opened up a small gift shop to support the local craftspeople and artisans.
However, within a span of weeks, five parents in the town committed suicide after discovering they had AIDS. Close to 40 children were left without parents.
Emmerson brought the remaining parents and children together and asked them what they needed.
The answer was help with the children.
“If a single mother has to go into market to sell produce, the kids would be left alone wandering the streets,” she said. “So that’s kind of how the school got started.”
While primary school is free in Rwanda, there is no preschool available.
Emmerson currently looks after more than 120 children, ages two to six. She teaches them English and French.
They gather daily on plywood benches outdoors, under a tarp if it rains. She is simultaneously a mother, a teacher, a nurse and a cook.
Emmerson hopes to have a permanent preschool facility built by the end of the year, and is planning on building a trade school within the next five to seven years.
“Most children in Rwanda don’t even get a childhood,” she says. “If they get a chance to learn and play, they get a fabulous start to life.”
Emmerson married local businessman, Uwayo Rachid, about 18 months ago. Last year they gave out more than 500 goats to impoverished families.
Goats are a source of income for poor families. They can breed them and within a few years have a herd, which they can then sell.
Emmerson and her husband also built two houses and repaired seven more.
“You can really make a difference here,” Emmerson says. “Give a kid $3 worth of school supplies, and they think you’ve given them the moon.”
To say her time in the Land of 1,000 Hills has put her life into perspective would be an understatement.
Things that once seemed so essential to our survival don’t seem to matter any more, she says. Emmerson has no television, no fridge, she cooks her meals over charcoal in the backyard and if she wants to send an email, she walks into town to use one of Ruhengeri’s two internet cafés.
Thanks to a close relationship with North Province governor Boniface Racugu, Emmerson has been able to identify who needs help the most.
“Everybody looks poor, but the local government knows their community very well,” she says. “There is really good government in Rwanda right now and there are a lot of opportunities to make things better.”