American Benefactor Aids Young African : Warrior’s Wilderness Is ‘Wild Blue Yonder’

He was a boy in a dusty village in Kenya when it began, a boy with dreams and certainties as old as his tribe.

He would grow to be a warrior of the legendary Masai. He would wear his hair braided, sleeked with tallow and red ocher. With his spear, he would stalk the lion. He would own cattle, as all the proud Masai before him had owned cattle. In time, he would be an elder in his village.

But then, a new dream found him.

‘It Was an Airplane’

“The dream began in my village,” he recalls. “The jumbo jet went over. I heard the thundering and saw the smoke in the sky but I didn’t understand. They told me it was an airplane. They said it carried people in the sky and that the people were going to Nairobi. I began to dream that someday I would be the man who flew the plane that took the people to Nairobi.”

At home, the Masai, Wilson Laroi’s tribe, still resist civilization. With aloofness, courage and traditions that have given them standing of almost mythic proportion among all the African tribes, the Masai still raise warriors and still send them out to kill the lion.

But Laroi is not at home. He is half a world away from Kenya. He tells his story in Oregon, with the sweet smell of strong Kenyan tea floating through his apartment and the accent of his native land lilting through his English.

The warrior from the bush is a pilot now.

At 25, he is not yet the man who could fly the plane that takes the people to Nairobi. But he is stalking that quarry, closing on that goal with each passing day, each hour of flying time.

He Is Very Close

Laroi has completed work on both his private and commercial pilot licenses. He is close, very close, to his instrument flying rating and his multi-engine license. Sometime within the next year he will head for California to begin training for his airline transport license.

“Wilson has a very good shot at doing what he wants to do,” said Mickey Duke, Laroi’s teacher and the chief flying instructor at McKenzie Flying Service in Eugene, Ore. “I think his goal’s realistic. He understands that it probably will take him a little longer to get where he wants to go. But he’s out here every day. He’s always working.”

Laroi nourished a single-minded dream that seemed little more than a fantasy until the woman from America, from Oregon, befriended him and underwrote his education.

He had taken a job at Masai Mara, the vast wildlife preserve that attracts thousands to Kenya each year.

“I met people who told me that in America I could be educated and learn to fly,” he said. “But I did not know how to go. I did not know where was America. In my tribe, the old people told me that if I went to America that I would touch the end of the earth and I would be afraid.”

Trip to Africa

One of the visitors to Masai Mara was Cindy Avila. From her horse ranch outside Eugene, she was on her first trip to Africa. Wilson Laroi was 18.

Avila, who now lives full time in Kenya, is modestly wealthy. The Dee Bar Ranch, the quarter-horse breeding operation that she and her former husband operated for years, garnered an international reputation. Animals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars were bred and sold from the Dee Bar.

Avila was easing out of the operation, which she would eventually sell, when she met the soft-spoken Masai guide in the Kenyan bush. Across telephone lines that reach halfway around the globe, she recalls the meeting and the decision to invest in his future.

“All my life, in business and in work, I have been lucky,” she said. “I came to Africa and I saw the lack of opportunity and the hardships which people suffered here, and how they suffered it with such good heart.

“Somehow, I thought it was time for me to put back into the world some of the things I’d taken out. Then I met Wilson. There is something very, very exceptional about Wilson.”

Launched Basic Education

Avila returned home after promising Laroi that she would bring him to the United States and launch the basic educational work he would need before he could pursue any career.

But getting out of Africa was Laroi’s job. Alone, he had to find his way to the modern city of Nairobi, to penetrate the bureaucracy of Kenya and America, to learn of physical examinations and passports and airline tickets. The lion and the leopard never struck such fear in him as did the elevator and the escalator.

He boarded the plane for America on a day early in 1982. Avila met him in Los Angeles. Deliberately, she plunged him into a series of new experiences, from scuba diving in the Caribbean to gambling in Las Vegas to wintering at the Montana home of her parents.

“Mostly, I wanted to get him some education, so that he could develop his English,” she said.

He spent a year at a community college in Arizona, improving his English and reading skills. In Wyoming, he did some training as a veterinary technician, acquiring skills that might serve his people’s cattle-based economy. Then came the University of Oregon’s program for students pursuing English as a second language--and some small-airplane flying with a local farmer.

Another year or more of work lies ahead for Laroi, time in which his life will be devoted solely to flying lessons and studying.