Journalism 102 final: Travis Rice Feature Piece

Travis Rice tied his waist-long hair into a bun, rolled a cigarette and opened the window of the truck.
“Just for the record, I’m only driving this truck until my car gets out of the shop,” he said. “I know this stands for everything I’m against, but I have to get around somehow.”
After he lights up he starts out on a trip to go pick up letters from the Reno courthouse. He drives around awhile looking for a parking space, driving past multiple spots and citing that the truck is too big to fit. He finally backs up into a 15-minute loading zone and plants the wheels on the sidewalk.
Travis Rice, 32, has an eclectic past: he studied in London, interned for former Senator Richard Bryan in Washington, D.C., lived off the grid in Maui, lived in Africa for a summer, became the first male Education Manager for Planned Parenthood, interned in a psychiatric hospital and lackeyed for Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie.
Rice was born in Long beach, Calif. and moved to Nevada when he was three months old. He played football for most of his High school career and toured different colleges trying to recruit him.
“I weighed 260 at the time and the coach at UNR said that he’d get me up to 300 before the end of the year,” Rice said. “He said he was going to make me gain 40 pounds in six months. We [the prospective football players] were cattle to him.”
Rice decided to take a “talent” scholarship to Willamette University in Oregon. During the summer of his junior year in 1995, Rice had his first eye-opening experience: London.
“The pub is the place to hang out,” Rice said. “You take the whole family down there and everyone has a beer and talks.”
Rice found gaping contrasts between the United States and the United Kingdom.
“Isms are openly talked about there,” he said. “They have communists and socialists sitting in their Parliament.”
After London, Rice finished up his education in Oregon and during the summer after his senior year he interned under former Senator Richard Bryan. Rice soaked in the different culture of the capital, marking that he was called a “hippie,” motioning that his hair, at the time, was only down to his neck.
“Cocaine was rampant,” Rice said. “All the interns would go down to the bar in their suits and drink and snort cocaine.”
After his internship in D.C., Rice moved back to Reno. Rice stayed in Reno for most of the summer and nearing Fall he boarded a Greyhound bus with a Hawaiian friend, went to San Francisco and boarded a plane to Maui.
“I jumped on a Greyhound bus with a hand drum, backpack and my bicycle in a box,” Rice said.
Rice lived in Maui for eight years, eventually meeting his wife. He lived off the grid, worked multiple jobs, set up an entrepreneurship program for kids, restored sand dunes and created a safe haven for Hawaiian children.
“Domestic violence was still a large part of the culture,” Rice said.
Hawaiian children weren’t just being protected from abuse parents or siblings for methamphetamine, better known as crystal meth, hit Hawaii before it became a problem anywhere else.
“Me and a big Samoan buddy of mine chased a meth dealer out of the parking lot of the safe haven we set up,” he said. “We wanted the kids to have at least one place where they wouldn’t be solicited to buy drugs.”
Rice moved to Southern Malawi in Africa for the summer after deciding to move out of Maui. He set up computer labs, generators, helped create education plans about HIV and built a pump house so that the villagers could get more than one crop a year. He also noted that corn was the main crop of the villagers.
“The UN would send shipments of corn seed that would have a higher yield but it wouldn’t produce seeds to use for the next season,” he said. “The UN wanted the villagers to be dependent on them.”
HIV was epidemic when Rice entered the country.
“Some men believed that if they had sex with a virgin it would cure them of HIV,” he said. “That’s why we started the education programs. We had to let the people know what about the disease.”
Rice taught the villagers to plant marijuana to help those infected through their last days and to plant and eat garlic to help get their immune systems stronger to live longer while infected.
“Aspirin is gold there,” he said. “I came with a couple of Frisbees, which they threw away, a few soccer balls and a bunch of aspirin.”
Some soccer balls became so worn and torn that they couldn’t be repaired any more.
“They stuck about 200 condoms together in a ball, held them all together with rubber bands and suddenly they had a brand new soccer ball to play with,” he said.
After his stay in Africa, Rice moved back to Reno. He managed to become the first male Education Manager for Planned Parenthood.
He designed and continued innovative education campaigns teaching boys to “be a man.”
After his tenure at Planned Parenthood, Rice started up school again in the pursuit of a master’s degree in social work. For the program he interned at the West Hills Psychiatric hospital.
“I met God a few times at West Hills,” he said.
Even though he met God on multiple occasions, he found a single reoccurring problem: the same people were coming in time and time again.
“It’s a revolving door,” Rose Gramalia, Rice’s manager, said.
The problem goes deeper than just the same patients coming in time and time again.
“We’re putting on band-aids and putting out fires,” Gramalia said.
After Rice’s tenure at the psychiatric hospital he became the intern of assembly woman Sheila Leslie and was put in charge of researching a bill on housing for the homeless.
Rice worked with Officer Patrick O’Bryan on setting up a wall of pictures taken by homeless people in Reno.
“Those photos really made a difference,” O’Bryan said.
Rice was put in charge of making the presentation to the Health and Human Services committee.
“She told me to do the research and make the presentation and to work with Officer O’Bryan,” Rice said. “I had no idea of what I was actually supposed to do.”
Rice was also instrumental in maintaining order during the tent city on the steps of the Capital.
“Everything I’d done before led up to me be able to make that presentation,” Rice said. “That experience changed my life.”