From apartheid to acclaim
Transplanted N.L. country doctor one of 100 bestowed Order of Canada
The patient had a problem with his “bird.” To Mohamed Ravalia, the new family doctor in Twillingate, N.L., this sounded odd. The gentleman hadn’t arrived at his office with a bird. Maybe the bird was in a cage outside, Ravalia reasoned, since individuals often brought in their sick pets — dogs, cats — for him to examine.
But the confusion around the bird lingered, hanging awkwardly, until the patient, a burly old sailor, repeated his health concern, finally prompting the mystified physician to seek clarification: “Where is your bird, sir,” Ravalia politely asked.
And with that, the burly old sailor dropped his drawers.
“He had been referencing his male genitalia,” the doctor says, chuckling. “That episode became a hilarious nightmare for me. The community joked about it for months. People still ask me how my bird is doing.”
The bird story has been around Twillingate for 30 years, as has the town doctor, a 57-year-old East Indian Muslim from race- and wartorn Zimbabwe, who came to this northeastern Newfoundland outpost, renowned for its icebergs and whale watching, as an immigrant. He expected to stay for a few years. But he never left.
“There was just something ver y hypnotic about this place,” Ravalia says. “This combination of the hostility of the land — with its rugged appeal — and then the people, with their singsong lilt, that had lived through immense hardships and tragedies, but saw in me a willingness to come out to this remote area and embrace it. They shaped the way I began to think about life.
“And living here, I was able to shed this albatross of identity that had always hung around my neck. My Asian identity had always defined who I was in Zimbabwe. But in Twillingate, as the only Asian, that whole weight fell away.”
Ravalia was adopted as “a local.” He married a local, and had two sons. He became a hockey dad, a community volunteer, and a veteran of kitchen parties — known as “Rav” to his friends — and “Dr. Rav” to his patients and colleagues. Now, he is being recognized for all that he has done for his town and for rural medicine in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Ravalia was among 100 notable Canadians appointed to the Order of Canada on Canada Day by Governor General David Johnston. An official media release praised the physician for his “contributions ... as a family physician, mentor and community leader.”
“My emotions around this honour vary from disbelief to absolute joy, to this sense of equity, a sense of fairness because, as you know — I grew up in a kind of fractured apartheid society,” Ravalia says.
He grew up in what was then Rhodesia, where racism was a fact of daily life. He had just graduated from medical school when independence was won in 1980; Bob Marley played at the soccer stadium in Harare, filling the air with songs of freedom amid an atmosphere of joy — and hope.
But that sense of hope evaporated, soon enough, in the new Zimbabwe, and the young Muslim doctor looked to Canada — a country he perceived as the “Switzerland of the North” — as a place to build a better life.
What he found in Twillin- gate was a home, a town of burly old sailors — and birds — a town he knows he will never leave.
“T hi s community embraced me from the start,” he says. “I just kind of transi- tioned seamlessly to a rural Newfoundlander, and I am very content with my station in life.”