Petaluma pilot flies help to COVID-hit Navajo Nation

Mark Rudolph loves to fly. He also loves service projects that better people’s lives. On rare occasions, he gets to do both at the same time.

A few weeks ago Rudolph, a Petaluma pilot and food industry executive, found one of those occasions. He and three friends built several hand-washing stations out of rubber garbage cans. He then flew them to rural areas on a Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona that lack running water.

The Navajo have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, Rudolph said. The hand-washing stations — a simple design with one bucket for clean water connected by a tube and foot pump to another bucket with a washbasin — are designed to provide critical sanitation to help fight the outbreak.

“The Navajo Nation have been decimated by COVID,” said Rudolph, 61. “They don’t have the ability to do sanitation. On the ‘deep res’ families don’t have running water or electricity.”

After building six of the hand-washing stations, Rudolph was able to deliver them in his Cessna P210 Centurion airplane, which he keeps at the Petaluma airport. He flew a couple of them with his neighbor, Dhruv Gulati, and his longtime friend Ney Grant flew the rest with Grant’s neighbor.

“I like flying from point A to point B, going to a destination with a purpose,” said Rudolph, who has been flying for 25 years. “Flying is the ultimate in multitasking. You have to be on your toes.”

Rudolph was born in the East Bay and became interested in airplanes as a kid — each year on his birthday, his father took him on a glider ride in Calistoga. He flew a couple of times in college, and got his pilot’s license in his 30s. He has owned his Cessna for 17 years.

He has spent his career in the food service industry, first as chief operating officer of Peet’s Coffee and later running a cheese company. He moved to Petaluma for a job as chief financial officer at Amy’s Kitchen. He is currently an executive with Guittard Chocolate in Burlingame.

Rudolph uses his plane to commute to the city south of San Francisco most work days.He’s also flown across country, to the Bahamas and to Cuba. He flies to British Columbia, all over the western U.S. and usually makes a couple flights a year to Mexico to work at a medical clinic.

Those are the kind of trips he likes the most, flying into a destination to give back.

“I have a desire to want to help people,” he said. “I’ve been very fortunate in what I’ve done and I want to give back, while doing what I love at the same time.”

It was 14 years ago when he and his friend Grant and two others first flew to the Navajo reservation to help build a shade structure for a church.

When the pandemic struck, he reconnected with the pastor at the church, who helped facilitate delivery of the hand-washing stations. Rudolph and Grant, who is from Placerville, flew into Escalante, Utah and camped out before continuing on to Tuba City, Arizona.

They met the pastor, Eric Kee of Tuba City Church of Christ, and offloaded the eight hand-washing stations. Grant, in a blog post about the trip, said Kee delivered the stations to people living deep in the reservation.

“A few days later Eric said he had placed his first unit with a family that had previously been washing their hands in a shared basin of water (so the last person washed with a film of dirt in the water),” Grant wrote. “Yep. That felt good.”

For his part, Rudolph’s reward came when he saw photos of Navajo using the hand-washing station that he had built and delivered.

“That part felt great,” he said. “It was like ‘yay, someone who needs it is using it.’”

For more information about service projects on the Navajo reservation, visit tubacitychurchofchrist.com.

(Contact Matt Brown at matt.brown@arguscourier.com.)