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FACES OF MAC
In keeping with the July issue’s behind-the-scenes theme, this edition of Faces of MAC features two longtime club employees who improve the member experience daily. Discover the many contributions — and fascinating life stories — of the club’s Housekeeping and Maintenance team employees.
Sunshine & Rain
To simply call Nassira Munyabuliza a survivor is an understatement and perhaps underplays the joy she exudes to every member and fellow employee she encounters. She’s been a stalwart of MAC Housekeeping since 2002, but many might not be familiar with her story. Failing to mention that she’s overcome challenges most readers couldn’t fathom would be an unforgiveable omission.
In 1996, after losing two of her brothers to the Rwandan Genocide, which claimed as many as a million people in three months, she and half of her family fled to the United States. She returned to Rwanda a year later to marry her childhood sweetheart, and while he’s divided his time between the two countries, they’ve raised two daughters here in the U.S. and worked to give them a life full of knowledge of the past and hope for the future.
“I want people to know that where I come from, it isn’t only genocide. In Rwanda, we are doing great right now, both economically and technologically,” Munyabuliza says. She’s still very connected to her place of birth, both through family and her work with the women of the Oregon Rwandan Community. “What we do is help each other. If the family is broken up, or the kids cannot go to school, I’m the one who comes and advises. We always raise money and awareness.”
Being able to help others is a major milestone for Munyabuliza, who undertook a long physical, psychological, and emotional journey to reach a place of peace. “When you came as a refugee, they asked you, ‘What do you like?’ We like it sunny, but also a little bit of rain, so they took us to Atlanta, Georgia.” After a short stay, they decided to follow a cousin to Oregon, which has proven a much better fit. “I’m OK with all the raining because in
Rwanda, we have lots of rain. Also, they call it the land of a thousand hills. There’s a mix of weather like here. We wanted a small city, so we came to Oregon, and we love it like home.”
Munyabuliza’s first job was selling tickets at the Rose Garden, now the Moda Center, and while she recalls finding some distraction in the basketball games she watched, true happiness was tough to come by for many years. Eventually she took a graveyard shift at MAC to make it easier for her to be there for her daughters, Melissa and Shanice, during the day.
As an example of the way seemingly mundane stimuli can trigger profound echoes of trauma, the chiming of the first-floor clock initially brought back memories of a night spent hiding for her life in a school while her fellow tribespeople, the Tutsi, were killed. Through therapy and a switch to the day shift, she’s learned to look at her trauma in new ways.
“This is the first time I’ve talked about the genocide and not cried,” she says. “I can now speak my story.”
The arc of that story continues to trend upward as Munyabuliza — who speaks five languages — and her daughters find success, happiness, and connection. She’s now the housekeeping supervisor here at MAC, which she describes as a good community of people. That community includes staff who cherish her cheerleading during their own tough times and members who value both her sparkling demeanor and the great care she has taken keeping beloved club spaces — such as the Women’s Locker Room or Squash area — equally shiny.
Melissa, her oldest, works as a marketing manager at Adidas, and Shanice graduates college next year with a degree in computer science.
Munyabuliza has also gotten to a place where she can again enjoy life’s simple pleasures, like hiking and playing basketball with her brother and nephews. Every Saturday, they take her to the movies, and she loves some action — from The Fast and the Furious and Mission: Impossible franchises to Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer films.
“Life, it gets better,” she says.
Permanent Vacation
As good as Woody Benecke is at keeping MAC’s facilities in tip-top shape, that’s how bad he is at vacationing. Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and raised in Kentucky, Benecke came to Oregon in 1988 for a little rest and relaxation, and he’s been working here ever since.
Heading west in a 1968 Volkswagen Bus with his brother, Wild Bill, the future seemed wide open. Bill was fresh out of the Coast Guard, and Woody had just earned his associate’s degree in computer electronics from Eastern Kentucky University. He had no plan other than to maybe try to work at McDonald’s and earn enough money to buy a plane ticket back home and begin his job search in earnest.
“Technically, I’m still on vacation,” Benecke says, his subtle smile radiating dry humor. Instead of slinging burgers, he ended up scoring a manufacturing job in Vancouver with the Japanese company Kotobuki, adding “That’s where I picked up most of my skills.” After that, he moved to Hewlett-Packard, at first working in the printer division before transitioning to the role of facilities systems engineer, which would set up the next phase of his “extended holiday.”
In 2009, he was hired by MAC as a mechanic, or general maintenance tech, and he’s been here ever since. Currently a Facilities System Engineer, he’s seen a lot of growth in the club as both a physical structure and organization of people through the years.
“The biggest change I’ve seen in MAC Facilities in nearly 17 years is the transitioning from the DeWayne Brantley era into something that was more modern and standardized with what you’d see in another building,” he says referencing the club’s former facilities manager. Around the end of 2012, MAC hired Elsa Lemoine, who brought a new sense of organization and intentionality to facilities operations along with fellow employees such as Cole Lathrop and Nick Miyasato. In addition to laying some of the groundwork for MAC’s more efficient way of operating these days, she got it involved in the Strategic Energy Management Program, which still influences club sustainability efforts.
“Elsa, Cole, Nick, and myself were allowed to dive in and make some big changes, and that really grew the sustainability program tenfold,” Benecke recalls. That shift opened a new aspect of his own career as he embraced conservation as one of his job duties, along with maintenance, capital project support, and building systems management.
When asked about the most exciting development to emerge from MAC’s sustainability efforts, Benecke laughs and says, “Exciting for a facilities department generally means ‘How much money did it save me?’” He then describes a project that involved more efficiently using the club’s water supply between a big compressor in the boiler room and the kitchen, as well as the disposal of wastewater through evaporation. A more detailed explanation would likely require a schematic, so suffice it to say it saved the club about $70,000 in water every year.
Benecke is only too happy to give something back to the members, to whom he feels an intense sense of loyalty. “When the nation was shutting down for COVID, nobody knew what was going to happen, and the members extended all our benefits and pay for another month. Nobody else did that. When times were looking like they were going to get real tough for a lot of people, the members stepped up, and I appreciated that.”
He adds that MAC supported him — through benefits, a furlough, and the ability to temporarily work remotely — in getting his hip and both knees replaced. When he returned to the club after the pandemic, he was no longer hobbling around from task to task. In turn, Benecke pronounces, “As long as I feel that the club still needs me, I’ll be here for the members.”
