 |
 |
 |
|||||
|
A Brief Oral History of Papahana Kuaola:
This continues from the story Origins of Hui Kū Maoli Ola “We got to He‘eia because we needed more space to do what we wanted to do,” Rick says. “And it was by chance, luckily by chance, that this property was on the block through KS, through Kamehameha School. And we had approached them because we knew they were large landowners and they have agricultural lots and such available. “They showed us this site as well as one over in Punalu‘u. Punalu‘u was much larger and probably would’ve been a lot cheaper to lease or rent, but this was much more central from a business perspective. And that’s literally what we’re looking at it for: the nursery. We didn’t even start Papahana yet. When we came here, when we saw this, we were like, ‘Man, it’s right by the H-3. We can get on the west side. We can do our deliveries really easily. It’s central, all of the companies on the Leeward side don’t have to drive to Waimānalo, they can come right here.’ We started and we knew our friends at Paepae were already getting things off the ground. We just thought it was a perfect fit. “When we got here, this place was a dump. Like, mismanagement to the T. I don’t think Kamehameha Schools knew to what degree their lands were being mismanaged by their lessees, but it was pretty bad and we uncovered it. There were like six cars, I think close to eight washing machines and driers just tucked in the bushes, and 25 lawnmowers from the previous lessee. The previous person wasn’t even a lessee, it was a licensee so he had even less attachment. “And when we did our walkthrough, we told him, ‘We want you guys to clean up your mess.’ KS told them they gotta clean up their mess before they vacated the premises, and that was their way of staying on the premises, because they just wouldn’t clean up their mess. And then finally, we’re like, ‘You know what? Just get out. We’ll clean it.’ And that’s how we knew that there was all of this garbage in there. “We got here and the first thing we did was set up our nursery so that we could start generating revenue to keep us going. And then from there, we would slowly go up mauka, because we knew there was a ton of work that we needed to do up there. We would start clearing here and there and having friends come over and start to clear stuff. Pretty soon, our weekend things kind of became an event to help us clean up mauka. “And then right around then is where we started our nonprofit Papahana. That was just a way to try to deflect some of the workload from our nursery guys, from doing all the teaching on native plants and everything. And then we started to utilize the warehouse and everything up there, and then in 2008 I believe is when we officially got our tax exemption for the nonprofit side. And then that’s when things really went full-bore. “We also bought in other partners. We had some great educators that were from Moanalua Gardens Foundation. And they basically ran their exact program that they did when they ran MGF, just under our nonprofit umbrella so that they could keep it up and running. And then we slowly interjected more of our philosophy into their teachings. I mean, they were great teachers and they taught a lot of great scientific-based education, which we never, ever doubted their competency on, but we just wanted to interject more of the cultural side to it. “A lot of the teachings reflected upon each other. It’s the same teachings, it’s just that, ‘Why would Hawaiians think of it this way even though it’s the right way?’ but from a geological perspective. And then things started to grow.” “We set the foundation of the organization in 2007,” Keoni says, “and then 2007 I moved to Maui and I also became a board member for the organization. So that was my means of sort of staying connected with the organization. I served as the board president for probably about four years. Moved back, and continued to serve on the board. In that first ten years of our existence, we’ve never had an Executive Director. And during that ten years, I should say that Kapalikū was the primary driver for the program, developing ‘āina, building partnerships. His partner in that was Mahealani Merryman. She’s the one that brought all the educators from Moanalua Gardens Foundation. She’s a whiz at getting grants, and she has self-funded that program for probably decades now. And so those two have served the organization really for quite awhile. “Kīhei Nahale-a stepped into a position that was another program director position, but he was more focused on cultural learning and how that might be expressed at our site. Huliamahi was one of the things that Kihei had enabled. At the same time, Huliamahi is very much something that we’ve been doing in various ways, but it’s refocused the format and said, ‘How about our ‘āina here? How do we ensure the kids, the community here, how do we make sure that they’re all connected to this ‘āina?’ “We created an Executive Director position. I stepped in as an interim. The goal was to kind of fix things up before we invited somebody else in, and then I just really liked what I was doing, so I applied for the full-time position and the board gave it to me. I’ve learned a lot in the past year. “I have been focused on much more organizational things. Our staff has knowledge that they’ve been working with, and mo‘olelo. I know somewhere in our archives, some place, we have that stuff. I don’t know how systematically we’ve been doing this. I know Paepae, just seeing what Hi‘ilei does, they do this pretty systematically is sort of ground truthing and correlating mo‘olelo and wind names, rain names and those kind of things with observation and building a knowledge base so we can say that ‘This is the ‘Apuakea rain.’ This is a particular rain that is referred to us as ‘Apuakea and then other things can be... then we can start to differentiate what these things are. “I’m still assessing what is our organizational knowledge of place. There are kūpuna there that we really could learn a lot more from. So I just see a lot of potential in our learning.” |
|
|||||
|
|||||
