The world is a different place when you live in Pahoa, luxuriating in proximity of the ocean by day, perhaps passing along some reverential thoughts to Pele before going to sleep at night.
Life’s like that in lower Puna where they say you can feel aloha rise up through your feet and move you to action.
People go elsewhere for their jobs or they stay in lower Puna and find ways to work in incremental stages and live on less. With no industry, it is an area that balances financial struggles and gorgeous resources, with the occasional lava breakout threatening to disrupt everything, as it has recently, consuming almost 700 dwellings, dislocating friends and family.
People have a certain core of toughness in Puna, a willingness to take the bad with the good. The volcanic risk is always there, as it always has been on this youngster island in the Hawaii chain. Nobody to blame when it comes.
“I was talking to a guy in town a couple days ago,” said Pahoa High School football coach Chris Midel. “He said they lost everything, but he had a smile on his face. They ‘will find a new place when they can,’ he said, and that’s how a lot of people are here.
“It might surprise people, but around here? Life goes on, it’s not just people talking about the lava all the time, it’s not like that.
“We live with it here,” he said, “it’s just a part of life.”
The spirit of Pahoa has been, excuse the term, sparked again by the lava issues. The Parks and Recreation Department nearly had to cancel a Summer Youth program when their facility was overtaken by community needs from the lava outbreaks. Teenagers have come to the rescue for Pahoa Parks and Rec like first responders at a natural disaster, which, in a way of consideration, is exactly what they have done.
“We really needed them and they were here for us,” Ranson Yoneda, director of the Parks and Rec Dept., said of an influx of help from Pahoa High School students. “They’ve turned things around for a bunch of kids here.”
Yoneda runs a Summer Fun program for keiki in the Pahoa area that runs from 8 a.m. until about 2:30 p.m., Mondays through Thursdays, but Pele scrambled plans and places to hold the events.
They are holding the program at Pahoa Elementary this year and the help of the older students has made it a success.
“Everything has been disrupted,” Yoneda said, “but we have about 60 kids — we hoped for 100 — and the help we get from the high school kids has been tremendous. This is an opportunity for those parents who have been displaced — or think they will be, maybe they are moving to family elsewhere on the island — it gives them a chance to drop the kids off with us and go take care of business.
“The connection has been great,” he said, “because these kids (ages 5-12), really look up to (the Pahoa students), like big brothers or something. It’s just a good thing to see, you know? In the middle of all this struggle, there is hope and help from these kids. That’s pretty cool, I think.”
Hoku Haliniak, PHS athletic director, was the director of information for the HHSAA five years ago when lava breakouts threatened to cross the road and block the main entrance and exit to Pahoa. In that role, she was all over the issues, the students transferring to Keaau, the opportunity for them to come back, all the schedule changes, everything.
“When I got the opportunity to take the athletic director position, I jumped on it,” she said. “I’m not leaving; I was very interested in Pahoa, but since I’ve been here I realize what a beautiful community it is, despite what you hear from people.
“No question we have issues,” she said, “guns, alcohol, there are real concerns, and no one can deny it, but there are so many tremendous people here; these kids are the best, absolutely selfless and caring.”
For Midel, the recent breakouts are a personal anniversary of a different sort. A former Pahoa student who teaches construction skills at the school through the state’s Building Construction Academy, he was hired five years ago, when the entire community was in peril from the advancing lava.
It is wholly within the quirky Pahoa profile that Midel never played for the Daggers. Pahoa had eliminated football in 1991, then restarted it in 1996, after Midel graduated. Now he’s coaching the sport he never got to play.
“Kind of strange,” he said the other day, talking story outside the school gym, “when I first started here, we thought maybe everything was going to be gone if it crossed the road, but it was kind of cool, too.
“You know how it gets dark around 6? We’d be finishing up practice and this red glow would rise up, like, it was just there and it was real. It was awesome and beautiful and scary, all at once.
“Now it’s five years later and here we go again.”
It won’t be easy for Pahoa athletics in the upcoming school year, starting with 8-man football in the fall. These Daggers will be road warriors.
Haliniak said the determination was recently made that all Pahoa teams will play all their games in all sports as visitors. There won’t be alternate “home” fields or gyms or baseball fields or tracks.
“It’s going to be rough,” Haliniak said, “funding-wise we are going to be hurting, I’m sure we will be in a deficit, but it’s what we’re faced with, it’s the reality of the day.
“We’re just trying to fight our way through this,” she said, “and it isn’t going to be easy, but we will do it, we will make it through.”
The spirit is strong in Pahoa.
Their neighborhoods are taken over once again, many homes are lost, many lives disrupted and in the chaos, kids from the high school rush to help the Parks Dept., hold together its summer program for keiki.
Because in Pahoa, while the present may be disjointed and confusing for all concerned, people keep their heads up and look toward tomorrow, with aloha.
Brighter days are always just ahead.
Comments? Questions? Whistleblower tips? Contact Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com