Aloha!
Today we spent the day at a Charter School with Uncle Keiki. He had us do a very interesting project were the whole group (21 of us) had to move leaves and twigs that were covering the soil by some lava rocks, the interesting part was that we were not allowed to talk and we had to work together the whole time (10 min). This seemed odd to me because some of us were running into each other and there were about 5 piles when we were done. I couldn't really understand him all the time, he blended his words together and didn't really talk very loud, but from what I saw and caught, the Hawaiians have a lot of ancient stories that are fading each generation. I met a kid (Kapu) that was in the eighth grade there and he spoke Hawaiian, he was so smart and fun! Esau was also there helping Uncle show us around, he was pretty shy but very forgiving to our culture. After this they fed us with food that was cooked in a Emu. This looked like a bunch of hot rocks with the food on it covered in layers to protect it from the sand around it.See pictures of white tarp on the ground, that was the "stove". Then we swam in a tide pool, it was warm from the lava under ground (something like that, Aunty Maggie was telling me). We finally got a whole roomie photo! Its Heidi, Nikkisha, Lauren, and myself. Overall today was not my favorite, I wish I could have understood more what was going on with the chants and clean up project.
Mahalo,
L