Ohana in Honolulu

After multiple days at sea, we hit our first port, Honolulu, Hawaii. The night before we pulled into port, the entire Semester at Sea community had a logistical pre-port meeting in the big Lasinger Union on board.  We learned about the process for disembarkment as well as main safety concerns in Hawaii (jellyfish, drowning).  Everyone was unbelievably energized. You could feel it in the air. Nurse Kim even sported her shark onesie for the occasion 😊.

The next morning, I woke up and saw the lights of Honolulu getting closer and closer to the ship as the pilot boats steered us to shore. It was such a wild, and breathtaking, sight after seeing nothing but blue ocean around us for several days! The dining hall was a buzz with activity and students were making phone calls and using their phones/computers for the first time in multiple days. The clearance process went smoothly, but I was definitely counting down the minutes until we could get off. 

Our aunts, Barbara and Mary, who live nearby in Fort Collins, lived in Honolulu for 14 years prior to moving to Colorado. Mary just retired in early January and their first trip after retirement was to visit their old home (and us!) in Hawaii. After disembarking, Barb and Mary greeted us with gorgeous leis made of local flowers. Then we were quickly off to the many things sites to see in Honolulu. We loaded up in the sweet Dodge minivan that Barb and Mary rented and were outfitted with small baggies of all of their favorite Hawaiian snacks. The kids were overjoyed to see them and immediately started tasting all of the goodies in the car. 

It is impossible to see everything on Oahu in one day but we gave it our best effort! We visited the only palace in the United States, toured the cemetery and took in the view of Diamond head, explored the science museum and planetarium (and saw a program about Hawaiian wayfinding…amazing!). We had a wonderful lunch at their friend’s private club, hit Ala Moana beach for some water time, and toured Waikiki. We also saw where Barb and Mary used to live, drove by Barack Obama’s old school and old place of residence. We hit Wiola for Hawaii’s best shave ice (Passion fruit, orange, guava “POG” flavor was off the chain). Dinner was at Phucket Thai with curry so delicious I wish I could have guzzled it from my water bottle. Too soon, and it was time for us to get back on the ship before heading to Japan.

There is a lot that I could say about my first visit to Hawaii. In the days approaching Hawaii, our ship passed through the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” essentially an area of the ocean where billions of miniscule bits of plastic are dissolved into the top layers of the ocean. Little fish consume these plastics mistaking them for food, then big fish consume the little fish, then people consume the big fish. Plastic is polluting everything. EVERYTHING. Bits of plastic are washing up on the shores of Oahu. People try to sift it from the beaches but it’s a lost cause. As long as plastic continues to get dumped into the ocean, we will continue to grow this problem. I’ve thought more about overfishing and single use plastics in the last 15 days than I have in my previous life combined. 

We also learned in Global Studies about the colonial history of Hawaii, a familiar and sad pattern of injustice that we’ll encounter in many of our Semester at Sea ports.  Sigh.

On a brighter note, the Global Studies faculty let us know that for the 5^th year in a row, Hawaii was voted the “Happiest” state in the United States using measures such as sense of purpose, family/social connections, physical, and financial measures. Students read an article about the diversity of Hawaii and learned that nearly 25% of Hawaiians identify as bi- or multi-racial. This phenomenon had led to a fundamentally different conversation about race in Hawaii compared to the mainland United States. The inability of individuals to be boxed easily had led to more flexible and nuanced thinking about race. I wonder if there is some connection between “happiness scores” and this unique phenomenon on the islands. 

Wally and I watched a documentary about Pearl Harbor on our cabin TV as we approached the islands and learned more about the devastation of the Pearl Harbor attack. I was talking to our Dean of Students about her experience touring Pearl Harbor in port and she commented how she always thought of the victims of Pearl Harbor being old (since her older relatives served in the military). Exploring Pearl Harbor took her breath away. The people that died were the age of her oldest son. Kids. 

Needless to say, our short visit yielded a lot of insights, the most important of which was gratitude and love for our amazing aunts. We learned first-hand about the spirit of aloha and ohana. I’ll leave the below as a final reflection:

ALOHA is more than a word of greeting or farewell or salutation.

ALOHA means mutual regard and affection and extends warmth in caring with no obligation in return.

ALOHA is the essence of relationships in which each person is important to every other person for collective existence.

ALOHA means to hear what is not said, to see what can not be seen and to know the unknowable.

May the spirit of aloha find you where you are.  

Signing off from the middle of the Pacific,

JJJ