Holy Crapola

   Hi, all! First I need to recap yesterday (Sunday). We had once-a-month church! Once Sunday a month, we help through a mass, outdoor church service at Haleiwa Park on the North Shore. This is a church for all who don't go to church. Anyone and everyone is welcome. Bums and homeless show up, regular folks show up, families, random people. All kinds. They're loured there with a raffle, where we give things away from a used pair of shoes to carts full of groceries. I heard they've even given away cars before. It starts around 10am and includes free lunch. I dang good one, I'll say. We interns don't put on the event, but we're the main volunteers that run the gig. I started out on stage duty, where we gave away raffle tickets, kept an eye on the goods, gave them away and give fruit snacks and goodies to kids. It was good fun. Community is so different here. Parents that went through the line to get fruits snack with their kids would say, "Say thank you, Auntie!" We're aunties! I love it! I knew it was a common term, but I thought mostly just among Hawaiian folks themselves. No. We get to be Aunties too, and I'm stoked about it. 

   I spent the second half serving rice in the food line. No serving utensils, just gloves. I pretty much got to make snowballs out of rice for a half hour. Then we got to enjoy the delicious food ourselves. AMAZING salad, weird hot dogs and the best stew I've ever had, next to zupa. The real work started when it was time to tear down, load, move and unload. We finished early afternoon and had the choice to stay at the beach and take the bus or hitch around, or go home. Naturally we stayed and hitched to Waimea. Who did we get a ride with? A man from church who had quite a tiny car. How many did we fit in his four available seats? Seven. Only a week in, but we're already gettin' reeeal close.

   We made it to Waimea and enjoyed sun and rest. There's a large rock at the beach that folks like to jump off of quite frequently. Usually there aren't any injuries, but this day there was. Most of us have jumped off the rock by this point. I and a few others had done it last week, no problem, but that wasn't the case this time. While I was flopping around in the water, safely away from the waves after my incident the day before, my fellow Seattle-area friend and roommate, Sayler, took her first jump of the rock. I didn't see it, but when I didn't see her around, the guys said she had hurt her foot on bottom and gone back to shore. I went up to lay out and hang out, and see how her foot was. It hurt bad, and later on, after a lot of swelling and a trip to the ER, we would learn that it was broken. Little did we know people hit bottom all the time and some of the folks here have friends who've seriously injured themselves, some paralyzed and one even killed. Apparently four people have died jumping off this rock. Praise the Lord we weren't one of them. Sayler is such a tough cookie and she's been such an awesome friend here, it kills me to have this happen to her. Please keep her, smooth healing and positive thinking in your prayers. It's hard to accept that we're only a week into a 3-month stay and half of it will be on crutches. 

   Now for today (Monday). Today was wild. I woke up, wild and grumpy, to one of my roommates poking my arm and asking if I was going to Waikiki with them. I said and went back to sleep. It was a weird morning today. Having the day off, no one really had solid plans and trying to put some together got chaotic. Some went to Waikiki, some went to Chuns, some to Waimea, we were all over the place. A group of us decided to head to a beach in Haleiwa, where there was good surfing for beginners. One of the SLS guys was going to teach a few of the intern girls. Most loaded up in Kim's car with the surf boards. Kim is one of the Swedish intern boys who, out of the blue, bought a beater pickup earlier this week. Needless to say, he's a main modes of transportation to the beach for the interns now. The other five of us started hitching. This is where the story begins.

   We got picked up by a couple guys in a pickup, who were heading right to Haleiwa. They seemed like alright guys. The driver, Tom, started talking about how he was heading to pick up his surf board that was in the shop, getting fixed. One of our girls asked what kind of board it was and expressed her interest in buying a board while she's here. He said he owed $100 for the repairs on his board and that if she wanted, she could pay him the $100 and have his board. We somewhat stupidly agreed to go to the shop with him and check out the board. It was in Wailua, about 10 minutes from Haleiwa. As we're driving away from the turn to Haleiwa, I could tell Sam, our SLS guy, started getting a little nervous, asking how far away this place was. It wasn't till we turned down a dirt road that I started getting a little nervous. "How far down is this place... ?" He kept assuring us this guy is the best guy for boards on the island, la la la. We pulled up to a dumpy old place and Clem came out to meet us. He seemed nice enough, not too creepy. He brought us to his shop, through his weird, shack-like house that had his wifey, a random man watching tv and a few creepy, old, blindy lookin' dogs like this one sauntering around. 

Through his backyard and down a narrow walkway we entered into his shop, where thankfully there really were surf boards, not dead bodies. 

   He's actually a totally cool guy. Nobody purchased any boards, but it was great fun checking them out. It turn out this guy made all the boards for the movie The Ride, about the Duke (Duke Kahanamoku, a super celebrated surfer here who lived from 1890-1968). Though at a point I was mildly worried we were walking into a human slaughter house, Clem ended up being legit and actually super cool.

   So our pickup friends proceeded to take us to Haleiwa, where we were supposed to meet up with Kim and his truck full of friends. Turned out the beach was flat, so they'd headed to Chuns. Amanda and I wanted to shop for swimsuits in Haleiwa, so the guys took the others to meet up with everyone else. 

   Amanda and I ventured back into town, where we bopped around and shopped for an hour or two. I haven't hung out with this girl much because even though we live in the same apartment, she's on the service team and not always around when we are. She's awesome. She's from South Carolina and likes to make art. We had a blast. When we had hit the jackpot and found swimsuits we were satisfied with, we grabbed some coffee and hit the HE>i store (http://hegreaterthani.com/). Check it out.

   After that, we kind of wanted to hit Waimea, but didn't really know how we'd get there, so we started to hitch thinking we could get a short ride back to the Haleiwa beach. Now I don't condone this, I probably won't do it again and Dad, I know you're probably seething, but the two of us gals hitched and caught a ride with a very nice fellow named Corey. Corey sported some very delightful dreads and happened to be going past Waimea. Yippee! Yes, stranger danger is real, but sometimes you don't have a car. Corey chatted with us about working for Verizon and his rule of always picking up hitch hikers if he had room, while Neil Young played on the radio. We'd caught a good ride. 

   We got to Waimea and bid our kind chauffeur farewell. Then we enjoyed the beach. Boy were the waves gorgeous. Though the water was refreshing and watching people get wiped out on the shore by the waves was hilariously satisfying, having chatty mcchatterson time with Amanda was probably the best part of the afternoon. They stayed there a while, just conversatin' and enjoying the beauty.

   By the time we decided to figure out how to get home, sunset was coming. I didn't want to hitch with it getting dark soon and still being just the two of us, but the bus wasn't coming. We decided to hitch hike only if we could get a ride with a lady. After maybe 10 minutes, I swear the Lord sent us the best ride we could have asked for. A gal in a little old red car stopped for us and offered to take us as far as Haleiwa. We said sure, thinking it was better than nothing. She was great and fun to talk to. Halfway to Haleiwa, she told us she'd stop to drop off her groceries and then take us all the way to Wahiawa. We nearly exploded with thanks. When we got to her house, RIGHT in the middle of little Haleiwa, she invited us in and we met her dog and hung with she put her stuff away. Then we headed off to Wahiawa, a good 20 minute drive with traffic in there. It was so great of her to do that for us. She went way out of her way for two strangers and told me to pay it forward when I offered her gas money. I'm so thankful for the safe rides we got today and I'm in love with the aloha culture here. We got dropped off right at our door. Praise the Lord! What a cool day.