By Ken Sakamoto, Star-Bulletin
Earl Kawa‘a, left, of the Waimanalo Health Center,
checks out the garden with Boysie Burdett, Wayne
Kama and Raymond Halemanu.

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Center farms
land and mind

Seeds planted in this Waimanalo garden
bear more than just plants

By Helen Altonn
Star-Bulletin

People and plants are flourishing in a Waimanalo garden that began about a year ago with two rows of potatoes.

It's a gift to the community from the Waimanalo Health Center and volunteers.

Earl Kawa'a started the garden behind the buildings when he became the center's social services director.

It's growing in different ways.

"When people start coming for plants, it's like a virus," said Boysie Burdett, a staff member who enjoys tilling the soil in his free time. "It spreads out and helps others. We're harvesting love."

Kawa'a uses it to teach people about diet and how to grow food in their own back yards. He also "plants seeds" to attract teens.

"I told five of them, there's a big slab there. Wouldn't it be nice to play basketball? They said there could be six basketball hoops.

"I will ask them to bring their dads, and from basketball, I will tie them into the land. It's another way of working with individuals, with teen-agers," Kawa'a said.

If they don't dig a trench straight, he said, "We may be talking about attitude, but it's easier to talk about digging a straight line."

Kawa'a was raised on a taro farm in Molokai's Halawa Valley. He said he's always combined his cultural knowledge with his profession. "It's basically the same -- to cultivate soil, attitudes and behavior."

The health center tries to help people in a holistic manner, said Executive Director Kawahine Kamakea-Ohelo. It provided medical care, bus coupons, food, clothes and other essentials to more than 3,700 patients last year.

The facility's directors allow $50 a month to get supplies from the Hawaii Food Bank for a food pantry, Kamakea-Ohelo said. The center has no refrigeration for fresh vegetables, so the garden is important, she said. "Folks can go and help themselves."

She said more than a dozen people are working off public assistance at the center because they can't get jobs.

"We tell them to learn as much as they can so they have a better chance of getting a decent job when times are better."

She said the garden gives patients and volunteers "a place to go, to feel welcome, something to do. That's their wellness."

Burdett and volunteers Shawn Boren, Wayne Kama and Raymond Halemanu are hacking rock and digging soil to expand plantings.

"Many different types of vegetables are grown here, like all the different people who live here," Burdett said. "Still, we don't forget native plants."

About 10 varieties of taro are growing, as well as squash, sweet potatos, papayas and ti leaves. The gardeners also are proud of their gourmet lettuce and other crops.

"I can't get on a payroll but I'm happy here," Kama said.

His wife was happy, too, when he took home a bag of eggplants and onions, he said.

Burdett said people go to the center from as far as Waianae and Kahuku because "it's a place that treats people like people."

He couldn't find work and was living at Kualoa Beach when he found the health center to give his four kids shots for school, he said. "The director gave me a job."

His family now lives in a house in town and he has started a landscaping business, he said.

Boren said he started an automotive and masonry business to "keep my sanity going" because he lives with 13 guys.

He also escapes in the health center's peaceful garden.

Volunteers aren't likely to run out of things to do.

Kawa'a wants to build a halau where people could rest and have other creative opportunities, such as wood-carving.

He envisions a larger halau for meetings, weddings, formal gatherings, teen programs, classes, recreation and other activities.

"What we can do on this land is only as limited as our imagination," he said.