The 600 words (about a page and a half) should include the title, your name, and a final paragraph including your name, age or decade, sex, ethnic background, when you came to Hawaii, from where you came, and what you like about being here. Material received may be edited for content, style and length of composition.
An example of a final paragraph is
“Vivian Green, a female in her 60’s of English and Scottish descent, came to Waikoloa from Mendocino County in California with her husband when he retired in 2007. They enjoy the warm and sunny weather, the diversified culture, and the access to the beaches, entertainment and health care.”
Pick a topic, make an outline of the points you want to cover, and then write. Please submit your page and a half by Wednesday, February 29 to VivianMarita@Hotmail.com with a subject line “This We Believe”. Mahalo!
An
example written by Vivian Green follows.
Community
Vivian
Green
I
was raised in a small rural town in Iowa, so a community to
me meant a place with schools and churches and a
library. My father was the school
superintendent. There were many churches with some
sort of perceived difference between the catholic church
and the protestant churches.
The
library building there was funded by Andrew Carnegie who
saw democracy, education, knowledge and its diffusion, and
philanthropy, as fundamental tools for strengthening the
bonds of our society (Carnegie Corporation of New
York). Nancy K. Queck says it was built in 1916 as
part of the Carnegie Library movement. The push for
the library began with the Greenfield Progress Club, a
local women’s organization (a group to which my mother
belonged many decades later), in 1915. They contacted
the Andrew Carnegie Foundation. The Carnegie
Foundation approved, but the city leaders did not. So
the club demanded the issue be put to a public vote.
Not only did they demand a vote, but they persuaded city
leaders to let the women vote. This was four years before
full suffrage was granted to women. The women’s vote
was 180-68 for and the men voted 158-124 against. The
total was 304-226 for.
In
Nepal, where I lived after receiving a Fulbright Grant from
the US Government, I taught Economics at the Master’s Level
at TribhuvanUniversity in Kathmandu. The expatriates
there ranged from Ambassadors from many countries to
anthropologists to art and drug dealers, not a typical
community.
I
next resided in Thailand while working for the GTZ (German
Agency for Technical Cooperation) on an integrated rural
development project near Burma and Laos. The program
funded agriculture and forestry, roads and water, and
education and health. My specializations were data
collection, monitoring and evaluation. The Western
community in Chiang Mai was composed of many US Drug
Enforcement Agency personnel and also Rhodesian tobacco
growers who had left Zimbabwe, and who went to Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia every three months to renew their
visas. Again, not an ordinary
community.
When
my husband and I moved to the Big Island of Hawaii in 2007,
we wanted to be north of the airport at Kona because of the
heavy traffic to the south. And we wished to live in
a place with schools and churches and a library. In
Waikoloa Village there are an Elementary and Middle School,
several churches, and a bookmobile, which serves as a book
exchange, donated by the Hawaii State Public Library
System.
I
attended art and yoga groups when we vacationed in Waikoloa
Village before we moved here. The first day of our
arrival, I joined the Waimea Community Chorus. My
husband and I studied with two Hawaiian Culture
teachers. After vowing to do no volunteering the
first year here, in the second year I organized three art
shows with the Waikoloa Art Center. Then along came
the Friends of the Library – Waikoloa Region group, for
which I offered to be the Treasurer. Now I am the
Vice President. (“Call me anything,” I said, “I just
want to write grants and do fundraising.”) This book
is the result of our second grant, funded by the Atherton
Family Foundation in Honolulu. We are working towards
land and a library building in about ten years, so we can
have a real library as part of the Hawaii State Public
Library System.
So
here I am, loving being in my element of
community!