APHN ProgramCulture Of Health

Aloha my name is Allen Cardines Jr. I grew up in this beautiful community of Nanakuli. I love this community, it's a people and a place of potential that there are so much things that we can offer and to perpetuate a sense of place, especially in regards to public health.

What is project 52? Project 52 was an idea of Ed Texeira the former Director of State Civil Defense. After the Chile tsunami back in 2010 he was concerned about the communities across the state of Hawaii and as much as he loves and cares about this beautiful place he knew that he could not be able to help every single community at that point in time. So he heard about this guy named Nehemiah he too was faced with a massive disaster and Nehemiah was able to pull together people from a certain place and to be able to create a sense of community that they could really lokahi and laulima, join hands together, work together in unity, to create a sense of kuleana, personal and shared responsibility to malama, to take care of that place and within fifty-two days he was able along with the people able to rebuild from that disaster.

Okay, so one of the things that we did is we needed to shift our paradigm and rather than depend on government that we said we can no longer depend on them. And so we as a community needed to find other resources and people within a community. One thing that we knew that we needed was people with a background in caring for people in regards to their health and that was you folks in the public health nurses, to be able to look at what can we do to partner together to lokahi and laulima in taking care of our communities, so that was one. And then we also reached out to the National Guard as well. We also reach out to the Department of Education, the administration at the high school, at the middle school as well and they were very supportive and people in our community. In regards to those that was trained by Department of Emergency Management, the city, and also local people from the community such as the churches and so forth so we were able to find people that was concerned and they wanted to come in and be a part and learn what we can do to come together so it took a lot of work. It took a lot of phone calls, a lot of emails, a lot of meetings to be able to pull people together to look at how could we create a community based disaster preparedness plan and team.

The changes that I see that it's possible. It's possible for local people in their communities to rise up to take a sense of kuleana, responsibility, and not just by yourself. There’s other people in the community that care. Even those in government, whether we believe it or not whether we know it or not. Not everybody in the government’s bad we got a lot of good people they care about their local communities and want to do something. So just that public-private partnership, that in itself was powerful.

When working in communities how should we approach? I think what is effective is to be able to connect before we correct. I've seen a number of people come into our communities. They so high makamaka, or they so way up there that they look down on us and they speak down to us. And it's hard for us to help somebody like that.

I think the biggest and most effective approach that I’ve seen with Ed Texeira and the nurses from the public health, was just being able to humble themselves. Meet us where we’re at and connect first. To be able to build relationship first and what I saw was people that cared about this place. People that cared about us as individuals. They didn't come in with agenda. They wasn't trying to push their own program but they sincerely cared and that’s the whole malama part.
The most important thing that we need to do in everything that we did to do and even regards to these values like kuleana, lokahi, laulima, malama and aloha. All of that needs to be first in us. You can’t give what you don't have. You can’t. It needs to be in us as individuals, in our marriages, in our families, our homes, in our organizations. And as we have that then together we can create a sense of unity in our community but that's the potential that I see and it's starting to happen and it's sustainable because we’re not depending on government funding or government entities. It's just local people, local style, caring for each other.