Welcome to Kauai!

On Wednesday we woke up at 4am, packed up our van, bid Mokule'ia farewell and headed off to the airport to fly off to our next island adventure on Kauai! Our flight left Honolulu at 8am and by 9 we were already in Habitat vans driving to our new home. During our stay here on Kauai, we are lucky enough to be living in a brand new Habitat volunteer house. While the house was virtually complete when we arrived, it was not quite ready yet, so we dropped our stuff in one room and then headed off down to the "Base Yard" for an orientation with Habitat staff. The Habitat affiliate that we are working with, Kauai Habitat for Humanity, was founded in 1992 after a terrible hurricane destroyed a great number of houses all over the island. Recently, the affiliate have built 18 houses (including ours) on our street. These are the first houses in what is going to be a 107 house development. The remaining houses will be built over the next several years, but construction cannot start on the homes until infrastructure is established for the neighborhoods. Our team is helping to make this process kick off, by building the dust fence along the existing homes to protect them during the oncoming construction. But surveying and approval has to happen before the dust fence can go up, so in the mean time, we have had several little projects to do and have met many different habitat homeowners and others from the community.

After orientation and learning about our project and the history of the affiliate, we headed off to the Salvation Army for lunch. During our stay here, we are lucky enough to have several meals provided by the Salvation Army and local churches. Not only is it wonderful to have a free meal, but it presents a great opportunity for us to get out into the community here.

After lunch we headed back up to the house and jumped right into work. The house was not quite ready for us to move in, so we helped put on the finishing touches. While the rest of our team cleaned, put up towel racks, and constructed ladders on bunk beds, four of us headed down the street to clear out "rubbish" in an area where we will be constructing the dust fence. It was dirty work in bug filled land, and our four am wake up and travel morning was beginning to wear on us, but we made it through to the end of the work day and were then able to settle into our bedrooms. And how exciting it was to have actual beds! With the exception of one week in Sacramento, this is the first time we have had beds since December. (Though I must say, the cots at Camp Mokule'ia were perfectly fine.)

The next few days we worked at our house, cleaning up the outside, and building a patio out back. We had good work days and great introductions to the crew we will be working with throughout the month, including our neighbors, Alex and Logan, two AmeriCorps National Direct workers who have been here since September.

Friday was a slightly stressful day for our team. That morning we bid farewell to Jeanine (our Unit Leader) who had been around for our transition. It was great fun to have her around and we were sorry to see her go. Throughout the day, Abby was tied up with phone calls to understand the contingency plans that were in place should the possible government shutdown occur. Not only have the budget discussions in Congress been stressful for the future of AmeriCorps, but with the threat of a shutdown, they were stressful for our teams out in the field. Had the shutdown occurred, we would have been on a plane back to Sacramento. We were all thrilled when we heard that this would not been happening! Breathing a sigh of relief, we settled in and made weekend plans.

On Saturday, eight of us headed out bright and early to the island’s North Shore to embark on the most beautiful hike I have ever been on: the Kalalau Trail. It was two miles along the shore to a beach, and then two miles up an incredibly muddy trail to a magnificent waterfall, then back out again. When we arrived at the waterfall, Danny, Abby and I could not wait and got right into the water and swam out under the falls. It was incredible!

After the hike out, in the car ride home, pretty much everyone fell asleep, exhausted after a long week and a tiring 8-mile hike day. I was so glad that we had not only done the hike, but that we had gotten out to another side of the island. The North Shore is the Kauai I was expecting. It is beautiful. The area that we are living in on the South shore, it not quite as breathtaking. The towns are rather rundown and depressed and the landscape is not quite as magnificent as what we saw on the North Shore and what we had grown used to on Oahu. Kauai is quite different from Oahu. I miss Oahu. I miss living on the beach, going into the lovely town of Haliewa, and being able to go to Honolulu. But Kauai is a wonderful adventure as well. One man I was working with the other day explained to me that he had lived on Oahu for ten years, but after having grown up on Kauai, he did not want to stay on Oahu. It was too many people and too urban. This was a hilarious comment to me, because while Honolulu certainly is a city, the island certainly had not struck me as urban. But in this case it is all relative.