My Turn: Goodbye Kona, homeless situation too aggressive to enjoy stay

On my last night of vacation in Kona I should be snuggling with my children and wiping the sand off my weathered feet. However, I am researching media outlets and journalists to voice my concerns over your tropical paradise going up in smoke and turning away tourists like me from ever visiting again.

I want to preface my statements by saying this is not my first time on the Big Island, nor is it my first time traveling to remote locations and culturally diverse places on our planet. However, tonight was the first time in my adult life I was scared to walk to the corner store for baby wipes and pancake mix. It is the first time as a mother who encourages her children to accept the world for what it is and to embrace diversity, that I forbid my children to loiter from our car to our vacation condo. It is the first time in my sun-worshiping life that I said, “I will never go back to Kona again.”

Your downtown district is saturated with transient people who are unsettlingly confident. They stroll the streets high on drugs and distract tourists for money and attention. One man sprawled across the pathway to our condo and refused to move when I was trying to push our stroller to the beach. A seemingly mentally ill woman screamed all night outside our condo while late night parties bellowed, and my young daughter could not fall asleep until we assured her we were safe and “everything would be all right in the morning.”

But everything was not all right in the morning. When my family and I got up early for our scheduled family photographs at the Old Kona Airport Park, I was disgusted to see so much litter on the grounds that our professional, local photographer had to change locations so our family could take home a portrait with a landscape free of rubbish and transients.

You see, both he and I wanted to capture the essence of the Big Island. He wanted to send me home with a picture of my smiling kids and the sun and sand in the landscape. Like me, he knew my memory would be stained by stepping over trash with my anxious children while men and women who lived in the park relieved themselves within eyeshot of our family portraits.

This is not a family vacation environment, and I would not recommend families visit Kona unless they plan to stay at their resort community and not venture to the downtown districts. Kona needs to get a grip on their vagrant and truculent citizens or your property values and ecotourism industry will dwindle right along with your littered parks and green spaces.

Emily DuPlessis is a resident of Ellensburg, Washington.