Results befitting the logic
Thank you, chairwoman Jennifer Jones, for your explanation of how to budget our money, as quoted in Sunday’s West Hawaii Today.
“Rather than focus on cuts, as a group we focused on different ways to bring in more income to help the budget rather than more cutting and slashing.”
With logic like that it is no wonder that we are broke as they demand more and more money.
Marion Humphreys
Kailua-Kona
Recycle rip-off
I need to recycle all of the containers that I have paid a deposit on. Atlas recycling in Waimea has reduced their hours and days of operation. They are only open three days a week from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., which leaves out everyone who works from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
I can conveniently purchase products that have the deposit tax, 18 hours per day, seven days a week at hundreds of locations, but can only return them at a small, limited number of recycling centers and only at times that are inconvenient for me.
Why does the county force these programs on us and then allow them to be so poorly implemented that the public gets ripped off? I’ll tell you why, any and all containers that have been discarded into the landfill or littered or were not recycled, the county keeps the money. The difficulty of recycling with Atlas has proven to be very profitable for the county because of the deposit monies that will never be returned. Do you think they would spend one penny of these ill-gotten gains on improving the recycle program for the public?
Randy Douglas
Kamuela
Brave, humble, great man made huge impact
Francis Kainoa Lee passed away last week.
I first met Francis when I began to work at Hawaii Preparatory Academy both as a sub teacher and as a pool lifeguard. He had worked at HPA for much of his adult life. He used to spell me at the pool if I needed a break or a day off.
He was a very quiet and private guy who always greeted me with a huge smile, my name and a handshake with a hand so big it completely covered my own. We had many conversations over the years and when I asked him how he stayed so fit, he told me he swam in the school pool almost every day when no one was there and that he was smitten with the touch of water against his body.
The only things I knew about him was that he loved his wife, his family, his job, HPA and swimming — in that order. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned from the pool manager that he had been one of the original members of the Hokulea crew.
As she told me of his history my mouth fell open. It’s almost mandatory now as a citizen of Hawaii to know that oft told tale of how those original intrepid and stalwart crew members set off to Tahiti in 1976 without any nautical mechanical devices to help their endeavor to reach Tahiti, and in doing so revive the culture of Polynesian navigation that had been forgotten for so many years.
The only help they had was “Papa Mau,” a Micronesian man who had those navigation and sailing skills and offered to teach the crew everything about navigating their way across the ocean using the stars, waves, the moon and the sun — but only if he could come along.
So these brave souls and Francis put their trust in this old man and off they went, reached Tahiti and even came back.
In all the years I knew Francis, he never once mentioned this heroic chapter in his life, and when asked about it was loathe to even chat about it. He only always told me it had been exciting but so long ago, and then he’d smile that broad smile that signaled that was the end of that.
If you ask all the hundreds of people who held him in such high regard what his long life stood for I am sure they would say, “Be brave in your every day life, but stay humble.”
He lived that.
Sean Gallagher
Waikoloa