All posts by Richard Ha

Health

Procedure

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Several weeks ago I went to a cardiologist for a treadmill test and echocardiogram, which were both just fine. These tests were done to evaluate whether or not my heart was strong enough for me to have a GreenLight laser procedure to treat an enlarged prostate.

I debated whether or not it was appropriate to write about this on the blog. But 50 percent of men my age have this problem, and it increases in frequency the older one gets. Enlarged prostate, and its treatment, is relevant to lots of men—just like exercising, wrestling with weight loss and eating healthier.

This past Wednesday I had the procedure. They administered a general anesthesia and when I woke up it was all done. There was very little pain. This is a relatively new procedure and I would have done it a year earlier had I known about it. The old procedure was described as the “roto-rooter procedure.” I wasn’t going to do that voluntarily.

Looking back, the most difficulty I had was dealing with the medication. They gave me a strong painkiller, which left me woozy. I didn’t need it and if I’d known it was going to make me dizzy I would have taken a couple of Tylenol instead. We returned home from Honolulu, where I had the procedure done, on Thursday, and on Friday I threw the pain pills in the trash. After that I could think clearly again.

I’ve been advised to take it easy for the next few weeks and resume daily activity a little at a time. This means I’ll need to eat more vegetables and less meat than normal.

Adopt-a-Class, Community

Adopt-a-Class

Richard Ha writes:

Lately I have learned a lot about Keaukaha Elementary School.

Such as that the school cannot afford to take its students on field trips. The field trips its students usually take are walking excursions around the neighborhood.

Keaukahaschool

My friend Duane Kanuha and I have this big idea, and we’re asking for your help: We want to send Keaukaha students on excursions that broaden their horizons and help them develop excitement for learning and positive attitudes about their place in the world. It’s my opinion that if Hawaiian kids are comfortable with their place in the world, they will not hesitate to participate in that world.

I’m specifically thinking about excursions to Hilo’s new astronomy center ‘Imiloa. ‘Imiloa is particularly powerful because it situates the Hawaiian culture and scientific knowledge in parity with the highest level of astronomy. It is a “discovery center” that celebrates both science (the world-class astronomy atop nearby Mauna Kea) and Hawaiian culture (including the marvels of traditional Hawaiian voyaging, navigation and much more).

It’s a place where Hawaiian kids see that there are careers and avocations directly related to their culture, and that these cultural traditions are important enough that they are celebrated in a world-class museum. And that the people pursuing these careers and passions are people who look just like them and their families.

Through my involvement with the advisory board of the UHH’s Keaholoa STEM program (a group that supports college-age Native Hawaiian students in Math and Sciences) I have learned that the most important years for a child are the formative years from Kindergarten to 8th grade. Children need to be engaged between K and 8th grade in order to be successful at the college level in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).

I’ve also learned that between Kindergarten and 8th grade is when children develop their beliefs about their place in the world.

I compare the situation at Keaukaha Elementary to that of my grandson Kapono, a Kamehameha Schools student who thinks that all his school’s incredible facilities and programs are “normal.” It’s all he knows. Consequently, nothing is beyond his horizon.

I also think of St. Joseph’s School. Hamakua Farms donated some produce as part of a recent St. Joseph’s fundraiser, which the school held at Restaurant Kaikodo. The fundraiser raised $10,000.

These schools have the funds and the ability to nurture their students through those important “formative” years. But what about students at schools like Keaukaha Elementary School, which doesn’t have adequate funding and where students do not have access to the same sorts of resources?

I asked Lehua Veincent, Keaukaha Elementary School’s principal, how much it would cost to send each class at Keaukaha Elementary School on an excursion to ‘Imiloa twice a year. With a 50-passenger bus costing about $300, and entry fees at $5.50 per student, it would cost about $600 for each class to take one trip to ‘Imiloa, where students can see what Hawaiians have done, and can do.

Imiloa3_2
‘Imiloa photo by Macario

Keaukaha School has seven grade levels (K – 6th), and just one class per grade. We are soliciting people to adopt one grade, for one semester, for $600 – which will send them on a field trip during that semester of the 2007-2008 school year.

For instance, one person (or group) would donate $600 in order to sponsor, say, the 3rd graders on a field trip to ‘Imiloa during the second semester.

We’ll let the teachers, of course, have final say where they go for a field trip. We just want to make sure that should they choose a visit to ‘Imiloa, money will not be a barrier.

After the excursion, the students will write letters thanking the sponsors and saying what they got from the trip, which we will post.

When you realize that because of lack of funding, Keaukaha Elementary students are confined to a walk around their neighborhood for field trips, you can see that this is a very specific place where we can make a real difference in kids’ lives.

My interest in Keaukaha Elementary School came about as a result of my work on a subcommittee of the Hawai‘i Island Economic Development Board that was working with the TMT people – the ones considering putting the Thirty Millimeter Telescope atop Mauna Kea.

I joined that group because I was determined that should this extensive, multi-million dollar telescope project come to Mauna Kea, it would actually benefit the people of Hawai‘i. We all know this isn’t the norm re: the telescopes atop Mauna Kea.

I started to ask some basic questions, such as: Where is the center of the universe for all things Hawaiian on this island? I determined it was Keaukaha Elementary School, because it has been in existence for 75 years and its primarily Hawaiian alumni are spread far and wide.

Then I asked myself, “What is the tangible benefit of astronomy in Hawai‘i to the Keaukaha community?” I could not find anything the community would agree was a direct benefit. But that’s a whole other story.

I learned a lot about Keaukaha Elementary School as a result of all this. And I found something very specific we can do to help its kids.

Here’s how it works. You can adopt-a-class for the whole $600, or be a partial sponsor by donating $300, $200 or $100. Click here to see who’s already sponsoring what class, and which classes are still available.

Download and fill out the commitment form, fax it back to me at 981-0756 (if you’re off-island, it’s area code 808), and we’ll update the website chart to include your name. Please mail me your check, made payable to the non-profit Keaukaha School Foundation, within 30 days (or by the start of the semester; those details are here).

And then sit back and know that you are making a real difference in the lives of children in our community.

Hydroponics, Lettuce

No Weak Links Here

On CNN’s Special Investigation Unit this past weekend, they ran a story by Sanjay Gupta called Danger: Poisoned Food.

It talked about the many incidences over the last few years of bagged greens being contaminated with E. coli 0157-H7, some of which resulted in fatalities. The main issues it discussed were:

1. Since 1995, there have been 20 E. coli outbreaks associated with California lettuce.

2. E. coli 0157-H7, the dangerous form, is usually associated with cattle.

3. Once contaminated, the greens cannot be decontaminated.

4. The process which mixes and tumbles greens actually spreads any bacteria that might be present. And chlorine and washing cannot eradicate all bacteria.

5. Control measures on farms are voluntary, not mandatory.

6. The FDA does not inspect farms.

This is nothing new. We knew all this three years ago when we were starting to grow lettuce. I predicted then that there would be more cases of E. coli 0157-H7 contamination of bagged lettuce and greens.

And nothing significant has changed. There will be still more cases of E. coli 0157-H7 contamination. People will probably start to shy away from industrial, assembly-line production of leafy green bagged products.

This is why we chose to grow our vegetables hydroponically. We are able to address the E. coli 1057-H7 issue confidently through hydroponic farming.

The following is our approach to the problem. It is not very complicated. Cattle manure is the main problem, so we have made sure to minimize the ways that cattle manure can affect our operation.

We do not use compost. Incomplete composting is a risk factor.

We treat the water our leafy greens grow in with chlorine at 650 ORP. This means that bacteria are killed on contact before we plant. And because of the way we operate, it is very unlikely that our water can be contaminated by E. coli 0157- H7 after that. Also, only county water is used should we need to top off the raceways.

We only use county water when we spray the leafy greens. Contaminated spray water is a risk factor.

Our plants are protected from rain. This avoids rain splash, which is another risk factor for the spread of E. coli 0157-H7.

We only sell whole heads of lettuce. E. coli 0157-H7 cannot be washed off. And it can spread far and wide when mixed and tumbled in a industrial leafy green bagging system. Selling only whole heads avoids this serious problem.

We only sell what we grow ourselves. The food safety chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We don’t have any weak links.

Losing Weight

Encouraged

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Richard Ha writes:

This morning I weighed 201, so I haven’t gained any weight. I haven’t done anything special about trying to lose weight except that I’ve increased the proportion I’m eating of vegetables to meat. My appetite is big because I’m lifting weights at the gym. Hopefully everything will settle down in the next few weeks.

My resting heart rate is 57, which is the lowest it’s been in the last two months. Although I’d like to lower it into the high-40s, I’m okay with 50s. Out of shape, my resting heart rate would be in the mid-70s.

I noticed that my heart rate at the gym is up over 160 on the last of the 4 x 10 sets. This is what’s driving my resting heart rate down. Very good. It was getting hard to raise my heart rate high enough just by training on the elliptical.

It’s my second week back at the gym and I am very encouraged. At first I wondered whether or not age had caught up with me. Now, though, I don’t see any reason I cannot get back to where I was six and a half years ago.

Why do I say this? Because I can do as much work in a few exercises as I was ever able to do. These are the exercises I had been doing at home. I can now do four sets of 25 knee ups. This is an exercise where you hold yourself suspended above the floor by forearms and elbows and raise your knees until your thighs are parallel to the ground. I can also do four sets of 10 reps of 25-pound dumbbell raises to shoulder height, front and side.

When I was at my best form, I was doing about the same. So, a muscle being a muscle, I feel that with smart training I can bring all my muscles up to the same—or a higher—level. Which means I should be able to recover my previous fitness level. This might take the better part of a year, which is okay with me, because it’s the journey, not the end, that is most satisfying.

Several points to remember. One only has to train a muscle once per week. You can do it more frequently, but that’s not the most efficient way. This is especially important for senior weightlifters. I notice that I need to be more careful about injuries. But other than that, I see no limitations.

My exercise program involves going to the gym four times a week and training a different muscle group each time. My goal for the first few months is to get up to four set of 10 reps for each exercise. I want to build a base from which I can build upon when I start to train seriously.

When I first went back to the gym, I wanted to be able to represent the 60-year-old group respectably. But now I’m looking beyond the “old guy” category.

Sustainability, Water

Water, Water, Everywhere

Richard Ha writes:

When we made the decision nearly 12 years ago to diversify geographically from our main farm in Kea‘au, the most important factor for us was sustainability. We could have chosen to locate on O‘ahu, which was close to the market. Most of Hawai‘i’s customers live there, and many people advised us to move there.

We chose Pepe‘ekeo, instead, for reasons of sustainability. One of the most important factors was the abundance of available water. Annual rainfall here is in the neighborhood of 140 inches. There are four streams and three springs that run through our property, which are all potential sources of irrigation water.

Waiaama1_3

Today we are working on transforming this enormous quantity of water into electricity. At the highest-elevation corner of our property there is a flume intake, which used to channel water down to the Hilo Coast Processing Plant (the sugar mill that serviced the Pepe‘ekeo area). The flume runs from our property’s highest elevation to its lowest point. We want to generate electricity and then route the water back into the flume channel when we are done with it.

Waiaama2

An inspector from the Commission on Water Resource Management (CWRM) came to inspect the flume site last week. We want to make sure that we develop this project in the right way, so we did not start any work before finding out exactly what is allowed. As it turns out, this flume intake is an approved use that is recorded with the CWRM. We were told that as long as we do nothing to the stream itself we can use its water to generate electricity. We are elated.

A preliminary estimate is that we can run all our reefers and all our other electrical motors and still have a lot of leftover electricity to sell back to HELCO.

Because we based the decision to locate our new farm around sustainability issues, we are now in a position to generate our own, free, electricity. Sustainability is one of our core values and it has guided our actions for a number of years.

Community

CAN!!!

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Richard Ha writes:

I was asked to give the commencement speech at the Hawai‘i Community College graduation last week. I immediately thought of stories my dad told me when I was growing up, and how they affected me all of my life.

Here’s a copy of my speech:

***

Good evening, graduating students, parents, teachers, Chancellor Freitas and visiting dignitaries. Thank you for inviting me to speak.

Tonight, instead of giving you a regular speech, I want to tell you stories of what I think helped influence me along the way. Hopefully it can help you as well.

I believe that: If you can imagine it, you can do it! And you can do it without sacrificing your core values along the way. Being street smart is the way to get there.

I flunked out of UH Manoa and was drafted into the Army. I applied to go to officer candidate school and volunteered to go to Vietnam. I was not the best student, but I had common sense.

After I left the service, I went back to school and got a degree in accounting. I kept all my core values and was able to reach several of my long-term goals, and am still working on many others. To me the most important things are:

1. Follow your dreams.

2. Look for several solutions to each potential problem, and then look for one more, just in case.

3. Do not sacrifice your core values for any reason.

At the dinner table, Dad would tell stories. He was a farmer then, but he did a lot of other things in his life. He would tell stories about taking on huge projects with large obstacles and unbeatable odds. He always figured out a way around the problems.

He would always say, “Not, no can!!” (pound the table) “Can!!!!” (pointing his finger in the air). And the dishes would bounce off the table.

He would go on to say, “There are a thousand reasons why ‘No can.’ I am only looking for one reason why ‘Can!’”

Those words, “Not, no can!!” (pound the table) “Can!!” stayed with me all my life.

Although “Not, no can! Can!” was the thing that stood out in my mind for many years, much later I realized that it was the way he taught me how to be a survivor that made it possible for me to make “Not, no can! Can!!” work.

It is easy to say it and it is dramatic. But how do you actually make it work? And how do you make it work without sacrificing your core values along the way?

These stories that Pop told helped me visualize solutions to problems before they occurred. He taught me how to be a survivor.

Some people call what he taught me “street smarts.” Others call it “common sense.” If you have to pay someone to teach you how to do this, it’s called “contingency planning.” Whatever it is called, I learned how to do that.

1. He told us kids about aholehole fishing at night with a couple of friends on the tip of a rocky point. It was at my tutu lady Meleana Kamahele’s place down Maku’u. There were no collapsible poles back then—they used long, two-inch-around real bamboo poles. They had lanterns shining on the water when he saw, in the darkness, white water coming! The wave came in and pounded on the rock where they were standing, and covered everything. He told me, “I climbed up the bamboo pole, hand over hand, and lifted my legs up and the wave passed right underneath.” His two friends ended up in the water and he helped get them out. It captured my imagination. What a story and what an impact on a young kid.

2. And he would say, “If an earthquake came that was so strong it would knock everybody down, what you going do? You jump in the air and do a turn. Hit the ground and immediately jump back up again.”

How come do a turn, I asked? “Because after a few jumps, you see everything,” he answered. I thought, “Yeah, that’s right!”

3. You are driving 55 miles per hour and a dog crosses the road in front of you. “What you going do? It’s going to happen so fast that you have to know ahead of time what to do.” You have no time to look in your rearview mirror; you can drift to the left as long as there is no car coming; you can drift to the right depending on the road shoulder. You can tap your brakes, but only so far before you start to risk the driver in the back. “What you going do?” Pop said.

“Press the gas and run ’em over.” I did not understand at the time. But he was saying, rather than risk human lives, you should press the gas and eliminate the chance of doing something wrong.

When I think about it now, he was saying: to avoid the chance of doing something stupid, run over the dog. Hard to do? Life is hard. Sometimes you gotta make the call. You don’t want to hesitate and hurt somebody else. He said it was okay if you kill yourself. But not okay to kill somebody else.

These were lessons in being prepared for emergencies and being prepared for life. And as a result it became second nature to me. And I would always go through “what-if” scenarios in my mind. So if a situation occurred, I always had several alternatives worked out in my mind. It became second nature with me.

I can remember two times when it might have made the ultimate difference. The first was in a rice paddy in Vietnam, when a sniper opened up on us. We ran and jumped into a small depression next to a thatched hut. When we hit the ground we realized there were three guys already hiding there.

I knew that this was not good; one grenade could get us all. So I grabbed my radio operator and told him, Let’s go. And we ran for cover a short distance away. Bullets flew all around us. As soon as we hit the ground we heard a loud whump! A grenade had been thrown right into the place we left. Street smart? Common sense? Whatever! It helped me do the right thing.

The second time was when I was in Texas, flying at 100 mph down a two-lane road, top down, in my 62 ’Vette. All of a sudden there was another car overtaking, and there were three of us on a road meant for two. “What you going do?”

I immediately flipped my blinker to the right and started to slide over, communicating nonverbally. I did not give him time to make the wrong move. Three of us flew past each other with inches to spare. I knew exactly what to do. I did not even get nervous. I just looked in the rearview mirror and nodded to myself: Yep. ’At’s how!

I did not realize until much later that this street smarts, common sense, contingency planning thing is what made it possible for me to implement: “Not, no can! Can!!” When you have long-term goals, you are faced with short-term decisions along the way. Making the wrong short-term decision will hurt you in the long run if it causes you to give up your core values. Sometimes, you just have to press the gas and run over the dog in order to keep your core values.

You can keep your core values and make the right short-term decisions if you have street smarts. When you are street smart you will figure out just how far you can go toward your long-term goals without causing yourself too much damage. You will know how much room you can give yourself so you don’t have to sacrifice your core values.

If you cannot find a solution that will allow you to keep your core values, no matter how tempting, don’t give up your core values. Remember: “Not, no can! Can!!” You can find that solution that will allow you to keep your core values.

But to balance things off, in case someone misinterpreted Pop’s generosity, he would lean forward and say, with a clenched fist and a mean face, to an imaginary person: “No Mistake my Kindness for Weakness!”

I can tell you right off that your core values are worth fighting for, and if you’re street smart you can figure out how to make the right decisions, even if there is a short-term disadvantage. In the long run, it is how you are able to keep your core values that will define you. It’s not money; it’s not fame.

Some of the important core values are:

1. Your family is most important.

2. Taking care of the keiki now, and a hundred years from now, is most important.

3. Your good friends are most important. I said good friends; I did not say bad friends.

4. Your word is most important.

5. Taking care of the most defenseless around you is most important.

6. Leaving no one behind is most important.

7. Taking care of your community is most important.

8. Taking care of the environment is most important.

If you’re street smart, you can figure out how you are going to reach your long-term goals without sacrificing your core values.

So when you see white water coming, climb up the fishing pole and lift up your legs. If the earthquake is strong, jump in the air and do a small turn. If you can remember these things you will know what I mean when I say: “NOT, NO CAN!” (pound the table) “CAN!!”

Thank you, and good luck, everyone.

***

I seemed to hit my target audience well. I could see the guys really engaged. Some of the girls were more interested in talking story, but a strong-looking Hawaiian girl was waving her fist and yelling, “Right on!”

At the end, when I said, “Not, no can! Can!” and pounded the table, they yelled with me, “CAN!!” It was fun.

At least 10 students coming through the line afterward commented and even thanked me for the speech. They had to shake hands with maybe 10 people, so it was hard to make comments. But some did. I was pleased.

Losing Weight

Plastic Nose and Bushy Eyebrows

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I gained a pound this week. The main thing that has changed is that I started going to the gym again. My appetite has increased because of it. I need to watch it.

I’ve been lifting weights off and on for 30 years or so. I generally lift religiously for several years, then get burned out and lay off for a few years and then go back again. My t-shirt says 3rd Annual Big Island Push Pull Championship. October 8, 2000. Hilo, Hawaii. Wow, six-and-a-half years ago.

When I was younger, I would sneak back to the gym at 5:30 in the morning after not going for awhile. My brother Kenneth would tease me by saying: “That was you, eh? With the plastic nose and bushy eyebrows, training in secret?”

We teased each other because sometimes he was out of shape and at other times it was me who was out of shape. I would train early in the morning until I got back in respectable form to lift with the strong guys in the evenings.

The guys in the evening would say, “Long time no see. Still strong, eh? You just started back?” “Oh yeah,” I would say. That was after maybe four months of sneaking into the gym and training early to get back in shape.

Now, at 62, I don’t have those issues of “attitude.” It’s humorous to think about now.

I’ve got a long way back. But I feel good and can’t think of any reason I can’t get all the way back. We’ll see what happens.

History, How It All Started, Our Story

Kapoho, Part Two: “That’s Why You’re Dangerous”

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Richard Ha writes:

When we were first getting started in bananas at Koa‘e back in the late 1970s, our farm was way out in the Wild West, where our close neighbors were the original “sustainable farmers.” Some people called them hippies. We just thought of them as fellow farmers making their own way.

Their houses were open, with mosquito netting to protect against flying insects. They had no electricity or running water.

They were on catchment water systems and we, and they, were concerned that our overspray did not hurt them. We were very conscious of their proximity and we took care to communicate closely with them. It made us very aware of how our operation could affect our neighbors, and helped us become the sustainable farmers we are today.

The neighbors occasionally had full moon parties and I went once. It was an experience walking around in the bright moonlight, in and out of the shadows of giant mango trees, running into people I’d never met before. I think the boys went to their parties frequently. I heard the people who lived closer to the ocean were clothing-optional, but I did not know that for sure. They were good neighbors and we got along very well.

The boys and I were very close. Jason and Bert danced and played music for Johnny Lum Ho, and they always won the Merrie Monarch competition. During the summers we all hung out around down the beach at Leleiwi, and when it got too cold we hung out at the Ponderosa; that was the name of my Uncle George and Aunty Agnes’s house on Chong Street in Kaumana.

Our farm grew to 55 acres in a short time and we all were very proud of what we were doing. Jerryl and I started to go to Hawai‘i Banana Industry Association annual meetings on O‘ahu, where people were very impressed we were coming up so quickly. We learned a lot by associating with the oldtimers and the University of Hawai‘i people.

On a farm tour of Kauai with some other Hawai‘i Banana Industry Association farmers once, we went to Waimea Canyon. We stood overlooking a cliff where there was a rope restraint you weren’t supposed to step beyond. One of the local guys, who was wearing brand new jogging shoes, stepped over it. We were considered large farmers and kind of leaders in the industry then, but he didn’t know us personally. I said, “I can have your shoes?” It meant: If you slip and fall, don’t waste your good, expensive shoes. Poho, give them to me before you go.

I wanted him to know we all came from the same place. You’d have to have come up the hard way to value shoes that were going over a cliff. It was so funny. His wife jerked, he jerked and then we all laughed knowingly. It was a good moment.

Jerryl’s truck could hold three people and my Opel station wagon could fit five. We had no problems with communication when everyone could fit in the two vehicles. But soon the farm and our number of employees grew too large for that, and after that we needed to make a special effort to keep everyone informed.

This was our first step into the world of big business. I realized then that it was not possible to be all things to all people. The best we could do was to be fair.

I lived in the condominiums above Hilo High School. I had a barbell set in an upstairs bedroom and that’s where I first started lifting weights. My next door neighbors and close friends were Ron and Penny Mau. Penny became a school principal and Ron is now a very, very well-known entomologist at the University of Hawai‘i College of Tropical Agriculture.

We were sending a steady amount of bananas to Oahu and our farm was growing. I had a degree in accounting, which I had studied to help me keep score. But I had no actual experience in the accounting field, and as much as I tried, I could not develop an effective bookkeeping system.

Finally I shoved all my records into a banana box and took them to an old veteran accountant. I told him I was looking to hire someone to keep the books.

I thought he might like to know that I had an accounting degree, expecting him to acknowledge that this was a good thing going forward. Instead, without looking up, he told me, “That’s why you’re dangerous.”

(To be continued….)

If you missed our story up to this point
Waiakea Uka: We first start growing bananas
Kapoho Days, Part One

Bananas, History, How It All Started, Our Story

How It All Started: The Kapoho Days (part one)

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Richard Ha writes:

After starting a banana farm at Waiakea Uka under the corporate name Ha Bros., Inc., I decided to start another farm as a separate entity, and I started looking for parcels. But land was scarce then. It was around 1978, and the sugar industry had most of the good land.

There was one 60-acre parcel available, which was owned by Elvin and Kay Kamoku together with Bill Kaina. Elvin was my Pop’s old diving buddy and at the time he was the Big Island fire chief. Bill Kaina was the pastor of Kaumakapili Church and later of Kawaihao Church. I leased the land from them.

The parcel was located at Koa’e, which is a 40-minute drive from Hilo. The Pahoa bypass hadn’t been built yet so we drove through the middle of Pahoa on the way to work. You went towards Kapoho, past Lava Tree State Park, past old Kapoho town, which was covered by lava, to the four stop sign corner and then back toward Hilo on Beach Road. You passed the Lyman cinder cones, and then the pavement ended and the road went under tall mango trees. The farm was about a hundred yards on the left.

The land had been planted in papayas and there was no soil at all. But a foot or more of cinder, from the 1960 eruption that destroyed Kapoho town, covered the entire parcel. The lava fountain had been more than 1000 feet high in 1960, and the prevailing wind blew the cinder onto the land.

We were kind of new to farming and we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to be able to grow bananas where there was no soil.

Fortunately, the papaya farmer before us had had a D9 bulldozer rip deep rows through the pahoehoe lava, and that’s where he planted his papayas. We didn’t have any money so we planted 45 acres of bananas in those papaya rows. Luckily for us, the ripped pahoehoe allowed the banana plant roots to go down far enough to reach moisture.

Mom, Pop and I planted the first bananas. Later we hired people to help us to plant and take care of the growing farm. Our original banana crew consisted of Miles Kotaki, Jerryl Mauhili, Jason, Jolan and Jocky Keahilihau, Puggy Nathaniel, Jolson Nakamura and Bert Naihe. Most of them came from Keaukaha and Panaewa. Jerryl was the farm manager.

We planted the bananas as deep down amidst the ripped slabs of pahoehoe as we could, then we covered them up with a mound of cinder. This was all done by hand using picks, shovels and o’o bars because we could not afford a tractor. We filled buckets and walked down the rows throwing fertilizer by hand.

As the bananas started bearing fruit, the guys would harvest the bunches, bring them to the closest road and lean them up against a banana plant. When the bunches were all harvested they would come by, cut the hands off and put them in two papaya bins we had on a flat bed trailer.

We were operating hand to mouth, and one day the two papaya bins were repossessed, so we had nothing to put the bananas in. Jerryl decided to just haul them on the trailer without any bins. So they put a bed of banana leaves down on the trailer and lined up banana hands, one inside the other, from one end to the other. They put a layer of banana leaves on top of the bananas and then a second level of banana hands, then a third and a fourth and on up until there were seven layers.

The first time they passed through Pahoa town like that, heads swiveled: “What was that?!”

We would drop off the trailer at the Waiakea Uka packing house after work, around 5 in the evening, and Mom would cut the bananas up and have them packed before 6:30 the following morning. It went on like that for several months—maybe a whole year. I don’t know how we would have done it without Mom’s help.

My brother-in-law Dennis Vierra is a guy who can do anything related to construction, and he helped us build a packing house. Until then we had no shelter, no toilet—just a lot of determination.

Dennis built a structure where we could hang the bunches and roll them on a rail to a place where we could cut off the hands and place them in a tank full of water. The hands were floated across the tank, where they were cut into clusters and packed into banana boxes. We thought we were in the big time.

It turned out that nobody really wanted our bananas on O‘ahu. We had more guts than brains at that time, so we sent several hundred boxes to someone we called Uncle Chow, though we were never sure that was his real name. He took them around Honolulu and sold them off his flatbed truck for ten cents a pound. He never sent us the money, and we wrote it off as marketing and promotion.

His efforts got the attention, though, of Stanley Unten, owner of Hawaiian Banana Company, who was the main banana distributor on O‘ahu. He called and we started shipping to him.

Next we bought a large cargo van. Mechanization was coming fast and furious for us. We bought a roller conveyor to aid in loading the cargo van, which we drove to the docks. We also used the roller conveyor to unload our banana boxes into a Young Brothers refrigerated container.

Then we really hit the big time—we bought a secondhand forklift for $100. The guys called it “Fred Flintstone.” It had hard rubber tires and would go “clunk” every time the part missing from the wheel hit the concrete. But it could move pallets of bananas, meaning each one didn’t have to be carried by hand. All the guys appreciated it very much.

To be continued

Losing Weight

Still solid, eh?

Richard Ha writes:

Now that I’m no longer depending exclusively on exercising to lose weight, I’m enjoying the exercise much more. Read about my new way of eating here.

Instead of mostly aerobic exercise, now I’m combining it with weightlifting.

Four days per week, I do 10 minutes of warm-up on the elliptical trainer, followed by 10 light dumbbell warm-up reps for biceps, front and rear shoulder, side obliques and traps. In addition, I do 10 warm-up reps of cable pull downs and 25 reps of crunches. Then I do three more sets of these with a weight that I can just barely finish during the last rep.

So I end up doing 40 minutes of cardio on the elliptical and one warm-up set plus three working sets with the dumbbell. I like the idea that I do a total of 100 crunches in each session.

I’ve been doing some form of this routine for a while now. When I first started I could barely finish three sets. Now I can do four fairly routinely. I try to use a little more weight on one of the exercises each day, but not too much. It’s important not to hurt yourself by being overly enthusiastic. This is the most common reason people quit weightlifting.

I’m ready to include 30 minutes of elliptical workout on two additional days per week. This should be fairly easy to do. In a couple of weeks, I’ll train one day with heavier weights but fewer reps. My objective is to increase strength. I’ll describe that when I get into it.

I saw my friend Desmon Antone Haumea yesterday for the first time in several years, and he commented, “E Richard, you still solid, eh?” I hope to maintain that for the rest of my life.

My resting heart rate is 61 and my weight, 201. I’m going to eat a higher proportion of vegetables to meat for awhile.