Integrating Experiences in Hawaiʻi 2019-2021

When I arrived to Honokaʻa in 2019, I felt eager. After months working at an Amazon call center, a season marked by purposelessness, Hawaiʻi felt like reentry into direction. This was the next step in my life, and I was ready for it.

Unlike Timor, I wasn’t stepping into remoteness or ambiguity. I was stepping into systems, the Hawaiʻi food system.

FoodCorps Hawaiʻi had accepted me not as a garden teacher, as I expected, but as Team Leader, a role typically reserved for returning service members. It was a jump in responsibility, and one I chose not to turn down.

I had cut the hair had been grown over years, cleaned myself up, and arrived determined to do it “better” this time, more professional, more measured, less hardened. My bright eyes and bushy tail had returned.

As Team Leader, I coached AmeriCorps service members across Hawaiʻi Island. I supported lesson planning, helped navigate internal and external challenges, assisted with large projects, tracked hours and reports, and worked closely with our program manager to keep operations running smoothly.

I enjoyed coaching. I saw all of the school gardens as part of a collective effort, and I liked connecting dots across sites. I was older than most of the team, and that maturity helped. I didn’t feel much impostor syndrome, I felt prepared.

Hawaiʻi felt different from Timor. There was literacy around colonization, an active vocabulary about its emotional and structural effects. I wasn’t discovering these themes in isolation. I was entering a place where conversations about sovereignty and restoration were ongoing. I had access to many great teachers.

I wanted to contribute without being extractive. The lessons from Timor helped. I listened more than I spoke. I paid attention to place, I learned the importance of place.

When COVID arrived in early 2020, our work shifted overnight. I had been working only for a few months at this point.

Service members were suddenly navigating closed schools, uncertainty, and isolation. We pivoted toward food banks, online engagement, and creative community support. I found myself slipping into the role of therapist as much as coach, holding space, listening, helping others find footing.

Strangely though, I felt calm in the chaos. I was living off-grid at Ahu Lani, a retreat center on the slopes of Mauna Kea, still receiving a paycheck. Crisis did not rattle me. Timor had prepared me for ambiguity and pressure. I could keep a cool head.

In my second year in FoodCorps, I became Treasurer for Hāmākua Harvest, a local food security nonprofit and farmers market. I taught myself bookkeeping and nonprofit compliance. Eventually, I was voted in as President.

It felt accidental really, no one seemed eager to take the role, but I felt capable.

Governance introduced a different kind of responsibility. I learned contract law well enough to win a lawsuit on the organization’s behalf. I mentored directors, served as ad hoc executive leadership, and navigated long-standing community tensions.

For a time, I enjoyed it deeply. The challenges were stimulating. Ownership of a community institution felt meaningful. I felt I belonged, something I realized something deeply important to me.

Over time, however, community drama and inherited dysfunction began to erode the reward. I found myself carrying more and more individually. The balance between contribution and consumption tipped.

Outside of formal roles, I worked with Native Hawaiian organizations restoring gardens and cultural sites around Waipiʻo Valley. I collaborated with voluntourism groups during COVID, designing programming that connected visitors to land and food systems without reducing them to spectacle.

When FoodCorps wound down its Hawaiʻi program, I transitioned into contract work, managing video production projects for the Hawaiʻi Macadamia Nut Association and Mālaʻai School Garden, among others.

These roles affirmed something quietly important:

I could execute. I could take on any project I put my mind to. Across farming, governance, contracts, and program management, I had become someone trusted to deliver.

Hawaiʻi transformed my intensity into passionate capability.

I matured from a field volunteer into a systems-level leader. I integrated what I learned in college with what I learned abroad. I became someone who could hold crisis steady, manage governance, steward land, and execute complex projects.

I also learned that competence can become identity, and identity can quietly overtake balance.

Where Timor stripped innocence, Hawaiʻi built confidence. Where Timor hardened me through grief, Hawaiʻi tested whether I could soften without losing strength.

The answer, at that time, was unfortunately incomplete.