Tafa Crew

I have been helping coach a club team with my parents this year. The club that we coach is called Mana Jr's, and we coach the 12 year olds. It has been a humbling experience, but rewarding to see the girls improve from month to month. Even though I would rather be playing, it's still nice to be around the sport. So, as a club, we have to do a service project, and the parents decided for our girls, we were going to volunteer at the "Fishpond" out in Haleiwa. It was down right DIRTY!!! But the girls loved it, they jumped right in and had fun. Kilika wanted to get in on the dirty action too, but he just wanted to swim in the water. After several UNsuccessful attempts to get him to understand that this water is different from bath and swimming water, I finally took him out and he was not happy about it. But, it was a good experience and overall a great way to spend the morning.

Here are our girls, minus one. They are a fun bunch to coach. They all get along very well, and they never seclude anyone.


Kilika and myself looking at the ducks before we started the dirty work.



Here are the girls getting nice and muddy and having a blast!






The girls were in the big pond with the "fit" adults pushing the mud to the banks so the tractors could clear it from there. It was a lot of work, and really stinky...not to mention all that mud. Everyone was getting stuck in knee deep mud.




Here are the "older" adults that didn't want to get into the big pond. They were pulling up all the moss from a different pond, transferring it up the hill, where they were planting the moss in fresh dirt so more moss would grow. It was heavy back labor!




The clean up...the first picture is of some of the parents that helped out and got dirty too...






We caught a 35lbs fish! It was HUGE!!!



After a hard morning of labor, who wouldn't sit down and enjoy the view!


It felt good to do some service and learn a little more about the ancient Hawaiian traditions. The fish pond is an original from an ancient ahupua'a (it has obviously been modernized). It was a good morning that ended with some ONO bento's and shave ice!