These areas that I am going to are not mainstream. You can drive by these areas and not even know that they are there. These are not areas that tourist go to but locals and natives of the land. These areas are of their ancestors and in many cases they have had to fight to keep these lands. Now, usually due to volunteers and class projects, they are slowly restoring these sacred historical areas back to what they use to be.
To get to this area we had to drive threw a cement factory, which is just weird. Thank goodness it was on a saturday because I can't imagine how weird it would have felt to drive threw that factory during a work day! There was a big group of volunteers today and they split us into to two groups: first group got a tour while the second group started work. Rachel (classmate) and I made sure we were in the first group ;) But before we were split up we actually went back OUT of the area and a woman did a Hawaiian chant/prayer for thanks and then another woman did a chant/prayer welcoming us into the heiau. Whenever I hear the chants in the native language it is touching and I am so aware of the differences in how I was raised to pray. In church it is such a quiet demure thing, with heads bowed but when they do their chants their voices are raised to the heavens, they encorporate all that are around them, and their words seem to engulf the group. It is always nice to be outside when this is going on. I can't imagine hearing a chant and being indoors... it just doesn't seem to fit to me.
Then we were off on our tour. We were told not to take any pictures of the artifacts :( but plants etc. were fine. Granted the artifacts consisted of stones, and unless someone pointed out what they were you'd probably wouldn't know that a stone was a "birthing stone" or represented a sharks head and a boundary. It was pretty to be in the lush green and it's amazing to think of people living there, simply. The women and men are housed in different areas and most of the work that we did was on the men's side to start clearing away some of the vegetation that doesn't belong.
After our tour, we switched with the group that was doing the work and luck would have it... it started to rain. From light to downpour, it went back and forth and I got wet and muddy. We worked for about an hour and then it was lunch time! Of course we had the rice and the kalua pork and cabage, some mystery meatloaf with gravy (that had big ass mushrooms which I avoided) and some awesome brownies!
It was a good and interesting morning and I am doing another field trip tomorrow morning. I need to get my hours and I will be short at the end of the semester due to my military weekends and the trip to Alaska... oh well. I'm making an effort.
Here are some pictures from the day:
Some of the greenery :D
This is the area we were working in.
The rains :P
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