It slowly dawned on the volunteers that they were not patients but subjects; separated from their friends and community in Kalaupapa, they felt like outcasts among outcasts.
God didn’t give man wings; He gave him the brain and the spirit to give himself wings. Just as He gave us the capacity to laugh when we hurt, or to struggle on when we feel like giving up. I’ve come t...
By now the streets of Kalaupapa were filled with people racing for high ground - sick people cryingTsunami! as nature played yet another mean trick on them, God's last best joke at their expense. It w...
Before Cook’s arrival the native population of Hawai'i was more than a quarter of a million people; a hundred years later, it had plummeted to fewer than sixty thousand.
An empty cart rattles loudly, she said, meaning, One who lacks substance boasts loudest.
Who can doubt the presence of God in the sight of men whom He has given wings.'...God didn't give man wings; He gave him the brain and the spirit to give himself wings. Just as He gave us the capacity...
When we are young, we think life will be like a supo: one fabric, one weave, one grand design. But in truth, life turns out to be more like the patchwork cloths-bits and pieces, odds and ends-people,...
We moved into Jade Moon's rooming house within the week, and slowly she and I found that our friendship, though damaged, was like fabric torn on the seam: not beyond repair.
The difference between Old Honolulu and New, she would come to decide, was the difference between a beautiful woman who was simply being herself and a beautiful woman calling attention to herself: a l...
She remembers the pain of losing him, but she smiles at the happiness he brought her, cherishing the joy she felt at his side.
Okāsan,
Moloka'i. It was not a name spoken lightly in these islands. Sometimes it was called Moloka'i of the potent prayers, known for centuries as the home of powerful sorcerers capable of praying men to dea...
Learn how to smile in the cannibal pot and life will be so much easier.
It was disquieting to Eddie, this jarring contrast between the bright, cheery atmosphere inside Palisades and the slowly darkening world outside it. As calliope music played and diapered babies crawle...
How stupid could she be to think a clean person would love her -- would risk death and decay and banishment for love!
But it's a poor church that cares only for what happens to a soul after it leaves this life.-Damien
And sometimes she would dream again of being Namakaokahai'i, her waves rolling across burled coral beds, scattering moonlight, cresting higher and higher the farther she traveled over the reef. She wa...
She bid me to look out on the lawn at the leper girls who were running on lame feet, playing croquet with crippled hands.There is beauty, she said, in the least beautiful of things.
Unemployment in America became, almost overnight, a thing of the past as the Federal government pumped billions of dollars into defense.
People disappointed; animals never did.