Soul Food in Pupukea
Two years ago, Bill Howes was at the end of his rope. He had been fighting for five years to get the North Shore Country Market (NSCM) firmly established in Pupukea, and the community-based non-profit organization was still struggling to acquire a site on which its monthly farmers’ market could operate. Howes, a former suit-and-tie-wearing architectural draftsman-turned-permaculture activist, was losing faith in the powers that be.
“It was just one thing after another with those guys,” he recalls, referring to the Department of Community Services of the City and County of Honolulu. Howes had had a land grant application pending with them for over a year. Bureaucratic foot-dragging and a sudden, inexplicable change of heart had yanked one site out from under NSCM at the last minute. Endless amounts of paperwork and deferred approvals seemed to make the wait for a new site interminable, and Howes’ patience was wearing thin.
The farmers’ market, which had been using a public park next to Sunset Beach Elementary School, was shut down due to legal constraints. In desperation, the organization’s board members were holding the monthly gathering in backyards, but Howes knew this was a short-term solution at best and watched in frustration as his dream got shelved yet again in the maze of official permission-seeking.
The difficulties came just as NSCM was becoming one of the region’s most successful grassroots responses to the economic and political challenges of the 1990s. Actually an offshoot of the Save Sunset Beach Coalition, which had protested a proposed luxury development project near the legendary surfing mecca, NSCM is an example of activist combat turned into positive action.
Around 1992, members of the coalition decided to redirect their efforts toward a more productive venture that would encourage broader community involvement in economic, environmental and social rehabilitation issues. Although stopping development of a big project that threatened the area’s “Keep the Country Country” values was a step in that direction, it soon became clear that devising economic alternatives would be even more important at a time when the North Shore’s plantation system was falling apart.
“Instead of just fighting, we needed to create something that was positive and energizing for people,” says Howes. “Once we looked around at our resources, the idea of a farmers’ market went on like a light bulb. The Pupukea highlands alone contain about 1,200 acres of fruit trees, but most of the fruit was just rotting in people’s yards because nobody was doing anything with it.”
NSCM formed as a non-profit organization committed to strengthening the region’s rural economy through sustainable and educational activities. The farmers’ market was conceived as a way of connecting local producers and consumers at the community level. The regular gatherings could also be used to promote organic growing practices, permaculture techniques, and awareness about the area’s ecological potential as well as its limitations. It was time to move away from plantation cash crops and into healthier, diversified agriculture that respected and enhanced the region’s natural resources rather than exhausting them.
Things got off to a great start, with plenty of support from an enthusiastic community, but dealing with the red tape of starting up a grassroots venture became a full-time challenge for Howes, who was voted the organization’s executive director. Although it might have been easier to give up on numerous occasions, he kept plowing away and managed to divert some of his boundless green thumb passion elsewhere.
While waiting for a site for the market, he teamed up with the Department of Health’s Psychosocial Rehabilitation Center in Waialua to set up a garden for the chronically mentally ill. NSCM received funds to develop this project into a full-fledged organic demonstration garden that provides patients with meaningful outdoor activity. The “Hale Ohana” garden, first cleared in 1999, is now bursting with organic papaya plants, taro, broccoli, beans, banana and other delectables that make up part of the patients’ daily diet and are even beginning to generate income for the center. NSCM eventually provided guidance and technical assistance to some of the center’s members to form their own non-profit, called Friends of Hale Ohana, which would manage and expand the project in partnership with the DOH.
Last year, after persistent phone calls and written requests, the City and County finally awarded NSCM a one-acre parcel of land across from Ke Waena Beach on Kamehameha Highway. The wait had paid off. The organization lost no time in setting up shop on the site, clearing haole koa with equipment that was mostly donated or borrowed, installing a drip irrigation system, setting up a shade house and planting everything from taro and tapioca to Tongan spinach and breadfruit with mulch donated from local tree-trimming companies.
Kalunawaika`ala Stream runs alongside the market site and offers an ideal location to reintroduce endemic Hawaiian and Polynesian/Pacific Rim food plants. A spacious thatched hale was erected last summer in a community celebration akin to a traditional barn-raising party. Along with a small, solar-powered office built from a used shipping container, it provides NSCM with the home it worked for so hard over a period of nearly seven years.
NSCM has also set up educational partnerships with other community groups, including local elementary schools, the Waimea Arboretum, and Child and Family Services. Youngsters deemed to be “at risk” learn organic gardening and farming methods with an emphasis on Hawaiian foods and medicinal plants at both the Sunset Beach and Hale Ohana sites. Sunset Beach Elementary is working on developing a curriculum with Howes for its own garden. Regular classes on composting and organic gardening take place on market days and are open to the public.
“A farmers’ market is everything that a community is,” reflects Howes with pride. “It’s food, it’s camaraderie, it’s ohana, it’s people getting together and having fun, only the great thing is that theyÿre making money, too. People are always taught to be competitive, but in the long run this just perpetuates a false scarcity of resources and greed. Here people learn to share with each other, barter, exchange information and suggestions, help each other.
“We’re slowly starting to come together as a real community now, and it’s amazing. I feel like I’m living in a dream. Every day I wake up and ask myself if it’s real.”
North Shore Country Market
P.O. Box 1153
Haleiwa, HI 96712
(808) 638-7172
[url=http://www.hawaii-northshore.com]www.hawaii-northshore.com[/url]
[email]bhowes@earthlink.net[/email]
— Catherine Black
Volume 11, Number 12 June 2001
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