 Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us here on partnerships for education here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, and with me today is my frequent guest on the show, Dr. Jojo Peter. Welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ethan. Glad you're here. We're going to be talking today about some interesting programs called Pacific Voices at the Towers of Cujillo, and Jojo's on the board of that group and very actively involved with it, our show titled, Actually Promoting Positive Cultural Learning Among Micronesian Youth, and that's really what Pacific Voices does, right? Yes, it does. Excellent. Yes, unfortunately, we don't have the executive director of Pacific Voices with us, but I'll do my best to talk about the program. It was an idea that we came up with a long time ago, and her name is Innocenta Kiku, a long time community advocate, members of the MHAC Micronesian Health Advisory Coalition, and she was very active around the beginning of the time when they were doing the health care restoration for Kofa citizens, but one thing we noticed is that at the, what you do is called KBT, and it's now called Towers of Cujillo Park Terrace, is that a lot of the children, when they come from school, you know, they hang around on a hutsite, and their parents don't come from work until about after six o'clock or after five o'clock. Right, this is very different from the traditional, the cultures where they came from, where you'd be like a big, extended family, you'd come home from school, you'd have a job to do, a task to do, so helping your cousin out, helping your uncle or auntie somewhere, doing something for them, and it was structured, and now they live in these smaller units, not such extended kids. So for that practical reason, the fact that we no longer have that extended family structure, physically present around them, that would always account for what they do, and they're accountable to in terms of the kind of projects and services and learning that they would do all the time, because living in the public housing, basically you're put in there with many other families that you go from one unit to another, you no longer are at your place, you're in different other people's place, so what we try to do is also for the purpose of learning, is we try to find a common place for them to come together, and use cultural learning and other kinds of learning that we can come up with, but we try our best to focus on cultural learning, and learn about things like food preparation, learn about navigational skills, dancing, stick dancing. Some of you may have seen our children when they performed at various fairs, and also during the play, we just want also one of the projects that the Pacific Voices put out, that the masters of the current, you see these young kids out there doing the stick dance, those are the members of that Pacific Voices. So in essence, filling up that time for them to continue learning, but also incorporate the cultural learning, something that can help them with the sense of development of pride in their identity, and also learn something in the process that they can share with their classmates when they go to school. Right, because here they're much more cut off from their traditional cultural practices, and traditions where if they were in juke, or someone they would have people all around doing these things all the time, they would be part of it very naturally. And you're right, and these are kids that are either born in here, born and raised here in Hawaii, or have recently come from Hawaii at a very young age, that they will grow up to adulthood, and not having that basic cultural learning at the young age. I'm not saying that we do all of it for them, but I think that's a model that we can't look at, because it really helped inspire these kids. When we sent them, when we took them to look at the canoe that was built by the late great navigator Mao Pi, his son, he came to KKV, one of the projects there at Kali Valley, and they built a canoe, so the kids are able to engage with that canoe, and learning about all of that, and also go to the field trip to see and the other cultural events. It builds within that sense of cultural pride that they have something within their heritage that it's worth learning about, but also build a sense of cultural identity. Exactly, it's really important for kids to have that very positive attitude towards who they are, where they come from, believe themselves, recognize that they can do interesting things too, now they can teach the other kids about their dance they're doing, or their method of food preparation, or weaving mats, or whatever it may be. Oh yeah, absolutely. Because that really gets over any sort of, it can really help break down that stereotype threat that the kids perceive if they're regarded as being less talented or less able. Absolutely, because I know, like for example in the Chinatown, and I've been to a lot of the events there, and the kids are very prolific in learning about their culture, and performing at the Chinatown, and talking about the children with Chinese heritage, and of course any other heritage, that's why we have all these events for them to participate and learn, but also participate and learn and share with others. So it also gives that sense of pride that I can actually teach something worthwhile to other children, and also my community has something worthwhile to contribute to the larger community. So in a sense what we try to do, and like for the Celebrate Micronesia event where we spend the whole day having cultural performances, and food display, and all that, our kids also participate there, so they are part of the larger Micronesian group, sharing with the larger Hawaii our new community here, what we have to offer. And then ultimately in all of that cultural learning is the late Mao Pi, and that's kind of like we're following that footstep, where him sharing this knowledge, great knowledge about navigation, sort of gives us, it opens the door for us to say, okay, there's something worthwhile here that we can follow in that direction, and teach other children, and teach other families, family members. Exactly. And it raises awareness in the broader community of the fact that there is a vibrant Micronesian community here that they have interesting worthwhile things to contribute, and to put forth that really just enrich the culture, because there is somewhat of pervasive attitudes, somewhat of a negative tone about a lot of Micronesian this is really hitting on all these levels from the individual child is going to gain Micronesian community gains and the larger island actually all gains, and this is a great win-win win. And also another bottom line of this is that it feeds right back into their own education. Right. It's not something that is counterproductive to learning, it is actually something that enforces and enhances learning. So they have something to do within the larger scope of their educational process. They go back to school, there's a project, we know that some of them have projects at school, where it feeds right back into what they're doing at the Pacific Voices Center. So our center is located at KPT, and we are towers of Kuyo Park. We're very fortunate that the management there has given us one room. It's room B103, and we encourage people to come and visit that center. We've had native Hawaiian hula dancers come and teach our kids how to dance hula. We have stick dancers from Micronesia. We even have technology people come in, and yeah, and I remember a retired, one of our friends, a retired professor from the Special Ed Program at UH, Dr. James Scoggy, donating a lot of the equipment that the children used to do technology projects like iPads, computers, cameras, and so they were able to do like the photography projects. And many, many other organizations that participate in coming in and filling in, you know, the gap where the students, we don't have a lot of resources. Inosenda is a halftime employee of the Kokua Kalei Valley Clinic, and we're fortunate that that's one of the projects that they're so nice and kind to support. And, you know, we just have good-hearted people who know something about us, and even the uncles and the aunties within the housing structures would come down and, you know, either they watch the kids when they're doing projects or they help teach or coordinate some of the practice and stuff, so we'll see some of that later on. Yeah, no, that sounds like a rich, a rich, smorgasbord of projects that you really are doing a lot of different things to help the kids academically, help them socially, help them figure out both learn more about their own culture, but also sort of integrate better into the culture here, too. Yeah. And I think, I don't know, do we want to pop up one or two of the pictures that we have? Well, you know, like, let me just do things like one of the popular things that we, the children really enjoy is the storytelling. And, you know, to be able to listen to a story or to tell a story, somebody come in and help them with the story thing, and actually grew into the direction of the theater, because storytelling, I mean, theater is an excellent form of storytelling. And there are people who are very good at, you know, putting together a story. And so I remember our director, Innocent, actually did, she took a legend of, from the place where she grew up, and she originated from her parents, originated from Anne, and took that legend and retold it in, within, you know, so modern day concept, in a way that it's able to be performed and acted by the children that she was working with. And other organizations saw that performance, and they used that as part of their outreach and their program in reaching out to the Micronesian people. And that was very, very good. And also, more recently, and I think a lot of people have seen the theatrical performance of Masters of the Current. And I think that's, that is such an incredible, incredible job with a lot of partners that come together and work with Innocent to, to put that play on. And I think we may see some pictures from that. But just this idea that it's a project that, you know, we sort of thought about, you know, we thought it up, but it's really everybody's project that there's always room for somebody to, to bring their expertise into. And the bottom line is it has to be able to translate into learning for our children. And then it becomes a really positive force there, but there's, yeah, there's a huge array of very rich traditional legends and tales from all, and they vary from place to place, of course, although there's common themes, but, but turning those into plays is a great idea. And it helps the kids learn about them, again, maintains these cultural values, reinforces them, gives them something to do. And again, a sense of pride and pride of place, pride of self. So that's, that's all sounds absolutely super. I tell you what, I think maybe what we'll do is take a quick one minute break now. And then when we come back, we will be able to go through the photos that we have. But right now, we are going to take a break. I'm Ethan Allen, a host of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Dr. Jojo Peter is with me here in the ThinkTech studio today, and we're talking about promoting positive cultural learning among Micronesian youth. We'll be back in one minute. I'm Andrea Gabrieli. I'm the host for Young Talent's Making Way here in ThinkTech, Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m. only on ThinkTech, Hawaii. Mahalo. And you're back here with us on ThinkTech, Hawaii here with Pacific Partnerships for Education. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. And with me today is Dr. Jojo Peter. Welcome again, Jojo. We're talking about promoting positive cultural learning among Micronesian youth, in particular a program called Pacific Voices at the Towers of Caheo. And Jojo is a board member of that. We were hoping to have the executive director of the organization, but she has unfortunately been called away for some other business. But this is really quite a broad array of different kinds of programs to do help between the time when kids get out of school and come home and before their parents get home and keep them occupied, enrich their lives, help familiarize them with their own cultures and some of the other island cultures, have them doing and participating active things they can then take back and share, teach others, raise the profile of the Micronesian community in Hawaii, and generally sort of make it a win-win-win all around here, right? Great. So, I know we have, we do have some pictures here of some of the kids participating in some of these programs. Maybe you can sort of walk us through them here. Well, we can't fit all the pictures then. And I just had to go through some of the pictures that we had. And there's just so much project that they do. Right. So, here's the east west face. This is part of the, they were part of this east west center. That's our local east west, I mean, Pacific Voices. And that's just some of our kids that are participating in our program. There's a lot of them. And you can hear them just coming into the parking lot, because they're loud. Some of them are chanting and some of them are just practicing their stick dance. And on top of that, you can hear the director, Innocenta's voice, trying to navigate the whole thing to make sure that all the kids are respectful of each other. And yeah, so this is a picture. And that's Innocenta, Sound Kiku. She is a retired police officer from Saipan, actually. And that's her background. She's from Chuk. Her parents are from Chuk. She was one of the, she is a really strong community advocate. And she's part of the Micronesian Health Advisory Coalition. They sponsor a basketball tournament called All Mike. And also for volleyball, All Mike men and All Mike women every year. The next one will be coming up this summer. And that the origin of this is that they were trying to raise money to help pay for the legal fee for the lawyers who will help represent the Micronesian during that Basic Health Hawaii fight against the state of Hawaii when they're thrilled to cut off the Micronesians or to take the Micronesians off the MedQuest program. So sometimes our kids get invited to go to participate in other many, many other programs. And this is just one of them. This young lady, the first one here is director Innocenta's daughter, Nene. And these are her school friends. These are people from, from the, you know, the Cuyo Park terrorists. And they're very, very intelligent in practicing every day. And really trying to learn how to, now I mentioned cultural learning and engagement with their culture as something that we really value for our kids. And because, you know, there's something about respecting other people's heritage, but if you cannot respect your own, then you sort of open up or yourself as, you know, as not being able to, what we call stand on solid ground of your own culture, because you have, you don't have anything to stand on, basically. So what we do is we invite some of these aunties to come in and also help with other things that you can see they're sitting in a mat and learning how to pound breadfruit. And breadfruit preparation, breadfruit is one of the mainstay of diet back home. And there are several ways you can prepare them. One way is this to pound them the breadfruit and, and, and prepare it and share it amongst your relatives. And a lot of the kids now they stay, they see it being, you know, eaten or being sold. But they don't, they don't appreciate the hard work that comes behind that. And a lot of the women are able to, you know, to do that as a way to sustain themselves here. So yeah, so that's cultural learning. It's really valuable to, to her. I mentioned the enactment of that, of that, that legend, legend of a war, a war between the two islands where innocent came from, or both, she asked ties in, in, on to both of the islands. So we have one of the aunties come and help the children or the young ladies here. And the, the gist of the story is basically, you know, when we, we focus on war, we think that it's all a men's business. But actually in this one particular warfare, one in particular war, it was the women who actually defused the conflict. If the women had not stepped in, there was this one island would have been invaded and taken over by the warriors from the other island. So it was the women in, according to that legend, we used their own connection to, to that invading island to sort of defuse the conflict between, between these two islands. And so therefore it gives you that a little perspective on, on the power of women that normally you, when you think about warfare, even in the West, we think of warfare and everybody think of it as sort of a, you know, a man kind of business until recently when you're trying to, to include women in the service. But warfare as a, is a general mean, means of like, you know, acquiring, you know, resource and building relationship is a very complex, you know, cultural event. And it involves a lot of things from relationship to cultural knowledge to even knowing your genealogy. And not only that, but also know the kind of rituals and sorcery that are unknowledge that are, you know, related to warfare. So to understand that complex, you know, cultural thing that, that is warfare, this program here actually tried to teach the young kids that, you know, that it's a complex thing, but women also have a strong, strong part in, in, in, in cleaning of the mess that men cut themselves. Right, I was going to say, defusing conflict. Instead of allowing this conquest to go through. Right, you don't want conflict escalated. Yeah, they basically save a lot of lives by, you know, stepping in and defusing that one. Super, super. Yeah. We also teach our, our children to, to be socially aware. Excellent, excellent. And as you can see, they are at this, that the, they participate in this larger group that we were doing at this event at state capitol. And these are, are my condition, young people that we teach them about the, even the, the, their stories here. We tried to teach them that their existence here has not always been easy. Their family's existence here to help them get through this, their life here in Hawaii has not been an easy thing. And we teach them that, you know, we need to be responsible about not just ourselves, but for other people by teaching the larger away community of Hawaii. These values that the state of Hawaii and the people of Hawaii and the constitution of the United States aspired to hold inequality and respect. And we remind people that, you know, these are your values we're learning. Right. You know, it's not something that we invent ourselves. These are values that, you know, that is inherent in the life and the fabric of this democratic society. So we, we have them, you know, we teach them about the issues. So they're aware of it. It's not, they're just, they're not just holding up the science. They're aware, yes, yes, they're aware of it. And sometimes, you know, they understand why some of the prodigious, you know, sort of filters through to them in school that way, because of the misunderstanding and the stereotypes. So they're able to understand that, you know, I know it's an early age, and, you know, their kids are kids. But at least they will remember when they did that, you know, in the future. And they will think twice when they, you know, they're in a position of, you know, of being on the other side of the fence, looking at the need of other people. So we're very proud of the fact that they were able to come with us to the state capital and participate in all of the, in all of the, so they didn't just participate in the theater and in the other things, but they're also participating in the social justice engagement of the- You taught them this broad array of- Right, right, right, right. Well, skills and- Yeah, so every now and then I have, I have to come in and remind them, I say, you know, we are in this place called Hawaii. You know, there's a history here, and you have to understand the Native Hawaiians, you know, and they also have to understand the particularities of our, you know, why we're here, and, you know, the kind of governing forces that sort of lands us in this project. So the Pacific Voices is one of the projects that we're very proud of. It's part of our larger community efforts. There are, we have the, we are OSEANEA Correct Center, One Stop Center. We introduced that on this program also. We have the M-Hack Micronesian Health Advisory Coalition, and they're the ones who were in charge of, I mean, not in charge, but they really stepped up the advocacy earlier in doing this, and they continue to do projects in the community. We have the COFA-CAN, who continue to work with policy makers. Recently, the issue of driver's license renewal for COFA citizens came up because COFA citizens, unfortunately, through the intricacy of all of the policies that have been created during the recent, you know, recent years, we fell through the crack by that, by a requirement that we, as a group, can only renew our license every year. We cannot do it for more than one year. Really? Yeah, I know that's unfortunate, but our citizens come in and work, and as a worker, you need to have your driver's license to be renewed more than one year, so he doesn't become a humbug. You go out there and you wait for the long process. Everybody would agree that, yeah, there is a little of a discrimination going on there, and a disparity, so we're trying to get people to work together to fix that. We have all of these organizations, and I wanted just to make sure that that people also recognize that we have other things beside all of the other stuff going on, and Pacific Voices is one of those. That is promote positive learning and engagement among the young people. It sounds like you're doing amazing work there. It's really people like Innocent Sound Kikku, and Josie Howard, Kathy, and the other people who are doing M-Hack and MU, and even they could call to schools to talk to teachers and administration, and in trying to see how we can engage better for the Micronesian kids. Well, this is a great example of Pacific Voices. Yes, very positive. Very positive. Yes, it's usually win-win kind of thing. So we invite anyone out there who's interested in helping teach the kids all the beautiful things about this culture and this place. As you come by to hear a part of Howard's. Right. Excellent. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much, Jojo. This has been a very, very enlightening dialogue here. I've learned a lot, and I wasn't really aware of this group before this, so it's great to hear of all the good stuff they're doing. Thank you for being a part of it, too. Thank you, Ethan. Thank you for being my guest. And I hope you'll come back a week after next for another episode of Pacific Partnerships in Education.