This spring break your humble correspondent spent ten days on the Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip to the Hawaiian islands of Maui and Lana'i.  For those of you unfamiliar with ASB, the program is community-service based and combines a winter quarter academic course with field work to learn about and aid a particular community.

The goal of ASB: Real World Hawai'i was to go beyond the stereotypes surrounding the Hawaiian islands and realize the state for what it was—more a homeland for its residents than a destination for its visitors.  We learned that the Native Hawaiian community was under great stress; Native Hawaiians suffer higher health risks, lower socioeconomic success, and lower education rates than all other ethnic groups of the Hawaiian islands.  And while the American annexation of Hawai'i over a century ago still rankles some in the community, many are more significantly upset by the slow usurpation of their traditional culture with glossy luaus and everything else that goes with the 'picture-perfect paradise' found in brochures and on Waikiki.

Enter this haole (white person).  When the class began, I expected to learn a little on the history of Hawai'i and a lot about current disputes and community needs (such as those mentioned before).  Indeed, these issues were all discussed in the course, but I never thought that race would play such an important role on the trip itself.  Noteworthy, Hawai'i is the most ethnically blended location in the United States, combining its native Hawaiian roots with the massive influx of Asian and European culture into a local culture.  Correspondingly diverse was our class enrollment, with Hawaiian, Navajo, Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, and Caucasian students participating (a good sample of Stanford's own diversity).

During this trip we discussed culture frequently, often with frank questions and jokes about race.  As we lived the local experience, we ourselves became more local—race was no longer a series of sharply defined categories and prescribed beliefs.  Instead, like the local culture, we each were simply a shade of brown.  This meant that varying cultures were respected holistically, rather than refracted into their constituent elements (to be critiqued and disputed).  This attitude, finding commonalities rather than differences, would be an excellent salve for current race relations in the United States.  As Americans, we should realize that nationally we share more values than we disagree upon.  In short, we're all part of an 'ohana (family), and should work through differences in the same manner as you would with family members.

Two more concepts of the Hawaiian culture came to impact me greatly on this trip—the famed aloha spirit, and pono (righteousness through balance).  Aloha is more than a nifty way of saying hello and goodbye in the same word.  It's a philosophy of life, to give and receive freely (reminiscent of Matthew 10:8), and one that benefits all who live it.  Living pono, or living a balanced life, is also important, and a concept that I found personally significant.

All too often at Stanford we're students of extremes—when we're working, it's for hours in the library, when we party (i.e. drink) it's to excess.  Part of this is our own youth, and it's necessary to have lives filled with passion for the things we do, no matter how dangerous or irresponsible.  But at the same time, it's important to keep in perspective our larger goals, values, and beliefs—moderating our passion for engineering, say, with a party or two on the weekends.  We should strive to develop close and varied friendships across the spectrums of student life (e.g. race, ideology, cliques) and not limit ourselves to an echo chamber.  Finding balance, living pono, will draw us all closer in the Stanford 'ohana, and we'll have many more shared memories as a result.

ASB Hawai'i taught me a great deal of new, interesting things—particularly those related to the unvoiced plight of the Native Hawaiians.  However, it also reminded me of something that I already knew: that I should spend my time in college satisfying more than GERs, or limiting my perspective to an 'I-just-need-to-get-through-this-week' mentality.  If we do that, if we forget where we're at and how precious our time is here, we might as well sleep 'till graduation.

Remember what it was like to be a profro, thinking about all the possibility and ability of Stanford students?  I encourage everyone to reclaim their own wonder at being a student at Stanford.  One of the easiest means is to join a campus tour, after all 2,400 profros have just been notified of their own chance to join the Stanford 'ohana and will be walking our streets soon.  But another, and perhaps more significant means of redefining our perspective is to participate in some form of community service—it reminds us of our own place in the sun, and our social obligation to help those who need it most.