By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Staff Writer
I met the invisible population of Our Honolulu in a back room of the Kahuku United Methodist Church on Monday night.
No, it wasn’t a secret spy meeting. This part of our invisible population lives in the hills back of Kahuku on postage-stamp farms. The residents are mostly Laotian refugees.
Samay Sourivong and wife Somnhot grow apple bananas on seven acres. They’re so busy on the farm, they seldom appear in public.
The Sourivongs come to the back room of the Methodist Church every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening to take a class in English as a second language.
It had taken the Sourivongs two days to get all their children out of Laos across the Mekong River in a canoe. Soldiers normally guarded the river, but Samay waited until new year’s when the soldiers were drinking and playing cards at a festival.
Lynn Law from Canton, China, and Jinsheng Jiang, who helps on Law’s farm, also attend. Law grows Chinese herbs on 20 acres and exports them to Canada.
Other students include an elderly couple from Western Samoa and Maria Jose Archinelli, a young lady from Buenos Aires, who is on a surfing safari around the world.
Student teachers from the BYU-Hawai‘i campus help out as volunteers.
The classes are supposed to begin at 6:30 p.m. But the farmers work from sunup to sunset, so they come to class later when the days get longer.
Barbara Gillone, founder of the North Shore Learning Center — a big name for the little room in back of the church — started the class last August in an empty house over by the Kahuku hospital.
At first, Gillone didn’t charge tuition. When the original sponsor pulled out, she supported herself by selling vegetables, given her by the farmers, from a stand.
When the vegetable season ended, she had to ask members of the class for $25 a month.
This created a cultural hurdle, Gillone said. The classes had been a social event. She learned at the first session that her students expected food to be served.
For the second class, Gillone came up with peanut butter, popcorn and hot dogs. The next time, students came early to help her prepare.
But paying tuition introduced formality to the process. The students had to decide if just learning English was worth this expense.
The fact that enrollment held up is testimony to the value of education.
I’ve never enjoyed a class more. Somsak Thansoothong sat on my left in a saffron robe. He’s a young Buddhist monk from Thailand who’s seeing the world.
During the spelling and reading exercises, he doodled on a sheet of paper. What came out was a Thai dancer in an elaborate headdress and a sketch of a nude woman.
One exercise combined spelling with spin-the-bottle. When the bottle points to you, you have to spell a word.
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