Kalaheo graduate dreams big
By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer
It was 4 in the morning when 12-year-old Lopaka Purdy insisted his family get up and head down to Boulder Highway in Henderson, Nev., where his family was living at the time, so he could see the Olympic torch carried past their town on its way to the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
"I remember him running along with the man who was running, for about a block," said his mother, Carmel Purdy of Waimanalo.
Lopaka Purdy, a former student president, will study in Switzerland and work at the Olympics.
"Ever since he saw that man running with the torch, he was there. He just wants to be involved with the Olympics."
Now Purdy, a 20-year-old college student, is one step closer to making his dream come true. He has won a prestigious $3,000 Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship to study in Lausanne, Switzerland, at L'Universite de Lausanne.
The International Olympic Committee is headquartered in the Swiss city. Purdy has applied to work at the Summer Olympics in Greece next year and made a trip to Athens for an interview.
"He came in person to apply, and they told him they were really impressed," said his maternal grandmother, Susan Nakama. "They said they received applications from all over the world, but very few had come in person. They told him he'll be working in either media or crew events, or in the main Olympic stadium."
Purdy is one of only a couple of students from Willamette University in Salem, Ore., to win the Gilman scholarship, said Willamette spokeswoman Bobbie Hasselbring. But it will allow him to complete a film documentary on what European students think of American foreign policy, American culture and American politics. He is majoring in French and international studies.
Purdy was student body president of Kalaheo High School in 2001, the year he graduated, after the family moved back to Hawai'i in 1999. But college was at first a question mark. There was no extra money, said his grandmother.
"He's had to work hard for everything he's got," Nakama said. "No one really had the money to send him to college so he needed to get grants and scholarships. And Willamette gave him the scholarships. He had full funding."
It was partly the influence of his grandfather, golf professional and teacher Lloyd Nakama, who encouraged the young man "to dream big," said his grandmother."They worked on science projects together. One year they made the Boulder Dam in the garage," she said.
"They'd go out and look for geodes in the desert. He liked to go and explore things, like a 1910 goldmining town that's now almost a ghost town where my father was born. They always came back with little treasures. They found the hospital where my father was born and found shards of glass from the windows.
"They were always doing something like that. Lopaka dreams big, and he dreams internationally though he's very committed to Hawai'i."
Just this week he was giving a 15 minute speech, in French, on the fall of the Hawaiian monarchy for his French immersion class, she said.
Nakama also remembers how Lopaka took trains all across the country one year looking at colleges, including George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Willamette, choosing the latter because of its small school atmosphere and the scholarships it offered. It was during last summer, when he worked as a groundskeeper for the Coast Guard in Hawai'i, when he also applied for the Gilman scholarship to study abroad.
Then she laughed. "He would never tell you all this," she said. "He's the most humble kid. It really bothers him when we brag."
Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8013.
