Rotary Club members remake Camp Erdman
By Will Hoover
Advertiser North Shore Writer
Last month, some six-dozen members of the Rotary Club of Honolulu, along with a couple- dozen spouses and friends, literally moved walls to complete "Rotary Village" at YMCA Camp H.R. Erdman in Mokule'ia.
Photo courtesy Rotary Club of Honolulu
The project, which required 2,700 hours of work, saved the YMCA $275,000 in making five cabins accessible to people with special needs.
Rotary Club of Honolulu members, from left, Jim Ewing, Jack Lockwood and club president Paddy Griggs helped complete "Rotary Village" at YMCA Camp H.R. Erdman in Mokule'ia. The project required 2,700 hours of work and saved the YMCA $275,000.
"We just felt that our club should do something significant for the Rotary International's Centennial Celebration," said YMCA former CEO and Rotary member Don Anderson.
"We've done a lot of stuff, but our club has never done anything of this magnitude before."
Anderson said past club president Paddy Griggs put in a total of 250 hours on the difficult project.
"It was impressive in the sense that there were lots of pieces to it — five cabins that needed to be completely redone," added Jim Ewing, co-chairman of the project. "We moved walls, so the cabins actually gained some size.
"But beyond all that, it's an hour's drive from Honolulu. And to get people out there each Saturday and Sunday was tough. But they did it. They were really wonderful."
Anderson said for years staff at Camp Erdman had undertaken makeshift repairs on the cabins to accommodate groups that included Easter Seals and the Muscular Dystrophy Association, which brought in groups for summer camp.
Two summers ago, champion ice skater Kristy Yamaguchi took a group of special-needs people to Camp Erdman. But when she went elsewhere last year because the Erdman cabins were too difficult to work with, Anderson knew something had to be done.
He admitted that he underestimated how difficult the restroom work would be.
"The big issue was the bathrooms," he said. "You really deprive people of a lot of human dignity when you've got to have two people go to the restroom. Some people still need help, because there are different levels of severity involved.
"You can be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires a five-foot turning radius in front of a toilet. But we went to a higher standard, where special needs people can back the wheelchair alongside the toilet and laterally transfer onto the seat."
Anderson said Rotary members gutted five cabins, each of which had one noncompliant bathroom, and dug through the foundations to install two big bathrooms in each cabin. In the end, the camp had 10 ADA-compliant restrooms in five cabins.
The club also rewired the cabins, put in new windows, installed new doors on two sides of each cabin, replaced blacktop walkways with poured concrete, and installed benches in the center courtyard.
The results were worth the effort, Ewing and Anderson agreed.
"Summer camp is a great opportunity because relationships built between people there are especially meaningful," said Anderson.
Reach Will Hoover at 525-8038 or whoover@honoluluadvertiser.com.
