This Thanksgiving marked the 15th year I felt the heat of the imu as we lifted 500 turkeys onto steaming banana stalks at the Kualoa-Heeia Ecumenical Youth Project. Among my earliest memories as a young child was the sense of awe I felt as many hands worked together amid the savory steam.
The KEY Project is a local nonprofit organization located in Waihee Valley north of Kaneohe. According to its mission statement online, it was founded to nurture the people of the Kualoa-Heeia area by providing vital grass-roots resources to serve the cultural, environmental and economic needs of its multicultural community.
Each year for Thanksgiving, the KEY Project puts on a massive imu fundraiser for the community. People can purchase tickets to put in their own turkey or other items (meat or vegetarian). This year was the 28th time the massive imu brought together people from many walks of life to participate in a fusion of the Hawaiian tradition of baking meat in the earth with the American tradition of preparing a turkey feast in the spirit of gratitude.
The community is proud that funds generated from the imu and other events will be dedicated in part to supporting local students to help them attend college.
The KEY Project has separate programs for high school and intermediate school. Last year this column also put out the KEY Project’s request for a new van. I was delighted to learn that the morning the request was printed, someone called to donate the vehicle.
This year I made the special pilgrimage with my European history class from Punahou School. We attended the imu as volunteers to help prepare the pit and transfer the turkeys.
"Mitzvah" is the term for a good deed in Hebrew. Our instructor, Carl Ackerman, said this imu was a "group mitzvah." As we worked on the imu, it felt as though we all became cells of one body. That’s really what the imu is all about: bringing the community together for a common cause.
"It doesn’t really matter about the turkeys or if we cook them in the imu. What matters is that the connection of community bonds are nourished by all of us building something together," said Paul Reppun, one of the longtime organizers.
Many of us are familiar with the complicated narratives of Thanksgiving. Europeans arrived on the East Coast of the mainland, which had been inhabited by Indians for generations. They were friendly at first but then subjugated the indigenous people and forcibly took the land they wanted. Oddly enough, the Europeans who fled to the North American continent left Europe to escape religious persecution and social stagnation.
Over the years, the celebration of Thanksgiving has become less about giving thanks and more about retail consumerism. Any sense of collective gratitude can also be hard to come by as long as discrimination among cultures, religions and gender is still rampant.
It strikes me that the Enlightenment, or birth of reason, has offered a path to dispel prejudice that divides people and allow multicultural groups to come together in a free land to collaborate and at times work toward a common goal.
It might seem strange for a European history class to journey from Manoa Valley to Koolaupoko to celebrate Thanksgiving around a traditional Hawaiian imu. The annual KEY Project imu transcends these apparent contradictions: It makes Thanksgiving really about giving thanks and brings us together as a group to reconcile mind and heart.
Ira Zunin has turned today’s column over to his son, Brandon Zunin. Brandon, a senior at Punahou School, is editor of Punahou’s student-generated newspaper, Ka Punahou. Reach Brandon Zunin at bzunin15@punahou.edu.
