Every once in a while, some kindhearted passer-by — who doesn’t regularly pass through Kaneohe in the morning — will catch a glimpse of Herman Perreira walking along Kahekili Highway in his well-worn tank top and shorts and assume that he’s homeless.
Sometimes people will notice Perreira picking up litter with the point of his umbrella and depositing it into one of three attached plastic bags and wonder what dastardly thing he did to be sentenced to community service.
Such misidentification is something of a post-vocational hazard for the 62-year-old Hawaiian Electric Co. retiree, whom many area regulars properly recognize as the community-minded gent who devotes several mornings each week to cleaning up the long stretch of highway between his home in Temple Valley and his turnaround point at Servco Toyota Windward.
“People like what I’m doing and I don’t mind doing it,” Perreira said. “I try to give people a glimpse of how things should look like.”
Perreira grew up in Kailua and attended Kailua High School and Honolulu Community College. He started working at HECO at age 19 and stayed on for the next 33 years.
Perreira liked the company but said the stress of his job eventually took a toll on his health. Concerned with the steady upward creep of his cholesterol, blood pressure and other medical readings, Perreira took a cue from his wife, Rendy, who had retired a month earlier from her job at Pacific Shipyards International.
“We went in together and we got out together,” said Perreira, who has been married for 42 years. “Retiring was the best thing I ever did. We don’t have the money we used to, but it’s better to be healthy.”
Even before he retired, Perreira had taken up walking as a way to improve his health. And because he was already out and about, it wasn’t long before he began to pick up trash along the way. Over the years, he’s developed something akin to a fisherman’s eye for the sea. He knows how winds swirl in the area and where the garbage thus settles.
Having unsuccessfully lobbied the city to place more garbage cans along the highway, Perreira eventually took it upon himself to leave large garbage bags about every half-mile along his route.
On his walks, Perreira takes along his trusty umbrella, plus plastic bags to sort the trash that he collects and disposes of into the larger trash bags. Refuse workers familiar with Perreira’s good deeds regularly pick up the large bags he ties and leaves on the side of the highway.
Perreira’s volunteer work is well appreciated by friends, neighbors and even total strangers who donate bags to the effort.
“People sometimes say, ‘Hey, why don’t you come walk on my street?’” Perreira said. “What I’d really like to see is people doing the same thing in their own neighborhoods.
“Imagine what that would look like.”
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
