You work, you serve, you cook, you clean for others. You do what you need to, but it’s never enough. Sometimes you ask for help. For food. For shelter. For life. And yet, you scrape together what you can for each month’s rent, knowing you might not make the next. Your children are latchkey, working on the farms on the weekends, picking coffee beans, picking macadamia nuts, hands and fingers too nimble, too sure for their age. And yet, you can’t make ends meet, so you fish at night, for menpachi, for auweoweo, for opelu. You regrow scraps in old pots, pans, jars, on windowsills, on verandas, green onions, bean sprouts, spinach, if you can. You try to save. To one day have your own home with your own yard to grow your own food. Or, to leave your home, in paradise, for a better life, for more than the scraps you are given. Each paycheck, each dollar, evaporating into the life that we allow you to live.
