Hafa Adai!
Report of a Pacific Visit
By Heidi Sandstrom
Associate Director
NN/LM Pacific Southwest Regional Office
Hafa Adai [sounds like HAH-fa day] means "hello" in Chamorro. Hafa Adai (in addition to Aloha) became a familiar greeting when, in July, I visited our Network colleagues and the staff of various community-based organizations in Hawaii and Guam, and conducted workshops on Guam and on the Municipality of Rota in the western Pacific.
I began my trip with a visit to Ginny Tanji, Director of the Library Resources Center, John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Ginny is eagerly awaiting the completion of a new library, at the new campus of the School of Medicine, located adjacent to the Kaka'Ako waterfront park in Honolulu.
Next followed a meeting with Momi Lovell and the staff of Papa Ola Lokahi, created in 1988 to help improve the health status of Native Hawaiians living in Hawaii. Papa Ola Lokahi is the Native Hawaiian Health Board, with a mission of improving the physical, mental, and spiritual health and wellbeing of Native Hawaiians. It also is concerned about the health status of Pacific Islanders and works closely with American Indian/Alaska Native health organizations. It was a privilege to hear Momi speak about Native Hawaiian culture and health practices, and to hear about Papa's many initiatives.
It's always a pleasure to visit Director John Breinich of the Hawaii Medical Library and his staff. Throughout the years, HML has provided health professionals and, more recently, the public in Hawaii with access to its excellent services and collection. A leader in outreach, it has completed many successful NLM-funded projects that have resulted in better access to health information for the state of Hawaii and beyond.
From Hawaii, I proceeded on to Guam, about a seven-hour flight from Honolulu to Agana, the capital. The Territory of Guam is on a single island located in the North Pacific Ocean, about 5,800 miles east of San Francisco, about three-quarters of the way from Hawaii to the Philippines. The island has a land area of 209 square miles (about three times the size of Washington, DC) and is the largest and southernmost island in the Mariana Islands archipelago. The native people of Guam are the Chamorro, and the Chamorro language and English are the two official languages. In addition there are significant populations of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, as well as many other Pacific Islanders.
While in Guam, thanks to the gracious arrangements of host Christine Scott-Smith, I was able to visit many organizations and people on the island. Ms. Scott-Smith is the Director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Library at the University of Guam, one of our region's Resource Libraries. She arranged meetings with various university faculty, and with the staffs of the University's Cancer Research Center, Guam Memorial Hospital Authority, the Guam Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, the Guam Department of Public Health and Social Services and the Guam Public Library.
I also was able to visit Alice Hadley at the Medical Library of the U.S. Naval Hospital Guam. Alice received a "Tugger" as a token of thanks for her contributions to the Network.
Before leaving Guam, I conducted a workshop at the RFK Memorial Library on Health Information Resources from the NLM; I then flew to Rota before returning home.
In partnership with Franda Liu of Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL), I conducted a workshop on the last day of my trip called "Building Health and Environmental Literacy with NLM Resources," as part of the 21st annual Pacific Educational Conference (PEC), Our Pacific Environment: Expanding the Vision - Literacy, Culture, and Technology. PEC is one of the largest educational conferences in the western Pacific and a major source of professional development opportunities for Pacific educators. This year, more than 500 individuals from across the Pacific and the U.S. mainland gathered on Rota, an island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), to participate in more than 100 presentations and workshops.
Rota is one of 22 islands in the CNMI. Only five islands of CNMI are occupied and CNMI has a total land mass of only 184 square miles. The capital of Chalan Kanoa is located on Saipan. The majority of the population is Chamorro, although there are also significant groups of Filipinos and Carolinians. Chamorro is also the principal language, although English is the official language and Japanese is also common.
It was a pleasure to meet and work with Franda and the PREL staff. PREL, with its main office in Honolulu, and service centers throughout the Pacific Basin, co-hosted the PEC; PREL serves the educational community in the U.S.-affiliated Pacific islands, the continental United States, and countries throughout the world. Its programs provide resources and products developed to promote educational excellence for children, youth, and adults, particularly in multicultural and multilingual environments.
My visit to the western Pacific, on behalf of the region, provided me with the opportunity to see the world from a very different perspective; to begin to understand the health, health information, and infrastructure challenges that face U.S.-Affiliated jurisdictions in the Pacific; and to appreciate the complex relationships that these jurisdictions have with each other, with Hawaii and the U.S. mainland, and with other Pacific Rim countries. I was also able to experience the warmth, hospitality, and gentle spirit that pervades these islands, so greatly influenced by the vibrant cultures of their indigenous peoples. We look forward to building on the new relationships established through this visit, so that, in the near future, we can more effectively address the diverse health information needs of the Pacific Basin.