Honu Heroes

Today was a really strange day...so strange, I can't quite come up with a title to it yet. Let's see how that works out...

Today I had to take kids out to do some turtlespotting. It's an ongoing activity we do where we take kids to specific places to observe sea turtles, take data on them, pictures and now video. We report stuff to the Pacific Whale Foundation who are trying to help them.

Sea Turtles are in danger because of all the messed up stuff we do to the oceans. The main issue is something called fibropapilloma. The turtles get these tumors that eventually kills them. And the tumors appear on the outside as well, all over their heads, tails, etc.

We've identified turtles, named them and charted when/if they get fibropapilloma. There's also a...uh...kind of an afterschool club called Honu Heroes...Honu is Hawaiian for turtle. You may find this hard to believe, but I'm actually not involved with them. But the kids have been giving presentations all over the island and even a couple on other islands.

Anyway, the first group I took were the veterans...the 8th graders. It was a long morning, but it was OK. There was a couple of spottings, but nothing huge. Honestly, it was more of a bonding moment - a lot of the kids, especially the girls, were taking more pictures of me than turtles...for posterity. I knew Kaitlen was going to be one of the kids who was going to have a tough time with me leaving and she spent most of the morning and lunch time messing with me. Viera's been distancing herself, which is going to continue until just before I go and Kristen is still trying to get me to start a MySpace page...they obviously don't know about Stu. The really surprising thing is our Aspergers kid has been showing emotion about me leaving...Jeez, now I'm healing the sick.

The afternoon was with the 6th graders. They were a pain in the ass. I had to pull the van over on the way because they were acting like such idiots...I almost turned this island around! I didn't realize that they hadn't done Turtles yet. So when they got there, they really had no clue what to expect. Once the turtles started showing up, that was the show. Twenty kids on this lava finger, literally clapping to get the turtles to come out of the cave. It was really cute. Then the turtles showed up and every one except one had fibro tumors around the eyes, mouth, etc. They had heard about it, but hadn't seen it until now. But they were still kids and were dealing with it pretty well.

After an hour it was time to go. I was the last to leave the area, just to make sure we had left no child behind (intended pun). I saw all the kids not going toward the van, but down the beach...what the hell? Off the lava finger (a naturally made pier out of lava rock from an eruption a long time ago) and on the beach a turtle had washed up on the shore...still alive but covered in tumors and dying. I've never seen anything like this before. The kids surrounded the turtle and realized that we needed pictures of this. To anyone showing up then it looked like the kids had no clue as to what was going on, but they knew that the pictures were going to help get this cause more publicity. We actually had to stop them from taking pictures.

When we got back to school, a bunch of kids went right to the teacher who does Honu Heroes. She got on the phone to some group who deals with this stuff, to go get the turtle.

I have the kids' pictures of this turtle. I'm not going to post them here - they're pretty graphic. Typing this has made me start to process this. I may have one more thing to do before I leave.