WAIMEA — There were perhaps 50 people who started the Out of the Darkness suicide-prevention awareness walk Saturday at Waimea Athletic Field.
Walkers trooped past the softball field where senior players were starting to gather, and past the soccer fields where American Youth Soccer Association players were engaged in play in the midst of colorful umbrellas erected against the increasing heat from the Waimea sun.
As the entourage led by Mar Cadiz, Leici Camara and Kaylynn Drake approached the finish line, the number had swollen to several hundred people.
Those numbers were aided by the fact Saturday’s walk was the first done in conjunction with the Kauai Suicide Prevention task force, said Madeline Hiraga-Nuccio, the task force president.
The Kauai Suicide Prevention Task Force was joined by other community groups offering services and information on suicide, including the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Hale Opio, Queen Lili‘uokalani Children’s Center, state Department of Health, and more that were active in the HOPE Festival and Healing Space.
“During the three years — 2017, 2018 and 2019 — there were 47 people on Kauai who died by suicide,” said Gina Kaulukukui, the Kauai representative to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention-Hawaii Chapter. “The resources and task force are so important to curb these numbers. The AFSP is a state-level group, but each island is unique.”
Kaulukukui, who was thrust into the suicide experience at age 4, was joined by other families, including coordinator Sheila Garcia-Louis, and several others, including Mayor Derek S.K. Kawakami, who experienced loss by suicide.
“We are all connected, like a lei — lei kukui,” Kaulukukui said. “Kukui because it symbolizes light. We celebrate not how to die, but life. The memory beads keep the experience alive. Hope, help and healing are possible.”
Pua Kaninau-Santos, after suffering her loss, became the voice for suicide, starting a task force on Oahu and bringing it to Kauai, where she got Kaulukukui to join the movement to break the silence on suicide and mental illness.
Drake, a 2019 graduate of Kamehameha Schools’ Kapalama campus, said she has commited to be the voice.
“Four years ago, I made the commitment to help others to be the voice,” said Drake, who said she will lead the Out of Darkness walk on Oahu this week. “I have a mission to help prevent loss after my family lost some of its members and friends, and even myself.”
The Out of the Darkness community walk, brought to Waimea this year, encourages people to learn the warning signs of people at risk of suicide, learn the training and become a life saver, and break the silence surrounding suicide and mental illness.
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Dennis Fujimoto, staff writer and photographer, can be reached at 245-0453 or dfujimoto@thegardenisland.com.
Aloha Kakou,
Many people know there are more consequences than meet the eye in the form of Herbi-cide, Insecti-cide, Pesti-code, Fungi-cide, and Rodenti-cide, etc., in the ultimate agricultural accumulation in and on the foods consumed by the public and its connection to the ultimate aberrant mental individual decision of Sui-cide.
Any thing or action involving a…“cide”… is not healthy, is dangerous and can be fatal…more so the chemicals in their daily dosages; and industry puts them on our food. Glyphosate and Chlorpyrifos, are just a few of notoriety in the news these days, there are many more chemicals and petrochemicals negatively impacting our health and health of our nation.
All of these entities result in death, and why they use the word ending that is “cide”, but where do you draw the line in their interaction with personal destruction; and the too many other chemicals and petrochemicals allowed in our foods. We are inundated like a flood, barraged like incoming artillery.
We wish there was time to bring up the horrible street drugs, some of which are now prescribed by doctors choosing addiction for their patients over natural alternatives they are not trained in nor have the skills to administer. But in failing to refer out for more conservative Care, they protect their control over the nation’s health and their gross income of $4 Trillion dollars a year.
There are many foods besides their toxic content that also lack nutrients as well, a double insult to ones health.
This is why some foods qualify to say ORGANIC on them, meaning free of poison chemicals…let’s hope so. “Non GMO” is another designation meaning that so,e psycho sci-fi scientists have not genetically altered the food to where they are gaining more and more corporate control over our formerly natural God given foods…this being a sin and crime in the eyes of God fearing and believing people, and the scientist who respect the Laws of Nature.
Foods loaded with actual nutrients provide vital elements that make people vibrant, live, filled with energy, and have that go for it attitude…along with that nutritious foods make people happy…not suffering…!
We’ve all eaten some foods that we felt sluggish and run down afterwords and it lowers our happiness output.
But, real, live, fresh, vibrant, nutritious, natural, non chemical, non toxic foods make people happy and also energized to make people want to work…and enjoy…the way food is supposed and meant to be by our Creator.
A Healthy mind is a Happy mind; not circulating depressing feelings and thoughts leading to harming oneself.
Too many people are eating food unfit for a healthy happy life. And proof is that the hospitals and doctor offices are filled with them and 80% of Americans take prescription drugs. Drug use of any kind has gone off the charts, helping too many to get sick and to stay sick and while others are wealthy…but not necessarily healthy.
Too many people are walking around with the combination of being either fat, sluggish, obese, lazy, tired, depressed, with an ongoing accumulation of unseen heart and vascular disease, as well as cancers and growing tumors in their bodies, heading towards Alzheimer’s, much of which is both an accumulation over decades of a lack of proper nutrition as well as a dangerous mixture of subtle but toxic daily cocktails of modern chemicals which are an experiment on the general public who are by lack of proper education are ignorant and uneducated about the side effects of the toxic chemicals and petrochemicals allowed to be in and even outrageously allowed to be called food. “Would you like some food with your chemicals…?”.
There is also another little known factor wherein our brain’s neurological interconnections at billions if not trillions per second, are not acting in an optimal, way, and this optimal healthy way is required to be fed by nutritious food and is also dependent on the dynamic structural integrity of that which houses and protects the brain and nervous system. So few have education and training in the neurological aspects of our bodies, our lives, and our happiness.
While the chemical and petrochemical industry is ever ongoing looking to put together new chemicals recipes, called medicines, in hopes of making a better pill for every mental ill, so far their cookbook is not effective.
Yet what literally stares every one of us in the face every day at every meal is food, nutritious for some…and deprived food for others.
It would seem a step in the right direction would be the “policing” of our food and restricting the input into our foods of non nutritious toxic chemicals, petrochemicals, sugars, artificial flavors, colors, preservatives, and processing that reduces nutrition, as well as the actual poisons used in agriculture and food preparation.
Each person can be a part of nutrient protection and promotion for themself and their family and children by READING THE LABELS on every food they buy; and leaving behind on the shelves those foods unfit for optimal health, so that the store and food industry owners in order to stay in business will restock their shelves instead with FOOD FIT FOR HEALTH.
The choice is literally in each person’s hands at every choice one makes as they take food from shelf to shopping cart.
Labels are meant to be read…not ignored. Reading food labels and knowing what they entail can be a good start on the road to better optimal Health, Happiness, and Longevity.
Obviously unhealthy people are suffering in different ways. Even about 2500 years ago, Siddhartha Gautama, who was and is known as Buddha, and he and others today taught and teach what is known still to today as Buddhism, entailing the health concept of Happiness over Suffering.
Health and Happiness share much.
Sickness and suffering share too much.
Going shopping…?…READ THE LABELS. IF IT DOES NOT SOUND LIKE FOOD, IT PROBABLY IS NOT…so Caveat Emptor…Buyer Beware…!