#replove

By: Anne Kim, APIASF/GMS Scholar

I love my natural hair.

I love my hole-y smile.

I love my mission and vision in life - to normalize equity / equality.

I love my ability to fear.

I love my developed ability to recognize fear and find a place of love to reframe and overcome it. Most of the time.

I love my struggle with cultural expectations of parents.

I love my standards and consistent follow through.

I love my failure to find balance on some days and self-castigation that requires kindness from self to self.

This February, join us as we #repLove. See the prompts below and submit a response telling us what you love!

February 6/ love yourself Love begins in one place – you. It’s only when you love yourself that you are able to fully love others. Loving yourself is about learning to accept both your best qualities, as well as your faults. What qualities do you love about yourself?

February 9/ love what you do Being passionate can drive happiness and success. Do you enjoy giving back to the community? Do you love to learn? Do you play a sport or instrument, or have a quirky hobby no one would be able to guess? What are you truly passionate about?

February 14/ love your community At APIASF, we love to celebrate our community! What does your community do to show their love and support for you? And, in return – in the spirit of Valentine’s Day – if you could give your community a valentine, what would it say?

February 16/ love your family & friends For many, family members and friends are our immediate support group. They are there to celebrate our greatest achievements and they are there to pull us up when we feel most down. Family does not necessarily mean blood-relative. They can be friends and mentors who have guided you in your growth and development. What are your favorite memories of your family? What lessons have you learned from them? What is it that you appreciate most about them?

February 21/ love your methods Everybody is different. If you ask 100 people to do a task, you will probably get 100 different answers. It is important that you embrace what works for you. What have you learned about your personality and work style? How do you tackle projects and obstacles? What works best for you?

February 23/ love your history AANHPIs are composed of a very diverse group of people – including 48 ethnicities and more than 300 spoken languages! On top of that, every family and individual has a different path. What do you love about your history and how has it shaped you as a person?

By: Rebekah Loving, APIASF Scholar

Raindrops formed an opaque mosaic on my eyeglasses as I ran through the sheets of sweet, acidic Hamakua rain to my house, sitting on a slope of Maunakea. One step in front of me was all I could see, but, fortunately, my eyes were not my only vision. In my community, there were always many eyes watching over me. Despite my community being as far removed from homogeneous as honey is distant from poi, the bland, slightly sour ground taro root that was a staple of the ancient Hawaiians’ diet and is still widely eaten, we looked after one another, like families in a siege bound together through adversity. I am Rebekah Loving, recipient of the AANAPISI-APIASF scholarship in the Spring of 2016 and a rising sophomore at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. As a young woman of Native Hawaiian and Japanese descent with a multitude of other heritages, including African American, Puerto Rican, and Swedish, to name just a few, I’ve never per se fit into an ethnic community. I’m an oddball, but my community didn’t care.

When I began attending the University, I had two main goals in mind. One: I must take every opportunity to improve myself both intellectually and as a person. Two: I must be an encouragement to those less blessed than me through tutoring, mentoring, encouraging, and inspiring, but most importantly through loving. With these objectives in mind, I began to actively engage with my fellow students, which made me realize that I desired to build a community, not based on ethnicity or academic excellence, but founded on giving care and support. I wanted to create a community, as my family had in the neighbourhood I grew up in–one that managed to overlook differences and create an environment for growth and collaboration. My first goal has been surprisingly successful considering this year’s outcomes. I have collaborated on a paper published in the European Journal of Physics and will be participating in the Summer Program in Biostatistics and Computational Biology in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). My second goal is much more difficult to quantify success in, but examination showed me that the community is maturing.

By: Charity Phillip, APIASF Scholar

“No matter where you end up in life; never forget where you came from.”

By: Keala Campbell, APIASF Scholar

Aloha mai kakou!

My name is Keala Campbell, I am a recipient of the APIASF/Walmart Foundation AANAPISI Scholarship for the 2015-2016 school year. I currently attend the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, majoring in Kinesiology, Health Promotion. I am back in school 15 years after graduating from High School, and am a proud wife and mother.

By: Jean Abac, APIASF Scholar

Celebrating the accomplishment from the recent sixteen weeks brought a newer light to the upcoming adventures ahead. I had no idea how challenging nursing school could possibly be until I completed this past semester’s requirements ending at 10:59 AM after hitting the “Submit” button for our electronic Final Exam this morning.

I will never forget how one of my professors always told my classmates and I, “nursing school is supposed to be hard, you’re dealing with people’s lives.”

By: Anonymous

Being different was not an easy concept for me to grasp upon recalling my memories of high school and early adulthood. Whether it’s the color of my clothing; the way I parted my hair; the way I walked; the way I spoke tinged with an accent of mother-tongue’s dialect; the way I ate with a fork and a spoon simultaneously during nutrition and lunch; my separation from the word “cool” since I only knew it used for the temperature; or the way certain words spoken to me seem to just fly over my head as I feared the truth of my foreign ears not understanding what classmates just said; being different at the time felt like a disconnect, a dead end, a death of the possibility of being a part of something greater and larger than myself.

Emigrating from the Philippines at fifteen years old, I was horrified with the stigma I was bestowed upon in high school labeled with a capital F-O-B; FOB, pronounced /fɑːb/; or fresh off the boat. I despised this term. I felt so ashamed carrying it with me every day, day in and day out. From the moment I leave the doorsteps of our home, to my daily walks to the bus stop, to my bus rides filled with the reminder of how I am different as I saw everyone carrying other things with them (I was born here, I am an American citizen, I am part of a community, I am an individual thinking freely on my own), and up to my first seatings in first period synchronized to the bell ringing cringing my stomach, I felt burdened by this dilemma of being different as a resident of my new home country.

Fast-forward nine years later, after going through a great deal of assimilation and learning, I now find myself so grateful for being different. Knowing two languages is better than one. I am no longer limited to my choice of utensils—chopsticks, knives and forks, handle-less miso soup bowls, forks alone, spoons alone, hands—what a variety! Mother-tongue’s accent can be hidden or manifest—now it is a matter of “to speak or not to speak” with it. Saying “cool” has never been so liberating whether pertaining to the weather or trying to be nonchalant. And whether I catch what the speaker just said or not, I acquainted myself and became friends with honesty as I can now communicate: “I’m sorry. I did not quite get that. May I ask for you to repeat what you just said?” All the time I spent mourning a hypothetical death from feeling disconnected was remedied by simply learning that adaptation is all about learning. Hard work was also necessary in knowing the various tools (such as language) that one may use in being her own person in a new environment.