Community members gather for cemetery ‘clean and restore’ project in Hawaii
By Eric Naktin
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PEARL CITY, Hawaii (KITV) — A major community led effort took place on Saturday to clean and restore Sunset Memorial Park in Pearl City.
Ciarra Paresca, Always Always Support Local event co-host, told Island News, “This cemetery has been abandoned and left behind for a really long time. We recently had a new owner that picked it up. Around that time they started working toward making the cemetery a better place.”
Open since the 1800s, Sunset Memorial Park is considered a historic, yet long neglected cemetery in Pearl City.
Kaneohe resident Mel Park said, “My parents are (buried) here, my in-laws. What’s most troubling is the vandalism—people taking stuff from the graves.”
Mika Cabinte with Always Always Support Local stated, “This property has been neglected for so long and we want to bring it back because one of the main concerns was the homeless people living in many of the tombs and the crypts.”
Volunteers, families and multiple local organizations gathered for a full-scale clean-up to honor kupuna that have been laid to rest and also help bring dignity back to the sacred ground.
Dana Sagum, Program Director with Goals Hawaii, told Island News, “A lot of the community, when they found out about this event were very supportive, and very excited about it. We have about 100 volunteers, maybe a little bit more that showed up today.”
Along with extensive debris, break-ins have caused ongoing issues in recent years. Veray stated, “The problem of breaking into the crypts, into the mausoleums and the cemeteries, they’re also taking brass plates off of headstones. This is happening at almost all the abandoned cemeteries. It’s an easy way for the homeless to acquire money and I don’t know who the recycler is that’s accepting this. It’s against the law.”
“I’m hoping to build a model for how to secure an abandoned cemetery,and also bring in the technology to be able to monitor when you have vandals coming in, immediately to be informed on your iPhone. Right now, we’ll be installing cameras that get hooked up to the cell phone network,” added Veray.
Meanwhile, cleanup efforts over the weekend showed solidarity, unity and healing for the community.
The plan is to have similar events at least once every six months.
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