Avis Kaona and her husband, LeRoy, could easily have balked that day the worker from Child Welfare Services called to ask whether they were willing to take formal custody of two adolescents they had been looking after on a purely aloha basis.
After all, the Kauai couple had raised five children of their own, had touched the lives of thousands more as public school teachers and had previously taken in another young man who had been in need of a good home and a sense of belonging. This was supposed to have been their time to relax and reflect on a life spent giving of themselves.
Instead, they decided to give just a little bit more.
“We talked about it,” Avis Kaona said, “and we decided, ‘Yeah, that would be OK.’”
Kaona well understood the moral obligation to care for children in need. When her father died in the Korean War and her mother relocated to the mainland, Kaona was left in the care of her grandparents and an assortment of loving aunties and uncles.
Growing up in Papakolea, Kaona spent her childhood immersed in church activities. After graduating from Kamehameha Schools, she attended the former Church College of Hawaii (now Brigham Young University-Hawaii), where she indulged her love of math and made the acquaintance of her future husband.
Avis and LeRoy married shortly after LeRoy returned from serving a Mormon mission. They settled on Kauai, started a family and eventually settled into a life as educators, Avis as a math teacher at Kapaa Middle School and LeRoy working with special-education students and at-risk youth at Kapaa High School.
At one point the couple — kids of their own already in tow — started inviting a boy from church to spend Sundays with them. The boy’s situation at home was volatile, and the Kaona home offered much-needed stability. Sundays became weekends and became entire weeks, and before long the boy was a permanent fixture at the house.
The pattern repeated itself soon after with another young man left adrift by an unstable home. The Kaonas looked after the boy for weeks at a time, even including him on family trips. In time the boy’s younger sister also joined the household.
When conditions in the children’s own home deteriorated to the point where they were in danger of being placed in foster care, the Kaonas stepped up and took custody of them for two years. They remained in close contact even after the kids were returned to their mother.
“We love them like we love our own children,” Avis Kaona said. “We feel our children were very fortunate, and we want to share our hearts with those who don’t have as much.”
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
