Lanai’s lucky this woman finds her joy giving kokua

People call Soledad Obado “Auntie So-ling” or “Mama Sue” whether they’re related to her or not.

Obado has been auntie or mama to so many people on Lanai, caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, looking after children. “Oh yeah. I raise anybody’s children,” she says.

At 91 she hasn’t let bad knees slow her down much. She still takes care of people. Before flying to Honolulu to have Thanksgiving with grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, she made sure the needy families on Lanai had their holiday meal first. Obado was one of the founders of the Lanai Food Pantry in the 1970s and has run the operation as a volunteer ever since.

“There were two nuns that came to our church back then,” she says. “They were talking about what was going to happen in our future, how we had to be ready to help people as the community got older. Nobody wanted to handle it, so I said, ‘I’ll take a try.’”

Ever since then Obado has collected and distributed donated food to serve families — mostly seniors — who rely on the Lanai Food Pantry at Sacred Hearts Church to get by. This year her eldest granddaughter, Dolleen Obado Keola, went from Oahu to Lanai to help with the pre-Thanksgiving work.

“I do whatever she tells me to do — carry boxes, organize the shelves,” Keola says. Obado also checks the expiration date on each item of food and checks every bag of rice for bugs.

Soledad “Sue” Gattock Obado grew up on Lanai, the child of a Spanish-Filipino father who came from the Philippines and a Hawaiian-Chinese mother. When she was old enough, she would go to Maui to take care of her maternal grandmother, Annie Yorkman, who lived in Waiehu. Yorkman was pure Hawaiian, and from her Obado learned the Hawaiian language and values.

Obado was married at 16, had her first of six children at 17 and raised her younger siblings after her mother died.

Though caring for a house full of children, Obado always worked outside the home. She worked in the pineapple fields, making friends of different races and learning how to cook other people’s specialty foods. She worked at Lanai’s tiny 13-bed hospital for many years, doing whatever needed to be done, including cooking for the patients and driving the ambulance. Later, when her children were older, she went through a nurses training program at Maui Memorial, commuting from Lanai every day by ferry. In retirement she kept busy by driving people to their medical appointments.

Keola, who lives in Pearl City, talks of cherished childhood summers spent on Lanai in the 1970s. All nine of the Obado grandkids would stay at Grandma Sue’s house.

“Grandpa would go to the dump and put bikes together for all of us,” Keola says as Obado nods, remembering. “We could ride all over and play all day as long as we were home at 5 o’clock.”

Keola remembers her grandmother working 12-hour shifts overnight at the hospital but still cooking three meals a day for the grandchildren.

“I think of that now and wonder, how did she have the energy to work a 12-hour shift?”

Obado wears a pendant on a chain around her neck. She got it in Rome in 2009 when she went with her church group on a pilgrimage. The pendant bears an image of the Virgin Mary. On another church trip the following year, Obado saw a statue of Virgin Mary in a marketplace and was inspired to buy it for her church on Lanai. There had long been an empty place in the front of the church that would be just right for the statue, and, she explained, “Something about the statue just told me, ‘I belong to you.’”

But the statue was large — about 4 feet tall — and heavy. There was much more sightseeing left to do on the trip. Taking the statue home would be difficult. Obado was undaunted.

“I got the priest to carry it for me,” she says. “We visited all different areas in the Philippines, from north to south, and the statue came with us. The bus driver would tie her to the seat, and we would go.”

When Obado got the statue to Lanai, one of her sons decided that it deserved a great display at the little church. “She stayed in my house while we built the grotto,” Obado says. The statue now has a place in the front of Sacred Hearts church in Lanai, where it welcomes anyone who needs food, comfort or encouragement — much as Mama Sue has done for many years.

Between now and Christmas, Obado will be busy crocheting booties for patients at Lanai Community Hospital. “Come December, Lanai gets cold,” she says, and Mama Sue wants to make sure all her children are warm.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.