As garden grows, gardeners learn to heal

One of the best feel-good news stories so far this week was the one about inmates at the Women’s Community Correctional Center in Kailua learning how to grow their own food.

The program, operated with help from the Lani-Kailua Outdoor Circle, has been helping the inmates not only feed themselves with wonderful fresh food but also building self-confidence and imparting new skills and thought patterns that go beyond just growing plants.

One of the inmates, 45-year-old Kimberly Pada, recalled the time she was handling a plant whose roots were all tangled together. Gently pulling them apart, she said, reminded her of her own tangled past, and how she has been slowly healing from her guilt, shame and painful experiences.

Of course, having a garden is a good idea in general, and Margaret Brezel, volunteer with The Outdoor Circle, said if anyone needs advice on how to get started, they can call the University of Hawaii’s Master Gardener Program, at 453-6055. If you want to buy some of the produce grown by the inmates, there will be a sale Saturday at Kailua Elementary School from 8 to 11 a.m. Proceeds go to the group’s "Learn to Grow" program.

Once again, a fight for Filipino veterans

Hawaii’s U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz has revived one of the most enduring traditions of Congress: seeking (in vain, so far) the passage of the Filipino Veterans Fairness Act.

Nearly every session of Congress for the past 20 years have seen the introduction of a similar bill, which proposes to extend full benefits to the surviving Filipino veterans who volunteered to fight with U.S. and allied troops in World War II.

The effort’s various hurdles included difficulties confirming claims with military records. Before his death, U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye focused instead on getting limited compensation grants to the veterans, a measure tacked on as a rider to the 2009 stimulus bill.

Now there are only an estimated 6,000 of the veterans still living, of the more than 200,000 volunteers. The Filipinos were the only national category denied benefits of the 66 countries fighting alongside the U.S. — a truly shameful omission.