Students across Hawaii are celebrating the life and legacy of famed Hawaiian lifeguard and big wave surfer Eddie Aikau this fall with their entries in the Eddie Aikau Foundation’s 2020 Eddie Would Go Essay Contest.
First-place winners in six categories received cash prizes of $500. There was one each in four grade levels — grades seven through 10 — for essays written in English. A fifth $500 cash prize went to the first-place essay written in Hawaiian by a seventh or eighth grader, and a sixth for essays written in Hawaiian by students in grades nine and 10. This year’s subject was Aikau’s empathy and compassion (aloha and menemene) toward strangers and people from other cultures, and how the writer demonstrates or intends to demonstrate those qualities in their own life.
“Eddie has been gone since 1978. His name is still out there, his name gets brought up, but the kids these days don’t really know him,” Aikau Foundation secretary Linda Ipsen said Thursday. “When the students really get to know who Eddie was beyond the surfing, it inspires them.”
Working as lifeguard for the city, Aikau had saved more than 500 people when he joined the crew of the Hokulea in 1978. The canoe capsized south of Molokai, and he went off on his surfboard to get help. No one could have known that a Coast Guard cutter would find the capsized canoe in time to save it and rescue the crew. Aikau was never seen again.
The phrase “Eddie Would Go” — with its nuances of fearlessness and the willingness to risk one’s life for others — became an epitaph that continues to inspire Hawaii.
Ipsen said the essay contest gives students the opportunity to see Aikau as a more than the guy who “would go.”
“Kids come away (from the contest) inspired by all the things he did on the outside of surfing. There are so many other things that he did, that he accomplished in his 32 years,” she said.
2020 Eddie Would Go Essay Contest first-place winners
English
>> Jessiah Walker, seventh grade, Kailua Intermediate School, “Live Like Eddie”
>> Catherine Hulugalle, eighth grade, Hawaii Prepatory Academy, “We are One in the Universe”
>> Amara Martin, ninth grade, Kamehameha Schools-Kapalama, “The Hawaiian Hero”
>> Lily Hannah Engle, 10th grade, Punahou School, “Guarding Aloha”
Hawaiian
>> Ho‘ailona Mahuka, seventh and eighth grades, Kula Kaiapuni o Pu‘ohala, “He Me‘e Hawai‘i ‘o Eddie Aikau”
>> Kauluwena Aiona, ninth and 10th grades, Ke Kula ‘O Nawahiokalani‘opu‘u, “Ola la Kakou”
