I’d like share to with you all a special thing that some friends and I in our Bible Study made. our friend Carol,  about 6 months ago, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Surgery and chemo are pau [finished], and now Carol’s  hair is growing back.

Before our friend had surgery and chemo, ke Akua [God] gave me  this idea… that it would be nō ka ‘oi [the best!] if some of us would make an “alohaghan” (afghan) for her. See, before all this, only two other wāhine [women] besides me knew how to knit or crochet in our little hui [group]. First one wahine, then a couple of weeks later, the rest of the wāhine, asked me if I would teach them to knit. The first friend I taught, taught another friend while I taught the rest… and we even named our knitting group “Hui Ulana Aloha”, (the group woven together in love). Our hui meets in one friend’s home, in the woods of Oregon, in a big log house.

I told my friends, “K’den, make one or more squares, 8″ square, anden [and then] when everyone is pau, then I’m going to put all the squares together for the alohaghan for Carol, so that while she’s going through all the chemo, she will know that she’s surrounded and covered by our aloha and our prayers for her recovery”.  So all the wāhine worked on their squares.

Well, they’re all beginning knitters, right? So the 8″ squares… well, they didn’t end up like that. Ho, the different sizes! So then, I had to find a way to put all the different sizes together. The main thing wasn’t how big or regular the squares were; what was important was the aloha that went into making them. I think the beginning knitters did a shaka [terrific] job with their squares.

So I started to put all the squares together; it took a lot of thinking outside the box to make all the squares fit into a cohesive afghan … and when I was all pau, we surprised Carol with her alohaghan.

Here’s Carol with her gift; she took it to her surgeries, to chemo, and laid it over herself during her recuperation. She told us later how much comfort it brought her.