Aloha! Here's an update on Area 12 bells on loan in Hawaii.

Two years ago, a dream turned into a reality with the help of some special people. I commented that I'd like to start a children's community handbell ensemble. Within a couple of weeks, the right people heard about this and four months later, we had a group of seven children from grades 2-5. That group has now grown to ten kids!

Over the summer, we had a group of twenty high school kids ringing for an eight week community service project from the YMCA.

In November, Central Middle School contacted us and asked for handbells to be a part of a special after-school program. So, in December, we had the younger kids do a demonstration to show the middle school kids how to play. At the end of the session, they asked us to come back the following week - and 14 kids showed up to ring! We arranged to set up a program when they returned to school in January.

Many have asked, "How did you do this?" 

Well, Harris UMC is in a low-income area of Honolulu and so many of the children don't have the opportunity to have this kind of experience. Central Middle School alone has 30 homeless kids! The former Choir Director and Associate Pastor of Harris UMC are the backbone of our project. They started with contacting and building relationships with the elementary and middle schools in the area. They took the time to get to know the principals and vice principals of the schools and then together made plans such as when and where and how to keep the church and state separate.

We set up a demonstration with Kauluwela Elementary School (which is three blocks from the church) and got three interested kids. We offered to have adult volunteers walk the kids to the church from the school, but the school had some teen volunteers do it for us. They were never on time and they came only sporadically and then not at all. We had a total of eight kids with them but soon after had only seven. This was not working the way we had hoped but we never gave up. 

Meanwhile, the connections and relationships kept growing. We worked on partnering with the YMCA which is one block from the church. We took a small group of adults to demonstrate there and the kids were really excited and ready to go, but the teen director at the YMCA was not inspired. We still kept working on the relationship with them in hopes of getting this going, and eventually had the 20 high school youth over the summer - but it was not without some bumps along the way!

Then came the call from Central Middle School. We are looking at getting 14-24 kids from the middle school!

It is our relationship building that has put us in this place of being directly in the community. We are fortunate that the church has a foundation set up specifically for the arts in the community, so they are funding music, gloves, folders and salary. We also have three handbell volunteers that are always there to help out. I love what we are doing! Working with the kids, it's so much fun to see their excitement for this instrument. I will keep doing it and I would probably keep doing it even if I weren't getting paid!