Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 28, Number 5, 1 May 2011 — Stender recalls hānai childhood [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Stender recalls hānai

childhood

HA Trustee ī \ Oswald Stender I |is well known % M for being an advocate for foster children. His passion stems from personal experienee. When he was 2 - too young to remember - his mother died, and his grandparents took him and two sisters in as their Ihānai children. Growing up in Hau'ula was the good life, he recalls. "As my sister says, 'We were poor but we never knew we were poor until someone told us.' " When their grandfather died suddenly eight years later, the life Stender knew best - of subsistence fishing, hunting, raising ehieken and pigs and tending to the lo'i - disappeared. "That's when things went awry," Stender |recalls. "Not having my grandfather anymore. Not having a support system." I"My father eame to get me. I had no idea who he was. I never saw him before. He took me from that enviromnent to a strange plaee that was his house (in Honolulu). He already had a family, so I was the outsider living with them," he recalls. "When I deal with foster kids in that age range, I ean understand their being unhappy," says Stender, who as a youth would escape and run away to his brother's house so often that he would eventually be passed on into another brother's care. When that didn't work, he became his sister's charge. "My brother

was a good guy, but he had his own family, so I was the third wheel," Stender says. After awhile, he says, "You just get the sense of not being wanted." For Stender, stability eame when he was a boarder at Kamehameha Schools in the eighth grade. "I found a plaee for myself," he says. "I had a bed to sleep in. I had my own room. I had made friends, of course, and had a teacher who mentored me. When I got into Kamehameha Schools, that was home. That was a plaee where we were all the same. As boarders, we were all there without parents." Stender would go on to college under the G.I. Bill, after noticing that those in charge at Hawaiian Electric Co., where he worked a steady job that paid the rent, were the ones who went to college. His college degree opened doors for him, he says, and his advice to youth in foster care who may be feeling lost and alone is to get an education: trade school, community college, university, whichever fits your needs. "Going to work without developing any skills is not a good idea because you'll always be in a rut," says Stender, whose career path has included Bishop Estate Trustee, Iames Campbell Estate CEO and Senior Adviser, and Director for Hawaiian Electric Industries, the parent company to HECO, where he worked his first job after Kamehameha. "If I ean do it, you ean too." — Lisa Asato I