Burnt muffins, pushups, and neighbourhood watch

After a short two week break back in Australia, the storey of Mr Keeffe continues back in the heart of Wahiawa Hawaii. For those who have never been to the beautiful town of Wahiawa I will describe it a little for you. Wahiawa is a small town in the middle of Hawaii on the way to the north shore notoriously known for its bad fashion sense and lack of ethics. Most tourists never stop there, they just drive on through. In fact some people were on a holiday at Wikiki and they were coming to visit STN, but the hotel manager did everything they could to convince this young couple not come Wahiawa. Would sort of be like someone on holidays going to Nambour. As many of you know I'm currently involved with STN and I can tell even in the one year I've been away, that the whole town is improving as violence, drugs and general dodginess decreases.

As you all guessed because of my exceptional cooking skills, my new role at STN is hospitality and campus life. One of my first tasks was to bake a fika (swedish morning tea) for the staff meeting. So the first photo is of me scrapping a burnt muffin from the pan, and the second photo you'll see the muffin tops on top of the muffins. This was because the bottoms got burnt beyond recovery. So the good news is I get to encourage a campus of about 60 staff and students, make sure everyone is doing alright, and organise a man night. The bad part is that until my cooking skills get better everyone's gonna have to pretend like they enjoy burnt muffins. Some of my friends are quite old fashioned and seem to think that its funny that a male like me is doing laundry and baking. However twice a week my masculinity draws strength when I help repair and organise an old storage house. Its just nice to hit things with a hammer sometimes.

After getting back into the swing of things, I'm absolutely stoked to be here. People's lives are getting changed everyday. Literally. I love that on a Saturday night at Surfer's Church we share a meal with the community and you get all sorts of people coming. Just this last Saturday night a few of us who are doing staff training baked some brownies and stuff to raise money for our upcoming trip to Kauai (and then I went and did some pushups). Our goal was $200, and at the end of the night all the notes and coins were counted and it came to $200 exactly (down to the last penny). The funny thing is we only had about $90 worth of brownies to sell. I'm pretty sure God hears prayers.

In my spare time we've been surfing quite a bit. We went surfing the other day at rockies and these guys came back from just checking the surf, like they parked and then walked down the alley to check the waves for 5 mins, but when they came back we were in their parking spot. I'm guessing someone flogged the truck (ute) while they were doing a surf check. Spew, they could even go surfing cause their boards were in the truck! The ironic thing was that it was parked below a neighbour hood watch sign. I'm just wondering what neighbours were watching for? Possibly an unlocked vehicle.