As I spoon a heaping mound of sugar into my cup of tea one morning, I realize how if not for this sweet, white crystals of pleasure and the resulting concoction, I would be a wicked witch to be reckoned with....I know, you may identify with this.
I also realize the incredible power sugar held sway over my tiny island kingdom of Hawaii back in the 1800's. It was to this sweet decadence that my great-great-great grandfather George Charman made his fortune. George sailed on a whaling ship from England in 1836. A year later, the ship was in the Pacific Ocean, well north of the Hawaiian Islands when the cook went mad, set fire to the ship and cut his throat. After the crew threw his body overboard, they spent the next 23 days stranded in the middle of the Pacific with blaring hope. The crew perished from the searing heat and with no food and water in the middle of shark infested waters George was the only one left alive. He was rescued from a passing American ship and taken to the nearest island of Kauai.
Later, in keeping with the requirements of the Kingdom of Hawaii, he married a royal Hawaiian chiefess named Kamano. Half of the island of Kauai was given to him as a result of this marriage. George went to work. He started the first sugar plantation in Hawaii, engineered intricate irrigation channels that fed water to the sugar crops, built bridges and roads that linked up villages together making the island one undivided community, and managed labor force to cut wood in the high mountain cliffs for homes and government buildings. He also built the first horse drawn carriage modeled after the chaise carriage he bought from the Bishop of Tasmania when he visited Australia. For the first time in history the indigenous islanders marveled at the sight of the carriage and dubbed it the 'Charman Carriage'.
As I stroll through the College of Mechanical Engineering here at U.T. with my tea with sugar in hand aspiring to the bright future ahead of me completing my degree in Mechanical Engineering, Thermodynamics track, I can embrace a better appreciation of life. Life is complex and fragile. When life seems difficult, I will call within the deepest part of my gut the moral strength and intelligence I have to endure and preservere.
If I am given the opportunity to complete my engineering degree I will take it. Like my grandfather did 100 years ago, I will use my intelligence and shear hard work to make my mark. I will be a vessel, a ship that accumulates knowledge and apply them to solve real world problems so that I too, can help to build bridges and roads- linking villages, communities, building the world as we know it. I am sure, it is in my blood.
