Once a month, when time permits, Kurt Leong, a North Shore fireman, dives into the water at Black Pot in Hanalei Bay to help physically challenged Kaua‘i residents do something he can’t live without: Get in the water. Born and
Once a month, when time permits, Kurt Leong, a North Shore fireman, dives into the water at Black Pot in Hanalei Bay to help physically challenged Kaua‘i residents do something he can’t live without: Get in the water.
Born and raised in Kailua, O‘ahu, Leong has always been in or around the water. Like most island residents, he grew up surfing, and it is a lifestyle he maintains to this day.
A combination of this passion for surfing and the start of a new phase in his life four years ago sparked Leong’s interest in giving back. In 2007, after working as a flight attendant for 20 years, Leong, 52, retired from Aloha Airlines. And while he is still a fireman on Kaua‘i, working as a captain at the Hanalei Fire Station, Leong found himself with more time on his hands than he knew what to do with.
“I had a lot of time off,” Leong, a Kapahi resident, said. “I was surfing every day. I thought (starting a beach day) was a great idea.”
Working with the broad idea of giving back in mind, and not much more, Leong flew to O‘ahu in 2007 to participate in a training session put on by AccessSurf, an O‘ahu-based organization dedicated to getting disabled people, who can’t on their own, back into the water. But translating what he learned on O‘ahu into an organization on Kaua‘i wasn’t so easy.
“The more questions I had, the more difficult it got,” Leong said. “I had to remember how they organized it with everything involved: the doctors, the therapists, how to keep it safe. I didn’t know where to start, so I hesitated for about a year and a half.”
After sitting on the idea of bringing a beach day to Kaua‘i for a while, Leong was contacted by one of the instructors at AccessSurf, who had been receiving interest from another Kaua‘i resident, Suzie Woolway. It was the joining of Leong and Woolway that helped translate the idea of a beach day for Kaua‘i’s physically challenged into a large organization of volunteers and participants that continues to grow by the month.
Woolway, who says she and Leong did most of their communicating over e-mail initially, said the hardest part was setting up the first beach day.
“Kurt was the water safety guy and I could provide the participants,” said Woolway, who runs a physical therapy clinic with her husband. “At that point, I just told Kurt to pick a date for the initial beach day.”
The rest, due to overwhelming support from locals, has come with ease. What started as a gathering of a few volunteers, Leong’s pop-up beach tent and a water cooler in August 2009 is now a monthly gathering of more than 100 volunteers and participants, with four beach tents, 14 surfboards, live music and food.
The official non-profit organization, Kaua‘i Ocean Recreation Experience, more commonly known as KORE, is run completely on donations from local businesses and residents, who have provided surfboards, life jackets, time and money to the growth of the group.
“We have grown so fast and it has been so great because of the community out here giving us donations,” Leong said. “Bruce Ishino has shaped us one large balsa board and is shaping another right now. The more I tell people what we’re doing, the more anxious they are to help us out.”
Leong is quick to stress simplicity as the central idea of KORE’s philosophy. Instead of making things too technical, the group, with help from a wide variety of volunteers, has made it an impossibly easy day for both participants and volunteers to enjoy.
“It’s a family thing. We want to teach them about the ocean and surfing,” Leong said of his low key, Hawaiian-style approach to volunteering. “Nobody does anything they’re uncomfortable with. Everybody comes and goes having the time of their lives, volunteers and all.”
KORE has grown large enough to feed the entire beach. But, more importantly, they’ve become an outlet where those who love the water but, can’t easily get in it, can enjoy a ride on a surfboard unaffected by their physical challenges.
Doris Foster of Lihu‘e met Leong and the KORE team three months ago. When she stepped into Hanalei Bay with a volunteer at her side in July, it was the first time she touched the ocean since a stroke weakened her left side 15 years ago.
“In my youth, I was a surfer, but I have been terrified of the water since my stroke,” Foster said. “But Kurt and his team are so helpful and make you feel so comfortable. It’s hard to believe that a community effort comes together and works so beautifully.”
In the week directly proceeding each beach day, Leong looks at his busy schedule as a fire fighter and selects a date to start planning the next month’s outing. While doing so, he takes to e-mail, sending a note to volunteers and participants, expressing KORE’s gratitude for their help and participation. But Leong doesn’t sign his name at the bottom because it’s not about him.
“It’s about our participants having a blast, but we’re having even more of a blast being able to give back through surfing,” Leong said. “Nobody ever realizes how much we take out of it because unless you have been in that position, it’s really hard to describe.”
