KEKAHA — The Koa Puna Motorcycle Club gave Christmas presents to hundreds of kids on Saturday afternoon.
“We do fundraisers all year for this event,” said John Copeland, president of Koa Puna. “It took a lot of work to get it done.”
He stood in the park behind the Kekaha Neighborhood Center, surrounded by keiki from preschool to middle school age. They played on a giant inflatable water slide and ran circles around their mothers, who tried to make sure they saved at least one present to open on Christmas.
Others gathered under a tent around a man with a long beard in a leather vest and a Santa hat, who was still handing out gift-wrapped boxes an hour after the event began. Under the shade of a nearby tree, babies crawled on the ground over scraps of wrapping paper around the ankles of bikers in leather boots.
“You should have seen it when the kids were up there, grabbing their gifts. It was nuts,” he said. “You cannot leave the Westside out.”
The guys in Koa Puna worked all year to raise money for presents for the kids of Kekaha. Then they bought gifts according to age range and wrapped them. All of them. This year there were nearly 900.
Nylana Smith, 8, unwrapped hers. She got a secret diary set with a key and a lock on it.
“Oooh! I want that!” said her friend, Ariana, 7. “I really want that!”
Keziah, 5, got an RC car that can drive even if it gets flipped upside down. His little brother Judah had orange Kool-Aid all around his mouth. They were there with their mother, Stephanie Kua, who had fun just watching all the keiki get their presents.
“It was crazy,” she said. “The kids loved it.”
Ray Lock, Koa Puna’s secretary — you can tell he’s the secretary because it says so in capital letters on a leather patch on his vest — said the motorcycle club started putting together the gift giveaway three years ago after seeing the way other toy drives normally neglected the far west part of the island.
“We found that all the gifts were going to the North Shore,” he said.
His friend, Rocky Ferguson, stood nearby.
“The Westside kids get nothing. I’ve known that for years,” said Ferguson, a Koa Puna member for over three decades before he “retired” himself. “Everybody seems to forget about the Westside. Since when? Forever?”
“Since dirt was brown,” Lock said.
Lock said the motorcycle club raised funds this year doing everything from making and selling smoke meat to running security for a movie company that was shooting on the island.
“It’s quite a big undertaking, but as you can see …” he said, smiling to himself as he tried to find the right words. “You cannot replace what you see on these kids’ faces.”
Anyone who wants to help with raise money for next year can call Ray Lock at his phone number: (530) 386-0608.
