Drive a half-hour northeast of Honolulu, skirting the majestic Koolau mountain range, and you'll trade the hustle of a splashy tourist city for the backroads of rural Hawaii. Charman James Akina makes the trip every day, commuting to Waimanalo, a small town on the windward coast of Oahu. About seven years ago, he retired from his internal medicine practice in Honolulu to help start an adult-care health facility in Waimanalo. Akina, who grew up on the island, sees his volunteer work as a retirement gift, both to himself and to this largely native-Hawaiian community of about 800 families. "Being part Hawaiian myself, I wanted to see what could be done to improve things," he says.
In Honolulu, most of his patients were affluent and non-Hawaiian. In Waimanalo, "many of the people are at the lower end of the economic scale, so the kind of medicine I practice is more holistic. You take into account all the social problems they're encountering every day." Akina makes house calls and heads up programs to teach children about personal health and proper diet. He's a firm believer in medical outreach -- venturing into the community rather than waiting for people to come to him. "Even if you are a very good physician, many people don't take advantage of what's available to them," he says.
Akina's patients "really love him," says Mabel Spencer, one of the founders of the Waimanalo Health Center. "He's the only doctor I know who lets them call him at home," she told the Honolulu Advertiser.
The soft-spoken physician lives just outside Honolulu on the same street as his sister and two brothers ("so this is like Akina Lane," he jokes). Being surrounded in this way by his family and his past, he says, has helped him maintain his native character and values. "And now that I've gone back into a Hawaiian community to practice, it makes my relationships with people more natural."
But traditions are eroding, even in rural Waimanalo, he says. "When I went into the country, there was a kind of cultural shock for me, because native Hawaiians weren't living the way I grew up. I can relate especially with the older people, because I know how things seem to have changed. I can go back in time to when things were perhaps a bit more ideal, perhaps a bit more quiet."
-- Taylor Antrim, '96
