Hello everybody. Welcome to Drupal as a data warehouse, everybody into the data lake. Today we're going to share our experience with data reporting in Drupal. For those who don't recognize the name on this quote, Edward Tufty is an American statistician and is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics and Computer Science at Yale University. He's best known for his writings on information design and he's also a pioneer in the field of data visualization and we thought we'd share this quote because it seemed appropriate to the talk. So my name is Gail. This is a picture of me and my siblings in 1999 hanging out my dad's barn door during a very long family photo shoot on my parents 50th wedding anniversary. I'm the one in the maroon shirt down in your right hand corner. I'm the baby of the family. I decided that being the baby makes me one of those customers. The ones I'm talking about, always asking why or why not. Researching what Drupal can do and then pushing for product changes that suit my needs and probably don't suit anybody else's. Learning just enough along the way about Drupal, HTML and CSS to be a little bit dangerous and being pretty annoying about all of it and if you ask these guys when I'm out of earshot they'll probably say the same thing. I'm okay with having that reputation with my developers and I mostly think they're okay with me too because over the past five years we've established that I pretty much care about ethos CE which is my learning management system as much as DLC the developers do. We use our learning management system or LMS to pull together the various types of education we provide making it easier to track progress and outcomes and to report annually for accreditation compliance purposes. In the past we would spend weeks prepping reports to upload into our accrediting bodies reporting system. So having everything in one place and having a prebuilt report for that has just been life changing for us which sounds kind of dramatic but you have no idea how much work it was to pull all of that together manually. Part of our educational mandate is to prove in the form of written needs assessment that our educational content is of real value to our learners. So we've always relied very heavily on reporting of pre and post test outcomes, post activity surveys, feedback and reflection forms and so on. Needs assessment is really the backbone of why and how we create content in the first place. And being in the medical education world I can't leave out grants reconciliation. We have to prove to the people who provide educational money for some of our content that we've accomplished what we set out to do and we have to report from those activities and so that's a foundation of building an effective outcome submission for grantors. The old version of EthoCE was based on an educationally oriented platform really tied us to some very specific course formats and reporting capabilities and so when DLC told us we were going to upgrade to Drupal we were pretty excited because we saw some really fantastic formatting opportunities that we didn't have before. However, we were still pretty much seeing the same reporting capabilities we'd already seen. Still had to do a lot of manual work to create a complete picture of our educational content which included merging some reports sometimes up to three to get a complete picture and nearly always had to delete columns sometimes up to half of them depending on the report that weren't relevant to us but were relevant to other customers. We also had to create visualizations in the form of charts and graphs to present to our educational oversight committees because there's no way they would bother to even look at what you see up there, that dense packed page of data. So for us cookie cutter reporting really wasn't cutting it so while we're very similar to other things that other EthoCE customers use or do we don't necessarily do it exactly the same way or need exactly the same reporting so we did have some reports with custom fields on them which wasn't necessarily cheap for us because it was custom work and it really created extra work for the developers especially when there was a new deployment they had to remember to migrate that change across and even with custom fields we still weren't getting what we needed. So there is a group of EthoCE users that has a monthly conference call we talk about what we're doing, we share ideas, we complain because isn't that what users do is complain and we help one another find solutions based on how we're all using the product and in that call over and over again reporting would come up every time we talked about the problem we all agreed we should put in support tickets and ask for more or better or different reporting and DLC also formed an online community which is really nice people can post questions and help each other out there and the same questions were coming up there too the bottom line was we were all looking for a better way to show our outcomes because we all in one way or another have to show those to an accrediting body so to re-emphasize my organization's needs and the needs of others in similar organizations we're talking about professional medical education so we need to be sure we're meeting knowledge and practice gaps to stay relevant to our learners and our accredited status depends heavily on our ability to effectively report on all of our educational activities in our LMS so after several years of asking and begging and nagging and not just for me, from other users as well DLC started looking into how they could better meet our reporting needs so my name is Ezra Wolff and I serve as the product manager for EthoCE which means I'm responsible for keeping customers like Gail Happy and so this is made about age 7 and it's not just a picture of a little kid it's a kid with a profoundly bad haircut and it's an unfinished haircut if you look at the top of the hair there and so I wanted to put this here not only because it's funny and embarrassing but also because managing the product is kind of like a haircut we have a bad product, we have a problem, it's going to grow out we can groom it and improve it over time so before we go on I just want to talk about EthoCE a little bit because Gail mentioned it it's a Drupal-based learning management system for continuing education and at DLC which is a company that produces it we're about a staff of 12, we have three developers so we're a pretty small shop but we have nearly a million health care providers who've used our system to maintain continuing education so that means probably some of you in this room have gone to doctors or nurses or pharmacists who have gotten training for continuing education through EthoCE which is Drupal so right on for that so we're really proud of our contribution to improving patient outcomes and we're also proud to maintain a few modules as part of that so now you know about me and the product I want to describe the context for the problem that we're going to show how we solved what we found in our application as Gail said that most of the requirements are the same and that's because we have an external regulatory agency in our world and in fact several of them that kind of set the rules that we have to follow but reports are a bit different everybody uses these reports for internal uses as well so business uses and internal stakeholders and bosses and grants and they all want them in a different way and so as the number of customers we had on the product crew this just became an onslaught of requests and so the business problem and how it applies to Drupal is that it just doesn't scale very well and I don't mean traffic scaling I mean that each one of these reports is a manual work building a custom view that a customer has requested and we put all our views in code so there's that whole workflow as well or we'd have some customers that would ask for an entire dump of the database because they have data sciences on staff some of the bigger hospitals and things but then they'd also want detailed modeling diagrams of Drupal core and all the contributed modules and all the custom modules and then they wanted to know how it all worked which is just again we're staff of 12 and we talked about and we tried just handing off views to the users at first but it didn't really work because we're not a training organization that's a complicated interface to learn we didn't want to provide support for it and the few times that we did this early on some customers created non-performative reports that basically crashed their sites by locking up MySQL so we learned pretty quickly that views is not a customer friendly tool or it's not a customer facing tool unless you have very technical customers and you trust them so we ended up building a lot of custom views and it keeps us busy but it turns out that that's not really a good thing for our organization because the developers are developers they're not site builders they want to write code and do challenging stuff instead of just clicking around and then each one of these views becomes another report that we have to maintain and when the schema changes we have to update them and change them so we ended up with just dozens and dozens of custom views on top of our normal views and there's really just not enough revenue from that because it became an opportunity cost for our business instead of building a product that worked better for everybody we were spending all our time building these custom views so with this problem then I turn to Devin who's our system architect and ask him to fix it so my name is Devin I'm a systems architect I unfortunately started with PHP 4 it's been a long time since then and I forgive myself for that as we said I needed an intro slide so I assumed it's a business requirement that I needed to fulfill so growing up my family had Dux's pets because everybody except me was somehow allergic to everything so no cats, no dogs just Dux moving on to the problem I thought hey this is definitely a big data question so I just turn on all these cloud services it all connects it's an obvious problem to solve so I split this up into three different phases the first one being big data the second one we'll figure that out and then the third one we're going to profit and that's it don't be the underpants gnome have a plan for what your data is going to do and so let's talk about the real plan our previous solutions as mentioned for custom reporting involved a huge suite of modules views, home box charts, high charts views, data exports about 10 other views related to modules that we had to you know maintain and upgrade it worked and we're building lots of custom views and charts for every customer adding per customer fields and calculations every single time which took time away from really more important Drupal development that we wanted to do as I mentioned we didn't have the capacity to train administrators using the site who really are not interested in using the views cockpit building our own tool would have been a distraction from our core business we're not data scientists but the functionality we did need was charting, report saving and sharing scheduling, CSV, Excel PDF downloads, embedded charts and reports and also most importantly handling the unknown so the reports and calculations that we didn't know about but our customers would ask for in the future so we needed a tool that we could give to customers to report on their own data instead of us being the ones to do it so once we figured out that we needed a BI tool we had to find the right one this is really a much bigger task than I had anticipated because the BI vendors they don't know about serialized data in PHP they don't know about web form, EAV storage they don't know about continuing education they don't know about Drupal so if you're in this room and you're thinking about trying to find a BI tool chances are the vendor is not going to understand what you're doing so it's really up to you to find the vendor that's the best fit for your organization or your business and so if there's one take away that I would want to leave from you as a business person it's that you need to be a shortlist of vendors as soon as possible and just be brutal with your vetting because there are dozens and dozens of them out there and they all want to talk to you and then do the most vigilant and intense due diligence possible and so just a couple examples of things that happened to us we found out in due diligence that one vendor had showed us some really great web based interfaces for viewing reports and building reports required us to use a Windows application to do the developer side of the work and you know we're a linux shop so that was a big problem for us and then another one we asked about their API roadmap and they told us that they were working on a Python based SDK and that's where all their energy was going into which makes sense because Python is widely used in data science but again we're a PHP shop and we wanted a generic REST based API and then the next question was where are we going to get all this data and that wasn't even something that I was aware of I thought we would just find a BI tool and they would bring the data warehouse to us and many of them do but the problem with that was once you pick that one you're sort of locked in and it also affects you know the ability to use ETL tools which is Extract, Transform and Load and ETL tools aren't cheap either some of them charged by the database connection so with multiple databases we have about 65 right now and one of them wanted like $10,000 for every two or three connections and something like that so that was just way more than our budget allowed our business model of software is a service so we're not building these one-off projects for our customers and negotiating a budget we're basically charging the fixed fee every quarter to get the services they want so we couldn't really go back and charge additional pricing for this and we certainly couldn't add it as an add-on and that's where I step back in and say as I said before I work for a professional medical association we're a non-profit organization and while we're not poor we aren't rich either and getting our board of directors to sign on the dotted line and this is in caps in my script for even more LMS costs is tough in theory they really do get that if we have the tech we have to maintain and upgrade it but adding features especially ones they don't necessarily understand and don't sound all that important to them is really hard so we have to decide what we can justify and what we can't and paying to retrieve our own data is not something they would sign off on so with all that in mind we needed to pick our products and to do so we really needed to dive in to how we were going to pull this off so the first questions we had were could we point a tool at Drupal and have it report out of the box and did we even need a data warehouse to answer the question about why reporting on Drupal out of the box is not optimal we have to look at how the data is stored so refresher for some you're in your first SQL 101 class and you're reading through the first tutorial you're asked to make a table of people and who their employer is and for most assignments not really a real world example but this is probably how you would have structured that table a field for user ID, name, employer and it does work but certain bits of data are duplicated across rows so you have to update the records or do some sort of textual find and replace in order to update a company's name for all affected users so take a name change for example you've got to make three updates either manually in your system or with some query and it might not take very long but at scale hover when there's lots of creation and updates happening at the same time you end up with table or row locking and it could affect the performance of your site you also can run into data drift just in case a finer replace goes bad and we have to normalize the data so the process of normalizing reduces data redundancy and improves data integrity we eliminate columns with duplicate data by creating separate tables we identify the data with a key we move data that's not related to the primary key so for example the person's employer is not directly relevant to the person themselves which is why we didn't even put the employer ID relation column on the people table and designing normalized databases like this means that removing the employer functionality from a system require modifying the base people table and the same would go if you wanted to add new fields and functionality so Drupal itself does this along with many contributed modules the core tables are pretty static while the add-on functionality uses relation tables for data storage so if we look at example of how we can efficiently store a user, a full name some location information and an employer we start with the user table we apply the normalization techniques that we talked about and we end up with about seven tables necessary to store the data and we can see why Drupal suggests managing fields in data this way custom fields can be added to just about anything that uses the field API and Drupal allows us to expand upon the base tables without altering the structure it also allows us to update only one row in this table versus an unknown number of rows if the company name changed so that's the basic concept of normalization and why we do it even though we're not talking about code here I think that's kind of an example of not hacking core we're not trying to alter the definition of core tables but instead you're safely extending them so don't hack core and close the database create a new table use keys to add your own functionality it's good design we just talked about normalization and this talk is about denormalization and why we need it so let me introduce the next problem table structure we just looked at got pretty complicated really fast and it's going to be really hard to write queries against it or as I said tell a BI vendor how to write queries against it and doing 10 million entity loads to get a whole bunch of data is going to take so long no matter how optimized your site is and if you have to do this on a schedule it's unlikely you'd be able to get updated data to your customers in near real time so the structure although very good for a production database is not good when you need to pipe this data to an external system that isn't Drupal the complexities in this design would also have to be understood in the reporting tool and if your third party system or reporting tool is doing all the processing necessary you're then locked into whatever tool that is so to summarize our operational database which is Drupal optimized for fast writes and data integrity it holds data but the relation model is not informative and that means without assistance you likely won't be able to answer a question about the data like account or an average or something split by another value so our proposed reporting database is going to be optimized for fast reads it's going to hold more information the relational model is going to be simple to users and also machines so we needed a module that could work with our Drupal data and get it into a format that would be conducive for BI tools and very early on I wrote a bit of code just as a proof concept and then I googled to make sure that there wasn't anything else doing it and my sandbox was the first thing to show up so there was really nothing out there that could do this and I'll leave it up to anyone else to decipher what that means about there being nothing else to do this so the normalizer module pulls from Drupal's entity so you can get more information defined schema you can also pass it external tables and it will programmatically build denormalized tables or views for use in data warehousing so simple example we have a node of type chinchilla we provide denormalizer with the denormalized table name the entity type to denormalize primary key to use and the change key to use what this is going to do is create a new table in a new database which contains all of the nodes of type chinchilla we also pull in the vote table here which probably doesn't have to be denormalized but it would be included in the processing so the queries that are generated by this module look a little bit like this and if you've ever had SQL preview on in views it's very similar, lots of joins but instead of taking this and rendering it to the user as content we're dumping the raw data into a table for further processing so after configuring and running denormalizer the resulting tables in our new database are only going to contain this denormalized data so for example that involved a lot of joins it's now stored in a denormalized format with no joins so this makes it much faster and easier to relate to other data in a data warehouse you don't want to run the denormalization process on an entire data set all the time and so on subsequent runs it will only update or insert brand new and changed records so we define those keys back when we set up our hook info which currently there's no UI for that yet but that will come later denormalizer records the water level so on the next cron run it will be encouraged so this is really useful when you're working with data sets in the millions and doing a full table load is going to be detrimental to performance or would make your reporting not in real time if it takes too long so at this point we created a new database in production with denormalized tables based on Drupal's own knowledge and combined with our own knowledge about how our data is supposed to be structured and only the data that you want exposed is in the new database contains the new tables and the complicated structures like fields have been flattened so at this point if you wanted to you could point a tool at this database although it's not really the most ideal you'd probably want to read only replica to handle queries so it doesn't take your side down but let's say you don't want to have you want to have my SQL as your operating database but you want to use PostgreSQL or Athenae or BigQuery or some other system that's a reporting database and maybe you want to bring in other sorts of data that's not related to Drupal for example we might want SendGridData tracking message opens or bounces based off the user's email Google add data to see how effective ads were so we needed to plan to pull in this data and then expose it and then utilize it in other systems so for this we have to change our approach a little bit and introduce something that resembles a data lake it's an aggregation of multiple sources of data the technology used in building your data lake depends on what you want to process for us it's a lot of relational data for others and maybe document storage but simply put in the presence of a data lake streaming from a source to fill the lake and various users of the lake can come to examine, dive in or take samples so now that we're not using our operational database during that the normalization process we can do some alters based on your own needs and do some things that really should not be done in an operational database like MySQL 5.7 and PostgreSQL have array and JSON type fields that can store multiple values without having to create sub-tables we can un-nest them later in a reporting database we can store parents in a more reportable hierarchical way you can report more easily on trees of data in data warehousing we really don't care about enforcing referential integrity like our operating database would we just care about the data getting into the system so the normalizer will also give you the ability to transform data in the case of any other processes that might involve manual extraction some of those examples might be dates if you want to convert all your unix times to isotimes key to value translations for translating keys to user values and then everyone's favorite PHP serialized data so while data lakes and warehouses can be similar without getting too in-depth there's some simple ideas that make them different with the data lake you're retaining all the source data in one place because you don't know what you're going to use it for you discourage creating data silos which can hold back data from those who need it due to technical or other barriers that may also make the data stale so you might want to create a data swamp a warehouse is generally reserved for processed data with a specific purpose so you may want to create a data warehouse that contains user demographics and nothing else you might then have another data warehouse that has orders and products but not demographics you could have multiple systems being populated from the same lake so you want to get all this data in one place to crunch some data but how do we get it there how do we pull something from somewhere else and put it into this database mentioned before one of them being BLT or ETL or ELT but simply put it's extracting data from your source transforming it via some process and then loading it into a target and recently extracted data from your source load it into a target and then do transformations people mix them around now so we need to do this we need a system to extract the information from a variety of sources and put them in a one system so after evaluating a few proprietary and sometimes expensive ETL systems we decided to try this relatively new project called SINGER SINGER is the open source standard for writing scripts that move data which is exactly what we want to do so the SINGER ecosystem consists of TAPs and targets so you could have a MySQL TAP for an external database a TAP for Drupal's database and then a TAP for SINGER emails, Google ads there's a whole bunch of projects that support the SINGER specification that will pull data so let's say you want to pull in and have the most hits and then compare them to clicks that were tracked in SendGrid to see if the emails were the reason for the traffic each TAP and target is its mini application they communicate via a JSON specification so your TAPs and targets can really be written in any language so here's the high level overview the TAP will extract information from the source there's a catalog.json file which is generated with a Drush command using the SINGER Drush module and it contains information about the structure of the data that we want to replicate so the target takes in data from the TAP and then transforms it to what the target needs so it could be CSV, Google Sheets, PostgreSQL whatever the target then outputs the state that the TAP sent over and that marks the water level or the last replication point that we talked about and so the state is then passed back to the TAP on the next subsequent run and then the process continues at the last replication point so this is running constantly and constantly pulling data into the data lake so the theme of this presentation is making sense dives, water level, TAPs, streams, lakes yeah, okay so here's a high level overview how this all comes together we can use SINGER streams in additional ways too so we're continually populating a central repository with SINGER so we can pull in all our sources put them in the data lake and then we can decide where it has to go later SINGER already knows the data format because Drupal generated this SINGER catalog which described the structure and all the field types of the generalized tables and once you have that catalog file you can replicate this data anywhere anywhere that has a SINGER target the target doesn't know where the data is coming from it only sees it in the SINGER format to add another example here literally just an hour ago in another presentation based on AI we had a requirement to dump data into Amazon S3 so we could run AWS Macy on this giant set and type what we're already pulling in and send that over to S3 so our solution in the end Drupal is being used to denormalize data into another database on production combined with SINGER being used to pull in third-party data also in the same location as the Drupal database our production database is on AWS Aurora which is like a souped up MySQL if you don't know that also provides a read-only replica of the lake which includes all customer data all of our customer's data SINGER extracts and loads data from the only copy of MySQL to a post-rescuel data warehouse Looker was our selected business intelligence tool that's used to transform and build reports on data the customer modeling is generated from Drupal based on the customer's custom fields and configurations so we can provision custom dashboards based on their configured fields we have about 100 million rows being processed the majority of that data comes from Drupal courses quizzes and web form activity it's about 1.5 million quiz attempts, 1.5 million web form submissions and it's replicating data from about 35,000 web forms so while that technical work was happening in the background I had to go and interview our customers to understand the product requirements of how we were going to deliver all this data to them we mocked up dashboards we took them to our user group meeting we posted them in the online community we then did a proof of concept and beta tested it beta tested the training and we ended up delivering 18 new dashboards they're all directly embedded in Drupal so we have single sign-on authentication with the business intelligence engine when the user logs into Drupal they're automatically logged into the BI tool but the number of reports really isn't important here it's kind of meaningless because we also rolled out self-service reporting meaning that customers like Gale can generate as many reports as they want in whatever format they want in addition the integration here with the BI and Drupal became a strong competitive advantage for us over our competitors the sales team got really, really excited about this it definitely moved the needle for them and it eventually became one of the key competitor differentiators in terms of winning sales plus building reports is really fun if you've ever done this I'll just give an example which is when we first got our data into the BI tool I basically lost the entire weekend sitting in my living room just building report after report after report and we always had plenty of data but we didn't have great information about that data and so this gave us the ability to do data discovery and turn that data into information which is really, really valuable in understanding how our customers use the system and how the end user learners use the system but finally and this is my favorite part of this whole project is that the developers don't build custom reports at all anymore our support desk manager has become sort of deeply invested in this BI tool she loves it and she's able to build these reports now usually in minutes like if a customer wants something custom and we often don't even usually we don't charge them for it so something that used to take weeks in terms of the development cycle now takes minutes and it used to cost hundreds or just low thousands of dollars to build reports as we do for free so it's been a really great success story for us it was a ton of work on the development side and they were really patient with all of us on the customer side who were pushing and pushing and pushing for something better and I can't tell you how much the customers appreciate the work that these guys put in to give us a better reporting option and while there are still things that need to be worked out on the development and the user sides we still have, we had issues until about what three weeks ago with pulling SCORM data out of SCORM files and it's working on it and it's working well now so that's good we really appreciate the work they put in and it's been a huge leap forward for all of us now on those calls we don't have complaints about reporting which is nice too so they took the plunge and they convinced us to follow them and with really great success that's them on your left and the customers on the right by the way so now we're inviting you to join us in the data lake because the water is fine I'll post the slides online later but here's some resources, all the projects that we used some of these are just approaching maturity a lot of this stuff really isn't that stable yet but it's a work in progress check out Singer, check out the taps there's a nice blog about Singer and Looker which is specifically what we use to integrate you don't have to use Looker, you can use whatever you want join us for contribution opportunities tomorrow and thanks for coming fill out the survey too please, thanks sorry we had no time for questions


Hello my darling extraterrestrials, I am Kim, this is Dustmotson Velikor, and today we are talking about Furyborn by Clara Grand. This book is about two young women separated by a thousand years, running simultaneously down the razor's edge. Both of them have something to prove, both of them have something to hide. In this world there is a prophecy that says two queens will rise, one of light and one of blood, and they will protect the kingdom from the invading angels. Oh yes, I said angels. Riel is a highborn lady, best friend since childhood with crown prince and his betrothed. But Riel is strong, too strong, and she's been taught since childhood to fear the magic that is a part of herself, something that as she explores more, she finds to be beautiful and thrilling. In a world where magic is commonplace and everyone can control one of the seven elements, Riel can control all of them. She has been foretold. But to prove that she is the one referenced in the prophecy, she must complete seven trials, and if she fails, she will be executed. Fun, right? Eliana is a bounty hunter slash assassin, maybe? And it's unclear, but she is maybe a half step above street rat. Known as the dread of Riel, she tells herself she has no qualms doing the dirty work of the tyrannical immortal emperor, all the while furiously guarding her secret. She cannot be hurt. Her body heals almost instantly. Perfect for an assassin, right? But there have been rumors that women are disappearing without a trace, and Eliana has people she wants to protect. She's just starting her investigation when what is essentially the guild of assassins decides to recruit her via one impossible task. She's not really in a position to say no. This book is fast-paced and gut-wrenching, and I would really like the next one, please. Seriously, it's super nonlinear, like mainly because it involves bopping back and forth across millennia, but also because it starts at the end, which is also the beginning and also kind of the middle, like... I don't know how to talk about this without spoiling everything. Okay, we're gonna move on. Though I gotta say, Claire Legrand writes an incredible cliffhanger, like dozens of them. Like, oh my god, she is so good at these, because you get to the end of the chapter and it's like, but then you switch to the next chapter, which is in the alternate perspective, and you're picking up from that cliffhanger. So it's like, oh right, this was the thing I was panicking about like 45 minutes ago, except now, it's now, and oh god, she writes some really good cliffhangers. Seriously, it's a page-tarner. Okay, and because I have to get philosophical about literally everything, the moral quandary of Good versus Evil is not an easy dichotomy in this book. A lot of people don't choose. A lot of people are just trying to survive. Eliana is definitely choosing against her nature for very good reasons, and Rielle doesn't even realize that she is making a choice. And yes, there is a nice romantic plotline in here, but it gets complicated. But that's honestly not why I like kept falling in love with this book. My favorite character is Eliana's little brother Remy. He's maybe 12, and he is a total dreamer. He's passionate about the stories about the old world and their myths and how things worked and the politics of that time. And I like him better than the two main characters. Like, I love the two main characters. Rielle and Eliana are great. They're fantastic kick-ass women who are complex and are doing what they think is right, and they're pursuing complex solutions to complex problems. And that's fantastic. But Remy needs to be protected. I love him. I really enjoyed this book. The worldbuilding is complex and multi-layered and beautiful. Like, there's worldbuilding for Eliana's time, and then a millennia ago when it was Rielle's time, and then even further back when they're building the religion of this world. It's myths atop myths, and I just, ah, it's so rich and I love it. And it also leaves you with questions. Like, how did we get to this point? Because, you know, consequences. What did you think about this book? Have you read it? Have you not read it? Are you watching this review so you can get out of reading it? I don't know. No judgment. But seriously, come talk to me about books. And don't forget to subscribe. I'll see you next time.


Aloha, I'm Carol Monly and this is our new series, Education Matters, which is a program that will explore education-related information that affects not just formal programs like K through 12 and higher education and professional schools, but anything that informs the broader community. Today, I'm really happy to have as my guest Chelsea DeMott, who is a student, a graduate student, has been a graduate student at UH Manoa and is currently the president of Phi Alpha Theta, which is a national history honor society. So, welcome. Thank you so much for having me today, Carol. Thank you. So, tell me a little bit about Phi Alpha Theta and the Hawaii chapter, which you are president of. So, Phi Alpha Theta began in 1921, the national organization. In 1984, our local Hawaii chapter was founded by Dr. Robert McGlone. He's a long-term faculty member at UH Manoa. In the history department, right? Yes, taught for 45 years. He's definitely, he was the head. He was a heart of our organization. And he built upon something that's great. Our focus is promoting history in higher education and to an extent to the community. And so this is the Hawaii chapter. Yes, and we're known as Alpha, Beta, Epsilon. I see. And you are the president of Alpha, Beta, Epsilon for the year. Yes. I'm very excited. It's been a great opportunity. Uh-huh. So, tell me some of the things that Phi Alpha, that PAT has been doing. I guess it's easier to say PAT. Yes. That's also okay. Recently, this past year, we have been in the World History Association. We have helped volunteer at the conference. They were held at HPU in January. And we actually had some of our members participate, which is a great honor for us. And we're able to fundraise and served as volunteers to help them run it. So the World History Association, that tells us what that is. That is a national organization. It is actually, I believe, an international organization. International. And we are helping with their regional conference, so it's everything on the Pacific, West Coast, and then Hawaii. And so this year, they're holding it at HPU, Hawaii Pacific University, at the Loha Tower. Right. So, and again, this dovetails into the goals of PAT. Yes. This is because we want to be part of, like, even other organizations that involve history. We want to have our students reach out to other groups, participate in other conferences, and generally share our ideas. It's a lot of pride for us to be out there and doing things in the community. Right. So, in addition to that as a goal, what are your, you mentioned some of the conferences that you've been doing and the WHA one, were you all participating as conference presenters too? Yes. Some students presented, they submitted their papers and they were able to present. We are very honored that one of our students, Lee English, actually didn't want an award over there. Oh, which, and what was Lee's topic, and what was the award for? I believe he was, he did a paper upon China. I have to look to expand upon it more. And I believe he wanted an honorary award for his writing abilities. And how big is your chapter in terms of number of members? And do you also have faculty members, and are students just from UH or are they from all over the islands? In terms of our faculty members, a lot of our faculty are file-pathetic members and we do have two faculty advisors. When Dr. McLoan retired, we ended up with Dr. Jolly and Dr. Karen Jolly and Dr. Peter Hopperberg volunteered to serve as our new faculty members and they've been just wonderful. They've been a huge support. We couldn't have done this without them. And they're both faculty members at UH Manoa in the history department. Yes, yes. And about how many student members do you have right now? About current student members that are active, I believe about at least 30, 35. And are they all from Manoa? Yes, they're all from Manoa and also this includes all past members as well because BAPA Theta is a lifetime membership. We do invite other alumni to go and submit papers to participate in our organization. And we actually do have a lot of alumni coming as well. We are based at the UH Manoa campus and this is because each school has its own chapter. For example, Shamanad, University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii Pacific University and BYUH Hawaii, they all have their own FAPA Theta chapters. But you are the president of just the Hawaii UH Manoa? Yes. And about how many in the state of Hawaii do you think there are? A member? Yes. That's a great question. We only ever see them during our regional conferences. We're definitely probably the biggest chapter. Overall, it's got to be at least 75 to 100 ballpark, that's what I'm guessing from what I've seen. Right. So tell me, we just showed a great picture of the flag, I believe, what you would call it. Yes. So that's your motto. Well, let's see what it says. Phi Alpha Theta. Yes. A Greek, the Greek words out of letters and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the National History Honor Society. Yes. And you can see our chapter name right there as well, Alpha, Beta, Epsilon. Right. So can anyone join? In order to join, you do have to have at least four classes within history and maintain a GPA of 3.1. We actually are now restricted to history majors. We encourage people from other disciplines to join as well, anyone with a love of history. As long as they've taken enough required classes and have maintained an overall GPA of 3.0, we more than welcome them. We've had people from political science, philosophy, American studies, we're really an inclusive group. And we love sharing other ideas, other opinions, because each group, each department has a kind of their own way of looking at things. And then I know you recently had a conference about a few weekends ago, right? I think we have a copy. That is the cover of the program, which I believe you also designed. Yes, I did. Is that right Chelsea? You have many talents. Thank you. So can we read what that says? Yes. It says it was a 33rd annual Hawaii Regional Meeting of Alpha, Beta. It is where we are, the narratives that define us. Right. And where was that held? It was actually held at Shyamalan University. We are very honored because this was the first time that Shyamalan has ever hosted a regional conference. We do this once a year, typically in March, around spring break. And typically they were held at UH Mānoa for many, many years. And so we reached out to our fellow chapters. And we had people volunteer to use their campuses. And we love it because we love traveling around. We love seeing all these new ideas, new campuses that we all otherwise normally would not. So we've been to HPU at Aloha Tower. And we've also been to BYUH at Abenālaie. And next year, I believe, we might be doing it back at UH Mānoa. And then we're going to hopefully go to UH Hilo at some point. Okay, that's wonderful. Well, the conference is really important because in terms of educating Yes. the community, of course, the historians. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the papers that were presented and the topics that were covered? Yes. In the last chapter, this last conference, we had a lot of Hawaii based papers, which is very important because that history sometimes is not talked about, especially in certain, how should I put it? Because all the papers that we have, actually, we're going to submit on to the Biennial Conference. And what is the Biennial Conference? The Biennial Conference is held every two years. It's going to be the National Conference. Oh, Phi Alpha. Phi Alpha Theta. And having Hawaii papers makes a huge difference because the history is not very talked about on the mainland. Right. It's how important is that? It is. We're usually the only representations of any Hawaii history-pacific histories. And it's amazing going and seeing everyone's faces, learning about all these new things. And they ask a lot of questions. And it's a great honor for us. So I know that, of course, we as the 50th state are as far west as you can go. So I assume you're the only Phi Alpha Theta chapter in the entire Pacific, is that right? I mean, not beyond California, it may have. Only us, Charmin, are the other choppers, too. Right, of course, within Hawaii. Yes, I don't believe, I thought a long time ago there was talks about maybe doing a chapter on Guam. That would be really interesting. I'm thinking about reaching out more to the Pacific, because they are our neighbors and we would like to encourage them to also participate in history and then encourage them to submit papers and even do a teleconference maybe. So the papers that were submitted at the conference recently were from all of the different schools who participated. Within Hawaii. Within Hawaii. Within Hawaii. So it's our own regional and a lot of Phi Alpha Theta chapters do this even on the mainland. They'll have a regional based conference and then every two years we go to the national. Right, and so you mentioned some of the topics all relating to Pacific and the Hawaii region, right? So do you have a sense of are there emerging issues that are becoming more popular or discussed that would be perfect to bring to the mainland for further discussion? Oh, definitely. I know Uwe Veki Hopkins, she's been doing research on voyaging and that's been a very interesting topic and she also been talking about the new Disney movie with Moana. That was her last presentation and some of the parallels with Gardening with Pacific History and the movie. Fascinating. It was, I loved it. It was incredibly interesting. Right, and do you give awards at these, at the conference? Yes, at the Phi Alpha Theta conference here we do give awards. We have about, I think we're up to over 10 awards and it's nice because it honors all the students for their hard work and it helps also almost bring up the, it's good confidence because then they get their, they practice, sometimes this is a very first conference and that makes a huge difference to the students and we help coach them, we teach them how to do it and they get a better idea of public speaking and presenting their research, especially if they want to go on to more academic careers or higher education to graduate school, to like become a doctorate and so this is often the very first time of doing it and we're very proud to help introduce students to that. Yeah, so these papers, are they also distributed to locally in terms of how would a person from Hawaii who might be interested in reading more about this but is not a member of Phi Alpha Theta? Actually our conference is open to the public. So we do send out some invitations, especially we have some long-term community members that do come, so especially also the families as well. So through families we've had a lot of guests come and also too for some of our talks we promote some of the history department talks at UH Manoa and we present those emails out, we send them out to alumni, anyone who's on our email list. So if anyone's more interested in joining our email list we would love to send out more information. So how do they contact you to get on? Because I think people would be very interested in reading, finding out what the topics are that you've covered, voyaging, whatever other issues relating to Hawaii and the Pacific but how do you get ahold of them? How are they gonna get ahold of them? Our best way to get ahold of us is through our email which is Pat Manoa, P-A-T-M-A-N-O-A at Hawaii.edu. That's very simple. Yes. Manoa at Hawaii.edu. And that way they can contact you as president and you would be able to direct them to getting more information about publications, fundraising and other information. Because we love our community, we want to be more part of it. We think that's probably one of our strongest, our people and our community is our strongest asset within our organization. Do you, are you involved at all in high schools? We actually do participate in Hawaii History Day which is a big statewide event. The kids, high school students compete. They do papers, they've done presentations. They've done, I've seen posters. They get really creative and I've actually judged before I've had other members judge as well. Dr. Karen Jolly, she's a big supporter of this. She's involved a lot. And we go, it's amazing what these high school students can do. Yeah. Well, you know what, we're gonna take a break and come right back because I think that you mentioned we haven't actually said the date. Oh yeah, so it's coming up. Right, so as soon as we come back from our break we're gonna announce the date for History Day in Hawaii. So we'll be right back as my guest, Chelsea Demont. Thank you. Are you looking to get shrunk? Join us on Shrink Rap Hawaii. My name is Steven Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. I see couples, individuals, families, because you know why? Because we all have problems. And if you're curious about shrinks and what they talk about, come look at my show, Shrink Rap Hawaii. And maybe you'll find your shrink. You wanna talk about some socially sensitive issues relevant to women? Listen to these guys. Well, I think it's important in Judaism that we don't take the Bible literally, we take it seriously. I agree. And really the key to understanding Christianity is compassion. If you're compassionate towards other people you are living a Christian life. And that relates also to dealing with women and men and women issues as well. Are women and men equal? They're equal. Who's better? Who's better? Welcome back. This is my guest, Chelsea Demont, who is the president of the Hawaii chapter called Alpha Beta Epsilon of the National History Honorary History Society, History Honorary Society called Phi Alpha Theta, which so we're very proud to have you here. And the importance of history and maintaining the interest and pursuing research and writing and engaging the public and others in history is really more important than ever, I think. Especially right now, definitely. Especially right now, lest we forget our history. So we left before the break the very important information is to the date for the History Day that's coming up. Yes, Hawaii History Day, the State Fair is gonna be held on April 15th at Windward Community College. And we definitely encourage the community to come and join us. We'll have a booth there. And it's pretty much the finals for all the Hawaii History Day competitions. And what are those competitions? Are they high school or college? High schools. I see. Yes, those are the ones that we do judge every year. I've participated before. And again, these projects are incredible and have really high hopes for future historians. Okay, so this means, is it just public schools or public and private schools? Public and private. And so History Day, all the history, different history, teachers and courses participate by projects? Yes. Or is it papers? Actually, there's different categories. So there are projects, there are papers, even performing arts. No kidding. Yes, in history. Yes, unfortunately, I wasn't able to see it last time because I was judging the posters, but there is performing arts and there's even, I think, visual, like documentary. Right, and so this, wow. So this is a full day of activity at Windward. And then your role, PAT's role, is to facilitate in terms of judging and what else do you do? We're also gonna give information about the history department at UH and the Honor Society in general. So we do wanna encourage students, one of our big things is that we wanna show them that history is a very viable field of study. We do this at the History Day and we also do this at Manoa Experience when the schools from around the area come to UH and they tour the campus as another one of our big events. And so at both events, we try to promote history as a field of study. We talk about the positive things such as you become a lawyer, there's all these different fields. Because our main problem is we notice that a lot of parents don't encourage history as a field of study. We don't see it as almost a viable career option, but we're trying to show them like, no, the skills that you learn in this can take you anywhere. Right, so your skill and your background in history, your undergraduate major who's in history, and I know that you've actually had a couple of changes in your career, right? And your master's is in... Library science. Right, but did you decide to continue in library science? No, I did not. I realized I wanted to be in a field that was more personable and more hands-on in people like storytelling. And so I went back to UH. I looked into doing the filmmaking program and then I did hospitality and I really enjoyed that. And so now you're going to use your history background in hospitality. So tell me how that's going to enhance your future career in hospitality. Definitely some of the enhancements is that I want to share with our guests and to anyone else. I'd like to join our history in a very accurate but in a very entertaining way. What do you say our history? As Hawaii, our local history, because I did notice sometimes in hospitality there is a problem with maybe the accurate information not being portrayed in favor of more entertainment-wise. So that's actually going to be my study is that I'm going to be doing a research paper on tourism and how that can alter the narrative of a place and focus here on Waikiki. Very interesting, very important. Yes, definitely. Of course, many of our larger resorts and hotels often have cultural parts of their tourist package, whether it's the hula or laymaking, but the historical part would be very valuable and therefore that's something that you with the history measures can go into. And actually the new trend is nowadays, especially some of our repeat guests, they really want to engage in real local history and they want to learn more about this place because they've grown a lot, but they come visit a lot and they want to do more. So does PAT and your chapter do anything in terms of the visitor industry, educating, outreach? Unfortunately, not to that extent. However, upcoming in August, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, they're going to come visit. Dr. Karen Jolly is one of our faculty members. She's in charge of this. She's helping host the conference here at UH. ISAS, right? Yes. And we will be actually doing an excursion in downtown Honolulu and our members, myself and a few other members are going to volunteer as tour guides. That's wonderful. And where are you going to go? We're going to go to Eolani Palace, Eolani Halle. We're going to be going to Kauai Hau Church, St. Andrews Cathedral. Do you go to Chinatown? And I guess it's not as historical as some of the other. Yeah. So we're going to focus on that for probably the day. And we hope it's going to be very interesting and informative and we hope you learn something from it. All right. So that means, is that just your chapter, the UH Manoa chapter will be involved? Yes, it'll be our chapter. I see. Great. So we've talked about other outreach issues and we've talked about awards. I know we have some great pictures of some awards that we can show. So we have two women here holding an award. These are our beloved faculty member and our former president Shirley Buchanan. On the left you'll see Dr. Karen Jolly on the right Shirley Buchanan. And when we went to the Biennial Conference in Orlando in 2016, Shirley was honored with an award for her participation in the national chapters. I see. And it was a huge honor because we actually sent 16 students from Hawaii to Orlando. We fundraised everything, the airfare and the hotels were all taken care of and we were the biggest chapter to participate in the entire country. That's amazing. It is. It's wonderful. And then we have another award. Oh yes. And faculty does hold a national competition between all the chapters. How many chapters are there, did you say? Oh, this is within the whole national. Right. There must be just hundreds. Hundreds of chapters. Hundreds of chapters. And we are fortunate enough, Ullevehi Hopkins, one of our great members. She's very tech savvy. She created a whole scrapbook of everything that we do throughout the year and she submitted that in 2014 and in 2016 we won best national chapters. That's amazing. It is. It was a huge honor. We're so proud of ourselves. Like everything we've done. That's great. And I think we have one more award that we wanted to show. And this is Dr. Robert McLoan and he is our founder, as I mentioned before, of our chapter. He was our faculty member for 45 years and he was truly like, he was a rock. He made everything of this possible and we owe everything to him and what he's done in his efforts. We miss him dearly. He retired in 2013 and then he passed away a couple of years later and we miss him all the time but we hold on to the hope that we've made him proud. And we want to continue this in the future. Yes, he's very beloved. Yeah, well thank you Chelsea. So tell us a little bit more about your fundraising efforts and how do you sustain yourself? How do you get contributions and how do you sustain yourself? We do. I remember a service we were especially good at writing because we're history majors. One of our great skills is we do some brand writing which helps us because we also have to sponsor the regional conferences. We help put in money for that and also because it's such an expense to go to the mainland and send our students there with airfare and hotel, we fundraise all the time. We do book sales, which are great faculty at UH Manoa including Dr. McGlone who left us his collection of books. We sell them every month, one dollar each. So please check us out on campus. We're gonna have another one in April. So any kind of books? Typically history books. These come from our professors, but we've seen some really random things. We've had romance novels. We've got books on gardening. So we have a huge variety and also we have bake sales. Our member- We have a picture here of a bake sale. Katherine Ulleb, one of our great members, she and her family actually made all of those baked, like they stayed up a couple of days making all those items for us to sell at a bake sale at Sako Maki Hall. She's a huge support. And then also surely, as I mentioned before, former president, she makes aprons. She makes aprons. She makes aprons. So what we try to do is all of our members have great skills in addition to being historians and we try to find ways to kind of do little things to make our money and help support our chapter. We're really, we're here for each other. And I think that's what makes our chapter really great. Yeah, so you mentioned your book sales, your bake sales. Do you also take in contributions? Yes, of course. We have had great support from our community members. And please email me at Padmanoa, I think, P-A-T-M-A-N-O-A at hawai.edu for more information. Our checks are typically made out of alpha, beta, epsilon, our region chapter. So please let me any information that you need. And also too, if you need any volunteer work within the community, we would love to have more opportunities to do that as well. Yeah, let's repeat that email address. Padmanoa, P-A-T-M-A-N-O-A at hawai.edu for all inquiries. Right, there we have it on the screen. Padmanoa at hawai.edu, thank you. So in terms of finances, how much money a year are you trying to raise to cover your travel expenses, your various expenses that you have? What's your budget? Our budget, I'll have to talk, Shirley's actually our treasurer. I just tried to manage with the other stuff. Everything financial-wise, she and Dr. Hoffenberg typically take care of. We just, we do have goals in coming up soon because we do have to start getting tickets for New Orleans because we want to send 12 students out there. And what's happening in New Orleans? In 2018, we have our next Biennial National Conference. So P-A-T sponsors a Biennial Conference every two years. And the next one is in New Orleans. And so we need to send at least a dozen or 12 dozen students out. And that's going to be coming up January 3rd through the 7th. So right before we start UH Manoa this school semester, we're going to go over there, represent Hawaii, do it proud. And I'm sure by the time we will fundraise, we can do it. We have a lot of faith in each other and I know we can do this together. And your goal and part is to bring to the national information papers regarding Hawaii and the Pacific. The history here, we have the Hawaii Pacific and also Asia as well. We bring in a lot of Asia papers. It's interesting because every time I go to the national chapter, I end up going in all these, we meet all these new people. And actually at this last one, we recruited a graduate student who was interested in joining our chapter. We gave him information. He ended up applying to UH Manoa and joining our- Wonderful. Joining our organization. Yeah. So there's also this community outreach on the national level. Right, all right. So can you long term think in terms of the future of PAT and the study of history and how it relates to the importance of continuing the interest in sharing what PAT does in Hawaii. I think what a very unique stage in the study of history is that we are still doing papers and everything, but I think we're also getting an interest and a broader interest. For example, I like documentaries. There's so many ways to portray history. There's so many ways to kind of expand upon it. And I think we're gonna be more creative in the future. I think the future will be incredible for the study of history. And I think we just need to let students know, future students, that history is a great field to be in. You get awesome skills. And history is a study of stories, almost. The human story. It's interesting. It's fun. And as you say, of course, you learn how to write to research. But in your own individual experience, applying that in the field of tourism is a wonderful expansion of, the narrow thinking of history is that you can only maybe teach or write, but actually applying it to a much broader community. You could take it anywhere. And I have to say that the skills that I learned through Phi Alpha Theta, including my very first conferences were through Phi Alpha Theta, and I learned how to speak. And that's one of the skills that I can never, that's invaluable to me. Because I used to be very shy. I could never do this. Well, we're almost done. And I want you to take one look in the camera too, Chelsea, and remind people about your upcoming history day. Yes. And anything you want to say. Thank you. I just want to let everyone know, please join us on April 15th at Wynward Community College. And we're going to have the history state fair. And we would love for the community to come to support our local high school students. And for any, we're going to have more fundraisers. And for any community inquiries, we would love to do volunteer work. We love to do organizational work. And so please, we want to hear from you. And again, email me at patmanoa.whai.edu. And we look forward to working with everyone. We're proud of where we're from, and we want to represent that to the rest of the world. Thank you. Thank you so much, Chelsea, P-A-T. And the work that you do with the history, study of history is so important. Thank you for coming. No, thank you so much for having me, Carol. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being a support. Okay, aloha'a. Thank you.


Rick Ross come up with this song. I think I'm Big Meats and I think I'm Larry Hoover and that that made me reflect back to it to be honest with you like wow you know but when they when he did it it was not in a like it was a thing of braggadocious hey man you know what I'm saying this is something I represent and this is about the streets is the way I've seen it. How was how did you how did you deal with that when it first happened because you now just hear your father's name broadcast like that right what what did you think where were your what was your mind and where were you when you first heard the song did you know about the song coming out before it actually hit the waves no I didn't they didn't reach out to us before they did the song I think my son might have told me about the song because he was a little guy and he could he heard his name yeah we on boss talk one on one yeah we gonna talk I think like like like when you think about him the way that the people uh the young people everybody knew about him you know what I mean for us it was even years back when things might have seemed to be somewhat going doormat Rick Ross come up with this song I think I'm Big Meats and I think I'm Larry Hoover and that what that made me reflect back to it to be honest with you like wow you know but when they when he did it it was not in a like it was a thing of braggadocious hey man you know what I'm saying this is something I represent and this is about the streets is where I've seen it how was how did you how did you deal with that when it first happened because you now just hear your father's name broadcast like that right what what did you think where were you what was your mind and where were you when you first heard the song did you know about the song coming out before it actually hit the waves no I didn't we were they didn't reach out to us before they did the song I think my son might have told me about the song because he was a little guy and he could he heard his name because his name after me so he like they saved my name they saved my name you know and you know I just listened to it but um when the song was released see a lot of people don't really know about my father they know about the legend of Larry Hoover you know the legend that grew through the media and some of the people in the streets so for them to speak off the legend Larry Hoover and not Larry Hoover a man who's still alive a man that's fighting for his life you know it you know I mean it's a rough situation he's if he's fighting for his life and you referring to him as a person that that's dead if he was dead or you know had just a life sentence and there was no more fight to be there I mean I guess you could say whatever but for somebody that's actually alive and still fighting and trying to come home and to you know glorify him as king drug lord you know I mean that ain't that that wasn't really a good thing I mean we we've done in past that at this point it did like you say put his name back out there in the world so I could appreciate that it just wasn't the best light to put his name wasn't the best light to put it in especially what you guys trying to figure out ways to show people who he is now right well even even then he had had the federal case at that point in time like the the positive things that he was doing in the community like trying to awake the sleeping giant trying to get youth to vote trying to um you know the guys that called rapists in the community you know marched and shut down city halls shut down the stock market you know I mean marched to make sure that medical centers wouldn't get enclosed in the communities certain schools like he was using the his influence to do positive things you know he came from a background in the streets he was poor he grew up like a lot of um young black people to come in they grew up in impoverished communities and what he seemed for opportunity was the same thing a lot of these young men see what opportunities but as time went on he seemed to he had influence and he wanted to use his influence in a positive way and he was doing that but you know he gets no credit for that he gets the credit for the part where he tore down some of his community which he's guilty of some of that but he also was trying to make changes and do a lot of things for the better of his community but you know in life the way how reality is it's you could do a million good things but just do one bad thing and it's like they can never forget that or they can never forget is like it outweighs all the good you've done yeah like I never say that my father wasn't on you know a criminal you know I mean but he was he he was making changes and he was doing positive things but they don't want to give him credit for that they just want to get a credit for the legend Larry Hooper who had a big gang organization not the Larry Hooper who seemed that he had a big organization and he like man this is a bolder's man if I could stop these kids from killing each other it could be a better place man I can get these guys to come together and just you know make peace and he was doing that and people remember that but you know in they mind they want to sell it as a plot that just had the biggest gang and I don't know take over the city or something take over the world I don't know what they was thinking that's ridiculous did you um like you did see Rick Ross after that or talk or did y'all ever come to a hey man you know it wasn't meant that way because that's probably what I would have said like I didn't mean it that way you know what I know that he was trying to own he was trying to auto we honor him we actually got the talk and everything was yeah everything it was like I was trying to honor yeah we came up with an understanding yeah yeah we on boss talk one on one one on one yeah we gonna talk


Aloha. I'm Marsha Joyner, and we are Navigating the Journey. Navigating the Journey is dedicated to exploring the options and choices for the end of life care, and to assist people to talk about their wishes and their choices. It's time to transform our culture so we shift from not talking about dying to talking about it. It's time to share the way we want to live at the end of our lives, and it's time to communicate about what we want and what we don't want for ourselves. We believe that the place for this to begin is not in the intensive care unit. Together, we can explore the various paths to life's ending. Together, we can make those difficult conversations easier. Together, we can make sure that our own wishes and those of our loved ones are expressed and respected. If you're ready to join, we ask you navigate the journey. Today, we are visiting with a very, very special person, and that is Cassandra DeCramer, who is on a journey on a path that most of us have no idea about. Cassandra is living with MS. She's a talented artist with hundreds of pieces of art, which we'll get to see some of today. And welcome to Cassandra. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We are so glad you're here. Thank you very much. Yeah, so tell us about Cassandra. You lived all over the world, you've done all kind of wonderful things, and now here you are with us. So, let's begin at the top. Well, I feel like I've been very, very fortunate to have just a fabulous life. I started pretty early inspecting everything that kind of moved, and that means bugs and all those call and preachy characters. And I learned the more you respect them, they respect you too. In fact, even now, I would say that even as I speak and talk, there are many, many things all around you every day, if you just look, it's just magic. And that is priceless. It is priceless.  Oh, yes, I really always would find things that would kind of help people. And so I was curious about things to do everything with, especially kinds of spices and foods have different properties, and what you do in your life, even optimism weighs on your character and your appreciation of life. So I always have just drawn from the age of four.  So I started at the age of four drawing and never looked back. And this is what kept me going, and I got scholarships to different colleges and wound up with a master's degree from L.A., and so I never stopped.  Right, but I also couldn't do chemistry and calculus in college, so that deterred my doctoring. Well, that's okay. So you were drawing bugs and all kinds of creatures while you're in school? Oh, yes, and in the fifth grade, I decided that I knew I wanted to be an artist. So I declared that that didn't have to go to school or normal things, because I already knew what I wanted to do. And so for the rest of the year, I just drew people in class and kind of came in jeans, which were all that popular then, and kind of spent a leisurely fifth grade.  So tell me, now, when you finally made the decision to be an artist, to really be an artist, tell us about that. I don't think there was ever a chance that I decided I wasn't going to be an artist, even as being a doctor. So now tell us about your travels and how art worked, or your travels and art worked together. Not sure they all worked together, but certainly were fun. And I haven't gone that many places. I certainly, certainly, certainly would love to see the whole wide world, and somewhat television, Netflix, et cetera. You can see parts of the world and you say, oh, I wish they could just deliver that food they're eating. When I'm speaking of food, you could recreate it a cookbook? Yes, my first little cookbook was on mussels. Mussels? No, you don't need it right now. Well, it would be nice to have. A cookbook about mussels. Mussels are found on Woodby Island. Woodby Island, yes. It's off the coast of Seattle, between Vancouver Island and the other little islands. And first starting the Pencote Mussels, I had been to Turkey and had eaten mussels and found they were very delicious, so I called them and he said, yeah, you can work for me. So I was the first woman on mussel rafts. On mussel rafts? Yes. To go actually to sea to get mussels? We planted them. We put them in bags small and then they grew. Then we pulled them up and took them apart. So you take the babies and you take them to sea and you plant them and let them grow. Mostly, as a woman, we were from different areas and we would take them apart on the raft, the required size. Oh, so you have to let them grow to a certain size? Yeah, and then they would pull them up and we would take them apart. I didn't ever put them down in, but that's okay. So then you learn to cook them or do you cook mussels? Oh, you can do anything with them. You can do them raw, too. You can do almost anything with them. I love to put them on the road like they do in Turkey, which is kind of a little bit of a barbecue broth on top. Put them in the oven like that or something, but many, many different ways. Of course mussels soup and mussels with topino and mussels with all the other wonderful seafood. So now you were talking about Turkey. When were you in Turkey? In 1977. My friend and I were always going to go to Paris and we talked about that for a number of years and then we said either we're going to Paris or we're going to stop talking about it. So we went to Paris. We first went to Amsterdam and met many Turkish people there. Then we went to Paris and France and all the countries took the Orient Express to Turkey. I think it was only $90. And so we spent the rest of our vacation in Turkey. So tell me about the Orient Express because that's something right out of the famous train. That's all it was. It was the famous train with the bunks for sleeping and a fast from, I don't know if it goes further up to Amsterdam or not, but we caught it in Paris and went all through Europe and Amsterdam. So in Turkey they had the mussels, you said, and coffee and what else? Oh yeah, all their different foods, yeah. And it was very beautiful and Turkey has problems now, but it used to be just a very, very friendly, wonderful place, just fabulous. Because of respect for life there and butterflies would land on people and the cats were always present. Cats? Lots of cats. And there was a funny little thing with the dogs that we found familiar and all of it was just wonderful. We left so hard sometimes we felt we broke our lungs. It was really a fabulous place. Well, let's get back to here and now. So tell us about MS. What is MS, first of all? But most of us that have no idea what MS is. Well, that's like if you had a cord going to a light and the cord were clear up until the light. That's about what it is. Because the nerves were clear up until the feet and moving the feet. I don't know how the brain talks to something there. The nerves do not. And it's because I think it's like the cord has been exposed just in an extension cord. If it's been stripped it won't work thoroughly. Oh, so that's, is it hereditary? How do you get MS? Where does it come from? I don't know, but my mother did have it, but they didn't know the name for it. They didn't call it that when she had it. And I didn't know that it was, that I was going to experience it later. But I experienced it really late and not until 1902. I mean 2002. 2002. And so what are the symptoms? How do we know what MS is? How did you know? I started falling. And then I started walking strangely. I couldn't seem to run very well anymore. And I loved to run. I ran and ran and ran when I was young. So just by walking and it's decreased somewhat. So sometimes it takes me a long time to get a very short distance. And it's very dangerous crossing streets. Because not only am I slow walking, but the street and how the pavement is. The pavement's not very good. And even the sidewalks. That makes it very difficult. And heavy doors in buildings are impossible. But you seem to get around. Okay, now it hasn't effect your art, has it? No, I can still sit and draw. Yeah. Well, we need to take a break. But when we come back, we are going to look at some of your early work. Okay? Okay. Great. Thank you. Aloha. This is your host Beatrice Contelmo. Come and join us every Friday at four o'clock on Perspectives of Global Justice. Hey, has your signal just been taken over or am I supposed to be here? This is Andrew, the security guy, your co-host on Hibachi Talk. Please join us every Friday on Think Tech Away. You want to talk about some socially sensitive issues relevant to women? Listen to these guys. Well, I think it's important in Judaism that we don't take the Bible literally. We take it seriously. Okay. I agree. And really the key to understanding Christianity is compassion. If you're compassionate towards other people, you are living a Christian life. And that relates also to dealing with women and men and women issues as well. Are women and men equal? They're equal. Who's better? Who's better? Tune in. Hi, we're back. And we are with our dear friend Cassandra DeCramer. And Cassandra is a talented artist. She's got hundreds of pieces of work. And we're going to take a look at some of her art. And if you'll just show it to us while we talk. And now you're living with MS and I understand that you have been the victim of a scam like so many seniors. And so that has, that they prey on all of us. I had the same scam. So how do you feel vulnerable? What does it make you feel like when people take advantage of seniors and disabled people? What does that feel like? Yeah, it is very difficult because I think that on the little money I made, I could take care of things.  So I thought if I could drive I could go to many more places and get things done because other transportation, sometimes I need a handyman to get where I'm going from the bus. It's really difficult. And besides it's so dangerous. So I wanted to have a car. And that ended up if I seen all the money I'd say which is no means an enormous amount. But I lost it. But it just interfered with me drawing or painting because my somehow to me as I feel like I'm very, very, very rich but I've never had any money. And now I'm in debt. Can't pay my rent. Well, that's not good. That people take advantage of these scam artists take advantage of seniors and disabled people. And I guess everybody though, that people trust and then that's betrayed. Well, people are in need of money and there's not too much opportunity to make it. You can volunteer in many, many places but get paid when you're older. It's just practically impossible. So now you are doing art classes. I'm going to start doing art classes at the Waikiki Community Center. And I would like to have the people do collages of the photos of their loved ones. And we can have a lot of fun doing that. So that'll be on a Tuesday starting I think May 16. Good. So we'll come see you. I know this is out of, we're not supposed to do this online, but we need people to support you. We really want people to support you after being scammed. That just sends goose bumps all over me. So we want people to support you and love you like we do. And so again, and you're going to do other art exhibits where you said you were doing some others. Well, I've had classes at Whole O'Malahia for many years as well as Foster and Lyon, but we're going to have an exhibit next month of Botanicals in the Big Gallery at Whole O'Malahia. So we'll see some more work of our beautiful artists. Good. And it's a free? Free. And where is that? That's a state park in Coney O'y. They call it the state park. And then you have another one at the Po Gallery later in the summer. And then we're back to where you are at the Waikiki Community Center. So we want people to come visit with you and come meet you just like, and come to love what we do and all of your great work. So tell us now, one last thing before we close, just what is your collage that you're talking about? What is a collage? A collage is where you use scraps of paper rather than paint. And the beauty of that is you can take a photograph, blow it up, and then kind of cut little shapes like the trees or the whatever it is in nature or in people and kind of make a wonderful, wonderful, it's more than art and it's satisfying because you cut out these pieces of paper and it's just a real different approach. So do you have magazines and things or do they bring the pictures? They can start collecting all pieces of scraps of paper, which they probably already do somehow. Even envelopes, inside envelopes and things are a wonderful source of textures. And sometimes even an idea is just cutting out the shapes into different textures of paper. But certainly the loved ones, you'll just be amazed at the amount of drawing you can do with the amount of pasting up. And if we can use a computer, somehow to blow up some of the photos and then just paste on top of the photos, it's not really a lot of fun and pretty soon you'll be doing your whole family. So now since we're talking about the end of life, is that a healing process? I mean working. To do the collage and the healing?  So I've done lots of big collages and they were like therapy. I can really just concentrate on that and do other things, like even listen to music or just be happy cutting out the paper. Well, I want to thank you for being here with us. But now, as our audience knows, we were supporting legislation, medical aid and dying. And in today's paper, in the advertiser, there is a great editorial and it's titled, Cowards Killed Medical Aid in Dying. And the lady is from Teresa Schock. She's from Maui. And she talks about the issue that she had with her sister and how it is that these people that killed this bill have no idea about the suffering that people go through and how they allow the churches and the Christians to interfere with the issues at hand. And so it's a great article and I can't stress enough about this whole thing of people interfering with someone else's options and choices, because that's what our program is all about, the options and the choices at the end of life and that they should be your choice and not the church, not someone else, but the patient's choice. And so I am so honored, thrilled to see a person that had the courage that this lady did to be so open and honest about what she and her sister are going through. So I thank you again. Thank you for being with us. Thank you and we'll see you next week. Aloha.