A First Crossing: PAAC Brings Hawaiʻi Students to Palau for the First Time
Eight days in Palau. A traditional canoe. A chant at the taro patch. And one student who learned she was related to the Consul General.
Serena Duarte stood at the bow of the Alingano Maisu — the voyaging canoe of Master Navigator Mau Piailug's family — and tied a knot. She had been voluntold, she said later. But she wanted to do it. And as her hands worked the line, she felt something she would spend the rest of the trip trying to name: the sense that she was bridging her knowledge of Hawaiian navigation with what Mas Sewralur, Mau's grandson, was passing to them here, in Palau, across thousands of miles of shared ocean. "I felt super grounded doing it," she wrote. "I was bridging two of the cultures I feel the most connection to."
That moment — a student from Hawaiʻi tying a knot on a Micronesian voyaging canoe as her first act in Palau — is as good a summary of PAAC's inaugural Takitani Summer Study Tour as any. This past June, ten students from schools across the state spent eight days in Palau under the theme "Honoring Oceans, Inspiring Change," organized by PAAC in partnership with Ivory Vogt and EmeralDreams Palau. What followed was not a tour of Palau's highlights. It was an immersion into a community that had been waiting, in some ways, to meet them.
Students spent their first full day on the water with Moss Sewralur before moving through a week that brought them face-to-face with every layer of Palauan life: a traditional lunch prepared by the women's cheldebechel group of Airai at the historic Airai Bai; a deep dive into marine conservation science at the Palau International Coral Reef Center; a full day snorkeling the Rock Islands Southern Lagoon with Palau Blue Tours, where they swam with sharks above reefs that Palau's conservation policies had kept whole. At Palau High School, they sat with students their own age and compared notes on what it means to grow up on an island. At the Micronesian Film Festival organized by Create Belau, they watched Remethau — a film about the first Micronesian woman to descend to the Mariana Trench — and several students left the theater in tears. At the Melekeok Bai, a traditional meeting house few outsiders are permitted to enter, they performed the Hawaiian chant E Hō Mai while the men of the community gathered to watch. Kenley Kenneth of Reng Collective later told Serena he got chicken skin. At the ancient village of Ngerwikl, they hiked to taro patches with Aunty Cory Mason and waded back through mud and rain, arriving at the waterfall at Mesekelat soaked, tired, and — almost universally — describing the day as one of the best of their lives.
What the experience produced in students was measurable and also hard to measure. Every student who completed the post-trip evaluation reported that the program helped them gain a deeper understanding of Palau's history and culture, that it strengthened their intercultural understanding, and that it inspired them to learn more about global issues. But the more meaningful shifts were the ones that took longer to articulate. Ylene Reid-Selth, a Micronesian student from Radford, wrote that she used to feel some shame about her heritage — that years of hearing jokes at school had worked on her in ways she hadn't fully admitted. "To go to Micronesia and see it firsthand was changing," she wrote. She came home determined to make a presentation about Palau for her school's Micronesian club. Leya Goeas left with a specific, actionable goal: to be one of the people who brings a reef-safe sunscreen policy to Hawaiʻi, inspired by what Palau has already built. And Jayden Tran of Kalani High School — whose four years with PAAC culminated in this crossing — wrote simply that he felt "way more cared for and loved in Palau" than anywhere he had been, including home. "Even in Hawaiʻi, where we pride ourselves on our sense of aloha," he added, "I felt it more there."
PAAC was founded in 1954 to deepen Hawaiʻi's connections with Asia and the Pacific. The Takitani Summer Study Tour to Palau is the first program in PAAC's history to reach into Micronesia — and what ten students encountered there makes the case, plainly, for why this direction matters. No classroom can produce what Palau produced: the recognition, in students who grew up on islands, that they are part of something larger and older than the bubbles they were raised in. That the Pacific is not a distance. That it is a relationship, and they are now part of it.
The Takitani Summer Study Tour to Palau is made possible by the Matsunaga Takitani Foundation. To follow PAAC's programs and support the students who carry this work forward, visit paachawaii.org — and share this story with someone who believes Hawaiʻi's future is Pacific.
Follow PAAC's Sister-State and Study Tour programs to see where our students travel next.
