There are organizations through which you can volunteer a few hours while you’re visiting the islands. We ended up booking time to help at an animal sanctuary through Malama Hawaii. There are other types of volunteer opportunities such as cleaning up beaches, gardening, and more. If you’re interested in lending some of your time but Malama’s options aren’t floating your boat, you can also check out Kanu Hawaii.

We didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into but it seemed like a nice thing to do. We looked no further than:

The property we helped out at, which ended up consisting mostly of weeding (I know, Dad, the irony…), felt like it was in the middle of nowhere. We drove inland through some small towns, made a few tight turns, and then suddenly we were in this secluded jungle-looking place. Stats include 42 cats, 50 guinea pigs, ducks galore, deer, one tortoise, dozens of roosters, a very large pig who was clearly going through some shit, a swan, and goats… including baby Stephanie (a goat) who I was told loved to be picked up but didn’t seem to want me to be the one to do it 😔 . There was also a very large turkey named Matthew who “loves to be hugged” but as much as I wanted to do that I didn’t have the stones to try it unsupervised.

The Animals (some of them)

The Property

It was really hard to capture the property in a way that can help you make sense of the layout. So please, enjoy these disjointed photos in and of themselves.

Henry

This is Henry. He was very friendly and followed us around while we were weeding. He was not much help.

At one point he literally laid down in the weeds we were trying to remove. See if you can spot him.

The woman who owns and started the sanctuary, which rescues animals from all over, built a small house on the property and added a full wrap around porch for the cats (yes, still 42 of them) to sleep out on.

As you might imagine, she’s very vegan but wasn’t obnoxious about it. There were cutesy signs all over the property that felt like stuff you’d see embroidered on a pillow at Marshall’s… if Marshall’s was about saving animals instead of kitschy furnishings. Stuff like “wings are for flying, not for frying.” It was hard to read that and not think of “Fish are friends, not food” from Finding Nemo 🐠

You have to park a ways from the actual property and walk in. We weren’t entirely sure where to go once we got out of the car but upon remarking that, one of Henry’s buds materialized and literally walked us all the way in. We tried to tip him but he didn’t have pockets.

This was a really enjoyable and rewarding couple hours and if you’re at all curious I encourage you to give it a try. My favorite part aside from making friends with a tortoise had to be the duck we saw on the way out who was, despite his best efforts, taking an un-bath and caught me judging him 😂