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Judith and I are strangers to these parts. That’s not news. But how you learn about a place and start to feel a part of it might be.

held its annual Live Aloha Day Saturday, and we joined about 50 other folks — including Civil Beat’s Ryan Kanno, his girlfriend and mother — pulling invasive algae out of Maunalua Bay. We were working with a group called, , a community-based organization aimed at preserving and restoring the health of the Maunalua region of East Oahu. Average folks helped the nonprofit remove by hand more than 100 tons of “alien” algae from 2007 to 2009. We pulled more than four tons Saturday morning.

Ryan, Sara and Judith before we started work

They’re used to hosting volunteers. So when we showed up around 8:30 a.m., things couldn’t have gone more smoothly. Although it’s a sign of the times that we had to fill out two forms before we could even get to work: one a legal waiver and the other telling them who we were and where we were from.

After a week in the office, it felt good to be in the water, breeze on our face, digging with our gloved hands in the muck on the floor of the ocean. Within a matter of hours, we had bagged more than four tons, ready for shipping to help build the soil on a nearby farm. But what was remarkable was how comfortable we all felt, a group of strangers, committed to the same common cause.

In the water, we were all in the same place. Wet. Laughing. Working. It didn’t matter that we didn’t know one another. We had a job to do. And we had time. And we were together.

That’s what the meaning of Live Aloha was for me. Once we were in the water, it didn’t matter where we came from or what we did for a living. What mattered was that we were there. And what we discovered was that we had more in common than what might separate us.

For a few hours, we lived aloha. I won’t forget the feeling.