'I took a chance'
A Student Publication of the University of Hawai`i • Honolulu Community College • April/May 2014
Ka LA photo by Mathew Ursua
Jeremiah Tavares challenged his mother, Jasmine, to go back to school. Now, she's planning to graduate in May, one year after he did.
Mom follows in son's footsteps at school By Mathew Ursua
Ka La editor
Jasmine Tavares and her son Jeremiah make the pilgrimage from their home in Waimanalo to the college’s campus in urban Honolulu every weekday. It’s a long bus ride. They’ve been doing it together for three years. Jasmine uses a wheelchair. She has arthritis in her back that makes it hard to walk. She said she walks when she can, but can’t make it far. Jeremiah pushes his mother’s wheelchair from the bus stop on King Street where they’re dropped off. Jeremiah graduated from HonCC last year and is pursuing another degree in computer networking. This year, he’ll watch as
his mother gets her own degree. It was Jeremiah who talked his mother into going to college, more than two decades after she graduated from high school He said that his mother would ask him what he learned in his classes day after day. One day he told her to enroll and find out for herself. She did. “I took a chance,” Jasmine said. She said that she would attend for one semester and see what happened. Three years later she’s on track to graduate with her first degree. Jasmine says possibilities are limitless. After graduating with an Associate’s Degree in Liberal Arts, she plans to pursue another degree in science so she can move closer to becoming a biologist.
She writes and illustrates children's stories, too. She said she started telling stories to her son when he was an infant in the 1990s. Soon after, she started putting them on paper and producing artwork. Jasmine said she’s expanding on one of her stories -- making it longer and updating the art. It’s about an alien named Mikey who commandeers his parents’ spaceship, shoots across the universe, and encounters new forms of life on a planet called Earth. When she wrote it in the 1990s, she saw her story as a means of teaching elementary school students about biology. “The moral of the story was to be honest,” she said. Continued on Page 5
Inside More than 800 to graduate
-- Page 2
Annual art & poetry issue -- Pages 7-10 Fashion, hair styles on campus
-- Pages 12-14
Who's on the dean list ?
-- Page 15