From grassroots support to coordinated efforts, Maui’s Filipino community has found its footing in the aftermath of the devastating Lahaina fire, and they are asking their government to do better.
Images by Joshua Galinato and Savannah Glasgow
On the morning of August 8, 2023, Jerome Menesses was supposed to start his new job as a teacher at Lahaina Intermediate School. Instead, the 30-year-old awoke to an email that said school had been canceled and the sight of smoke billowing from the mountainside. He and his wife, a teacher at Princess Nāhiʻenaʻena Elementary, had moved to Lahaina from the Philippines three weeks earlier as part of a cultural exchange program that allows Filipino educators to teach in the United States for up to five years. With no power and no internet, they played cards and kept an eye on the encroaching fire. Their landlord, a Filipina woman who moved to Lahaina decades ago, said that if they needed to evacuate, firefighters or police officers would notify them. But as the fire moved closer, no one came, and they received no alerts. Suddenly the blaze was just a few houses away. They packed a small bag, their passports and IDs, ran to their landlord in a small car, and escaped the flames on a little-used backroad. “Everything we had, it’s all turned into ashes,” Menesses says. “I don’t know if we’d be here if not for our landlord.”
The fire that Menesses and his wife narrowly survived was the deadliest in the U.S. in the last century, killing 100 people, a quarter of whom had ties to the Philippines, according to the state’s Philippine Consulate General. The flames destroyed more than 2,000 buildings, most of them residential homes. Downtown Lahaina, the historic whaling town that was once the seat of the Hawaiian Kingdom, burned to the ground.
Filipinos are strongly represented in Lahaina. Around 40 percent of the town’s residents, which numbered around 13,000 prior to the fire, were Filipino. Many are third- or fourth-generation locals, descendants of plantation workers who farmed sugarcane in West Maui. But today, one in three Lahaina residents are recent immigrants, which has only further complicated the town’s already fraught road to recovery.
In the weeks after the fire, as national relief organizations and politicians — President Joe Biden, Governor Josh Green, congresspeople, state representatives — flew in to Lahaina to assess the damage, national and local news stories lamented the absence of a prominent Filipino voice. Nestor Ugale, the founder of nonprofit Kaibigan ng Lahaina (which means “Friends of Lahaina” in Tagalog) says he suspects the initial lack of representation was in part because of the unprecedented nature of the loss: communication was out for days, people were in shock and didn’t know who to trust. “Where were our Filipino resources in the beginning?” asks Ugale, who formed Kaibigan ng Lahaina after the fire to connect the area’s more established population with newer Filipino immigrants who have less government and family support. “This part of the community was severely impacted, and they were in trauma mode.”
In late September, the Maui Filipino Chamber of Commerce and their O‘ahu counterpart put on a resource fair at the Lahaina Civic Center that drew around 2,750 people. Kit Zulueta Furukawa, the MFCC director, and her team partnered with local Filipino businesses to give away sorely needed basics such as soap and clothing, along with familiar snacks like Ligo sardines and Vcut potato chips, fresh vegetables from Aloha Harvest, and malunggay (moringa) and avocados picked from volunteers’ yards. The fair was called Hawak Kamay (Tagalog for “holding hands”), the first in a series of events that brought the island’s Filipino population together to access resources from federal agencies. “It also brought familiarity and language,” Furukawa says, “not just spoken language, but the languages of care and comfort.” The center was filled with the sounds of Ilokano and Tagalog, with clergy, doctors, lawyers, barbers, and massage therapists tending to the needs of the survivors. Fresh orchids donated by a Maui farmer brightened the space and lifted spirits especially for the “manang,” Furukawa says, an endearing Ilokano term akin to auntie. Lahaina chef Joey Macadangdang donated 1,000 adobo and pancit bentos.
I am extremely grateful we have a place to stay, but it’s nothing compared to what we lost.
Krizhna Bayudan
Meanwhile, Honolulu-based nonprofit Tagnawa and its fiscal sponsor, Hawai‘i Workers Center, gathered Ilokano and Tagalog speakers from around the community and from University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa to offer translation services. Nadine Ortega, an Ilokano instructor at the university who created Tagnawa in response to the fire, and a team of volunteers carried out the only on-the-ground Filipino-specific needs assessment, reaching more than 800 displaced families. Most urgently, these survivors needed financial assistance, housing, and communication in their mother tongue. Tagnawa found that approximately 75 percent of Filipino families in need of assistance included elderly people, some of whom had been denied funding because they lived in multigenerational homes and only the head of household was eligible. Some interviewees were new arrivals who, in addition to being ineligible for federal funds, did not have a bank account set up to receive private donations. Others had received abrupt hotel eviction notices in languages they could not read. “All of this compounds,” Ortega says. Citizenship status, elderly parents, two or more children in the household, language barriers — “[that all] made it particularly difficult for the Filipino community.”
In Filipino circles, Ortega says, people are more open to addressing mental health collectively, as opposed to Westernized one-on-one therapy sessions. “Talking with these groups right after the fire, they would reject concerns about mental health,” Ortega says. “But, we could see the effects of the fires and the trauma in their tears and in their stories about what happened to them, who they lost, their homes, their old lives.” Tagnawa is slated to receive a $150,000 Hawai‘i Community Foundation grant, that will help the organization further its Filipino values-based support system centered on the matriarchal and collectivist spirit of Filipino culture that allows people to tell their stories in Tagalog and Ilokano to a group that understands their grief.
So far, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Small Business Administration have doled out $300 million in direct assistance to date, but those without a green card are ineligible for federal assistance. This includes Menesses, despite his being employed by the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education. The Filipino community and the greater Maui ʻohana helped Menesses and his wife find a place to stay and gave them gift cards, food stamps, clothes, hot meals, and emotional support. Despite the difficulties and financial hardship — including an outstanding $13,000 loan Menesses and his wife attained just to come to the U.S. — that have colored their experience so far, he says they want to stay. He and his wife have been teaching Lahaina students since their schools partially reopened in nearby churches, before returning to campus. “We love Lahaina and we really love the kids, so we can’t leave here,” he says. “They really need us.”
Third-generation Lahaina resident Krizhna Bayudan started helping with recovery efforts in the fire’s immediate aftermath, from translating for Ilokano speakers to helping displaced people fill out aid forms. When Hawai‘i Workers Center offered her a full time job as a community organizer, she put her grad school plans on hold in order to help attain dignified housing for affected residents, including those who had been pressured into paying rent on houses that had burned down or become unlivable after the fire.
Bayudan herself has moved four times since the fire, which claimed her family’s recently renovated family home in Wahikuli, where she lived along with her two sisters, parents, and a few renters. “Being a part of a neighborhood like Wahikuli was a blessing,” she says, recalling the array of fruits and vegetables popular in Filipino cooking that her grandparents had planted on the property: bitter melon and eggplant, banana and calamansi. They lived only a few minutes from their cousins, and the palm tree-lined highway between their street and the horizon gave way to a mesmerizing Hawaiʻi sunset most nights. But Bayudan has had little time to reminisce. She worries if Honua Kai’s impending notice to vacate will be extended by the Red Cross, even though it had already been extended four times. Bayudan says that in order for Filipinos and the greater Lahaina community to recover they need access to dignified housing. “We all really do just need a home, somewhere we can feel safe and comfortable and not have to live at the mercy of our condo owners,” she says. “I am extremely grateful we have a place to stay, but it’s nothing compared to what we lost.”
In December, four months after the fire, around 6,200 people were still displaced. Many remained in temporary housing in hotels and overpriced vacation rentals or doubled up in family homes elsewhere on Maui. In the days after the fire, Lahaina residents voiced fears that people would leave and forever alter their communities, making way for new, wealthier residents and more tourist accommodations in Lahaina’s future. The Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement estimates that 1,000 people have already moved off island. Ugale, who was born and raised within Lahaina’s multigenerational Filipino enclave, says people have been leaving “in droves” for places like Nevada, where their insurance payouts will stretch further. “Every week I hear of this person, that person, this family member, making a decision and then they’re gone, so suddenly,” he says.
Despite so much uncertainty, Ugale says people are doing what they can to recover emotionally and spiritually through sharing food and prayer. The white crosses along the Lahaina Bypass represent the lives lost, a lot of them of Filipino ancestry. “We still need to grieve those losses together,” Ugale says. He and other local leaders are working with County officials to coordinate a community-wide viewing of Lahaina town in its devastated state before all of the rubble is cleared. The plan: An escorted drive by bus through what remains of Lahaina, he says, “to get closure and say a final goodbye to the town we love.”