Lahaina’s Micronesians face unique fire recovery hurdles

By Yiming Fu, Report for America corps member

Marlynn Akiwinas wants to stay home. It’s a windy 68 degrees in Kahului, where she lives in a 3-bedroom 1-bathroom FEMA-provided house. She’s worn out from work, where she makes just enough to support herself and not enough to live the life she wants. Laundry piles up on a chair in her room and a silver tinsel Christmas tree slouches in the corner. 

Akiwinas’ boyfriend knocks on her window, a big smile on his face. 

“You have to go outside, it’s such a nice day today!” 

“Oh I’m cold!” Akiwinas responds, shivering and pulling her arms in. “If you feel the wind — it’s cold! I cannot go in the water right now.”

Akiwinas sits cross-legged on her bed wearing a deep magenta blouse and Pohnpeian skirt. The response is uncharacteristic for her, a firecracker personality who can usually be found telling jokes, dancing through the grocery store and floating on her back in the ocean. 

It’s her day off from Kahului airport’s California Pizza Kitchen where she works as a cashier, makes pizza and does food prep.

Akiwinas makes around $900 a week. About $500 of that goes to groceries to support her mom, herself and three kids. 

A 2023 Lahaina fire survivor, Akiwinas lost her home and her job and is trying to get back on her feet. She’s been applying to low-income housing in Lahaina, but she hasn’t heard anything back. 

The rest of her family, her three brothers, aunts and uncles  have been able to return. But she’s still waiting in the queue and is not sure what will happen. 

An eldest sister who feels responsible for taking care of those around her, Akiwinas keeps going for her family.

“I’m not going to lie, I have been struggling and feeling stressed before, but I tell myself I’m not going to give up,” Akiwinas said. “I’m okay with it, I’m okay with what I’m going through because I need to help my mom and my kids.”

Culturally specific recovery challenges

Akiwinas is from Pohnpei, a Pacific island that’s part of the Federated States of Micronesia. She is part of a roughly 1,000-person Micronesian community on Maui, which includes Pohnpeian, Chuukese, Marshallese, Yapese and Kosraen people. Each island has its own language and culture, but there are many shared values. Pohnpei is known for its lush green landscape dotted with waterfalls and rivers.

“If you want to know who we are,” Akiwinas said, “just type it in YouTube, relax and enjoy. You will see our people dancing, our style, our creativities.”

Lahaina was a big community for Micronesian immigrants, who make up about 1% of Hawaii’s population. Many extended families lived together and supported each other. A town where one in three people are born in another country, Lahaina is known for its blend of Hawaiian, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican and Micronesian cultures. 

Micronesian people come to Maui as part of the COFA agreement and many work in the tourism industry. COFA, the Compact of Free Association, is an agreement that allows citizens from the Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia to live and work in the U.S. in exchange for military control of certain land and waters.

Anndionne Selestin, a care navigator at Roots Reborn, works with Micronesian clients to provide culturally sensitive disaster recovery assistance. She said Roots has about 100 Micronesian households on their client list.

For Akiwinas and many Micronesian people who live on Maui, recovering from the Lahaina fires is even more challenging because FEMA and Red Cross do not offer materials in Micronesian languages, cultural values stigmatize asking for help, and COFA status prevented access to federal aid post-fire. The fires also disrupted multigenerational family networks in Lahaina that made Maui feel like home. 

COFA people can work, live, go to school and have health insurance in the United States. However, they are not considered U.S. citizens. To get aid from FEMA, Micronesian families had to apply under a kid who was born in the U.S. or with a spouse who is a citizen. 

“We have clients who are a family of 14, but they are assigned under one FEMA number because their youngest is a citizen,” Selestin said.

In March 2024, eight months after the Lahaina fires, Congress passed a bill granting federal benefits to COFA community members, meaning they can now apply to programs like SNAP, TANF and FEMA. 

Still, Selestin said there’s a lack of communication and outreach to Maui’s Micronesian community. What happens in Washington isn’t relayed to the people affected and in languages they can understand.

“People don’t really know what he signed and what it’s for,” Selestin said. “If you don’t explain it to them, they’re going to still think they don’t qualify, but they do qualify already. So we make important posts like that, translate it into our language, and send it out to them.”

Looking for home

For many Micronesian fire survivors, their loss is doubled. Already away from home, they lost tight-knit Micronesian communities in Lahaina where they lived for decades. Many families that lived together were spread apart in post-fire housing.  

Jean Wichep, 24, moved to Lahaina to stay with her uncle. Before she moved, she was studying to be a nurse at the College of Micronesia. Tall and athletic, she played on the basketball and volleyball teams. She misses playing her sports and hanging out with her teammates.

In Lahaina, Wichep lived in a two-story house with 12 family members. Her happiest memories were taking walks with her cousins along Front Street where they would drink honeydew boba along the ocean.

Now Wichep lives in Pukalani, a town in Maui’s mountainous upcountry region. It’s different in Pukalani, she says. Really quiet. She still works as a housekeeper at the Montage hotel in Lahaina, a commute that can take her more than an hour each way. 

Akiwinas’ family also lived in Lahaina. Her neighborhood was all her family members, her three brothers and their families, as well as cousins, uncles and aunts. She could walk to visit everyone.

“It’s sad because we always stay together and live together. We’re close. When we do our birthday parties, our funerals, we gather together.”

After the fire, her family was spread apart. Kahului doesn’t feel like home to her. The beaches in Central Maui don’t compare to the West Side, she said, and it’s nothing like home in Lahaina where there’d always be a place to cruise, party or have a barbeque.

Returning to Lahaina would be like “fresh air,” Akiwinas said. “A complete stress relief.”

Housing challenges

Selestin said housing is the biggest challenge for her clients.

“A lot of people, they don’t want to leave,” Selestin said. “But they’re going toward I have to leave.”

Renters have to pay for their FEMA housing after February, and the prices are often out of reach for Lahaina’s immigrant working class. Sue Ellen William, a COFA community care navigator at Roots Reborn, said her clients live in FEMA housing that costs $5,000 to $6,000 monthly, but the families only make $1,000 to $2,000 a month. 

Families don’t want to leave, William said, because they work in Lahaina and that’s where they built their family. 

While Roots has placed clients in short term housing projects on the West Side, Selestin said those are planned to last two to five years. 

“Everybody’s concern is and then what? What’s going to happen? Where am I going to go? I don’t know if there’s enough houses to rebuild in time for everyone that’s affected.”

Akiwinas’ old home survived the fire, but her landlord marked it as burnt out to claim insurance money. She pays $4,000 a month for rent, and she’s not sure she’ll be able to handle the high price on her current paycheck. 

She has talked with her boyfriend about moving to the mainland, and she’s not sure what she’ll do. She’s rooted on Maui, where she’s lived for almost 20 years. 

Akiwinas has always wanted to stay in Lahaina, since it’s the closest place in the United States to home. Her kids don’t want to leave either because they grew up in Lahaina.

“This is where they belong, this is where they used to be. We need to find somewhere cheap, somewhere we can grow together.”

But the cost of living might be too high. Akiwinas said she’s working hard to move forward in life, but it feels like she’s working for her landlord. She lives paycheck to paycheck and can’t save any money to send home.

“I want to work for my family, for my kids. I want to see their future.”

Hopes and dreams

Wichep has two young kids that she puts above everything. She escaped last August’s Lahaina fires when her youngest was three months old. Wichep wants her kids to grow up strong and healthy and with lots of opportunities.

Eventually, Wichep hopes to go back to school, complete her degree, and be certified as a nurse to help other mothers.

Akiwinas wants to live in a house with her husband and her whole family. She hopes one day she can save enough money to go back to Pohnpei. Her favorite memories include going out with her family at night and grabbing bananas, papayas and mangoes off the trees.

If she returns to Pohnpei, Akiwinas thinks she’ll start her own business so she can be her own boss.  

“My grandfather, his land is big and empty,” Akiwinas said. “I just wish me and my boyfriend could go back. We’re going to make a big business over there. Store, maybe gas station.”

Akiwinas counts off the things she needs to do on her day off: checking the status of her housing applications, finding other low-income housing to apply to, and helping her mom re-apply for health insurance. She’s also waiting on a letter from her landlord telling her if she can stay in her house for another year and how much the rent would be. She considers following up, since her contract ends this month.

She also wants to rest. The tasks loom large in her mind, and she pushes ahead because of her faith in God. She’s grateful her whole family made it out of the fires.  

“I’m still alive,” Akiwinas said. “I’m doing all these processing and stuff that I’m still going through. But I’m not going to say that I’m sad. I’m happy for everything that God gives us to use, to eat, to work for. Everything.”

The rest of her family has returned to Lahaina, a 25-mile drive away. But Akiwinas is still applying. She has a niece and nephew that are celebrating their first birthdays in March. She wants to make it to both parties. Her family members keep messaging her and asking her to come, but she doesn’t know if she can.

She hopes her boss will give her the day off.