A Reflection of KNL by Eric Arquero
Kaibigan ng Lāhaina’s Executive Director, Eric Arquero, offers his reflection of the devastation caused by the Lahaina fires. Overwhelmed by the unknown, he describes the mixture of emotions — mourning for his community while taking action through volunteering and searching for meaning while observing the mounting frustration and uncertainty — all while navigating how to move forward in rebuilding a town, a community, and a home that was lost. His reminder to readers: “We are living connectors to our past, to our culture and with the community that feeds us and nurtures us and lets us be contributors to the health and wellbeing of a small town in West Maui.”
Kaibigan ng Lahaina Executive Director, Eric Arquero, shares his insights for an exercise during a cultural and language training held in June 2025.
Responsibility, the idea and value that drives so many Filipinos, is not one that cannot be easily breached or ignored. When you watch your hometown become decimated to rubble and ashes, knowing that loss of lives accompanied with loss of homes and the loss of security it’s hardly ever possible to sit idle and watch. No matter what kind of uncertainty and heartbreak you, yourself, are undergoing. You learn to deal with the blows as you try to shield yourself from them as well, with the reasoning that someone else is in a worse position than you are and so it is your responsibility to help others up because someone else had helped you up at one point in time. The you in this dialogue refers to me and the sentiments of this statement are felt with such deep and profound means that recovery overtook my mind and expanded my energies to the point where my whole life has become dedicated to Lahaina and the future of my hometown.
The morning after the fires that engulfed and destroyed Lahaina, I sat in my car on the beach, the only place I could find cellular signal. I spoke to family members on the continental U.S. on a very unstable signal, and they broke the news to me - “Lahaina is gone”. How do you even conceptualize that statement when all you knew about home and place was the very town that people are telling you is no longer there. I drove to my church, where my parents are the pastors, only to be greeted with my parents and family members attempting to cook enough food to feed about the fifty evacuees that made the five mile trek up north of Lahaina. Unsure what to say when questions like “do you think my house made it?” or “I can’t reach my family, how can I know they’re safe?” In retrospect, I wonder why they asked me those questions, why was the expectation that I would know anything when I knew nothing but “Lahaina is gone”.
That same morning, I drove around the backside of West Maui, through narrow and crowded roads of Kahakaloa into Maluhia and eventually into Waiehu and went to buy supplies without knowing for whom and for what? How do you even anticipate what you need when you know very little about the actual situation. It was in the back corner of a Target where I finally looked at my phone, multiple missed calls, text messages from family and friends asking if my family was safe and a plethora of social media posts declaring “Pray for Lahaina”. With a scroll of the screen there it was: aerial footage of a gray and smokey landscape. It was alien and familiar at the same time but after a minute the images made sense. The familiar seawall that we would hang out on to watch sunsets when I was in middle school created the frame and as the camera panned upwards, the distinct outline of the Mount Pu’u Pa’u Pa’u where the L looked down at the war-zone of a town, devastated, smoky, destroyed, gone.
I mourned for a day. Trying to make sense of what had happened. To know the town that raised me was no longer standing, to hear of accounts of what family and friends endured to evacuate, and to learn the growing lists of missing persons of which included familiar names - old classmates, co-workers, friends of family, church members, acquaintances and old neighbors. After the shock had worn off, I sat in my cousin’s living room in Makawao deciding that I could not simply sit and wait for word, or think of a plan. People I knew were hurting, people I knew were lost and it was my responsibility to help, to do something to make the situation better knowing that I alone could not solve anything but still feeling a deep sense of obligation and duty to be present. So, I drove into Wailuku, entered the Maui War Memorial Gym and signed up as both a volunteer and an evacuee.
Spending five days volunteering, I experienced incredible highs and lows. I was met with the looks of people I knew, devoid of hope, full of shock, trauma, sadness and defeat. But I also watched as thousands of people came to volunteer their time and efforts to assist, to bring donations of goods, meals, and even money. Despite all of this there was a deep frustration brewing inside of me, something I couldn’t define because I had immense gratitude for the amount of support that was being given to my community and yet, it felt incredibly wrong and insufficient in some way. I finally realized that what was bothering me was that so many people wanted to decide what was best for Lahaina, that all these efforts were diminishing the voices and stories of Lahaina in turn for a narrative that centered around the work instead of the people and that deeply troubled me. I finally decided that it was best to end my time at the shelter and go back to Lahaina and be in the community and the timing was welcomed because within a week the shelter had closed and the recovery operations were centralized back into West Maui as residents returned home to assess the damage of their homes/properties.
I remember the first time I returned to Lahaina. Having to wait in traffic to see if the County of Maui Police would let me pass onto the road. I remember having to call in a favor so I could sneak into a convoy of trucks bringing supplies into Lahaina and how frustrating that was to get permission just to drive home. I remember bracing myself to see Lahaina and I remember vividly the way my eyes welled up and did not stop running as I drove through post-fire Lahaina, burnt down structures, the distinct smell of ash and smoke, and that from the roadway I could see all the way to the ocean and turn my head to see directly to the mountains because neighborhoods had been flattened by the fire. I remember the feeling, only being able to recall a similar emotion when my grandmother died - that sense of loss, that sense of never again being able to see her or hear her voice the same in the loss of Lahaina: never being able to see Lahaina, never being able to experience the Lahaina I had grown up in and had made home.
For weeks after that initial drive through I dreamt of Lahaina. I had dreams of driving down Wainee St. on my way to Dickinson Square to visit my friend’s massage business; or driving down Papalaua St. to go to Bank of Hawaii, or even driving down Front street at night as I used to do with friends in high school. I went through a similar process when my grandmother died, having vivid dreams of memories doing ordinary things like peeling oranges, or cutting up mango to eat; or playing while she would “salapay” clothes on the laundry line. It was in this I knew that I was mourning the loss of Lahaina, the Lahaina that I knew and loved and would never get to experience again. And just like the days after my grandmother’s funeral, it was expected that life would continue, that every day obligations would be met and yet unlike my grandmother’s passing I just didn’t seem to know how.
My parents and our church came to me and asked “what do we do?” and I didn’t have a definite answer but only “something, anything”. Lahaina had been closed off to the rest of the island and the world it seemed, and community efforts in the means of resource hubs organically sprang up providing food, meals, personal goods, medical care and havens of gathering for those mourning. The idea to serve hot Filipino meals was a given, with so many of the church congregation workers in the hotels and restaurants in Lahaina. Plates of pinakbet, pancit, chicken adobo, bicol express, fried chicken and suman were given out weekly on a Monday afternoon to Filipinos searching for comfort as they made their temporary homes in hotels and condominiums that they worked at - cleaning hotel rooms, washing dishes, tending to landscape. The appreciation and gratitude given for something as simple as a hot meal was profound, because it wasn’t just a feeding of the body but of the broken spirit of Filipino families across Lahaina. It was a small effort, with a large impact.
From those humble efforts, the call was made to gather concerned and capable Lahaina Filipinos to come up with solutions for our community. The sense of bayanihan was strong and the concern that too many Filipinos were in “hiding” to mourn and heal as we so often do because culture prevents us from ever admitting defeat or struggle. Kaibigan ng Lahaina wasn’t born out of necessity. Our people know how to survive, it is ingrained in our minds and hearts as our people have survived the worst of conditions and oppression in the Philippines. But Kaibigan ng Lahaina was born out of a passion: for both our Filipino community and our hometown of Lahaina. It was the way we could imagine honoring what we lost and what we kept from the fires and assuring that Filipinos in Lahaina would have a bright light to help guide paths towards recovery, resilience and “survivance”.
And it wasn’t that we knew exactly what we were going to do as a newly minted organization. In fact, our inspiration was driven through the experiences we were living through as survivors ourselves. In seeing how difficult navigating resources was for us even though we all had a good handle of the English language and understood systems and processes, we worried that our kababayans were having a much more difficult time and that the idea of losing our community members shook us to work harder, to vision larger and to go into the depths of survival and help translate these processes beyond language but in culture too. We found the American system of disaster recovery was too foreign for many of our people, and time just seemed to never be on people’s side despite it feeling like time was standing still. I imagine like many of our ancestors, moving to more fertile ground was a common practice when one place became too barren to bear fruits for livelihood and we knew that was high possibility that greener, more cheaper pastures would be sought; and we knew that our people didn’t choose to live in Lahaina because it was economically beneficial but because the place was so special and the community so strong that people could feel at home here. A place where roots could be replanted and the fruit of future generations could flourish. Like many places in Hawaii, Lahaina was America but it also allowed our people to hold onto their Filipino values, and cultural practices with greater ease. The proximity to the motherland perhaps provides a greater sense of security for Filipinos in the diaspora.
The beginning of Kaibigan ng Lahaina was difficult to navigate. The feeling of trying to be everything with the reality of not having much to offer but our persons and talents was difficult to conceptualize. Mostly because in our culture, you cannot show up empty handed, you cannot present help without the tangible reach to lift up others and we simply didn’t have the capacity to do that so. We did what we could and that was: to be present. To be the eyes, ears and a temporary voice of our Filipino community. The balance of being Filipino and Lahaina wasn’t an easy task because not only did we grow up with the necessity to be assimilated to an American culture, but also to the localized culture of our town. One that is communal at the heart but can deafen the voices and narratives of individual experiences. In the beginning we agreed we’d be Lahaina which felt like a good decision because we could not be effective if the community felt we would disturb the already fragile social system after the disaster. We embody Lahaina because we consider our neighbors, and the extended neighborhoods we have a part of. We hold onto the small-town easiness and we uphold the long time Lahaina tradition of caring for our elderly and our children. However, in more recent days we now hold importance to being Filipino, to upholding and elevating the languages, the cultures, the values and philosophies that we carried with us when we migrated to Hawaii. We are now trying to embody the resilience of our ancestors through a learning and re-learning of what indigeneity means for settlers in a colonized land. We now search for purpose within circles that vibrate with the languages and mythologies of our forefathers, and we make that true in Lahaina not only by sharing them but by living in them and using our circumstances in the now to be a channel for those traditions to resurrect. We as Filipinos have two homes we desire to return to, the home in Lahaina that shelters us and the home in the Philippines that guides us forward. That is what Kaibigan ng Lahaina is: pathways towards home in the multi-faceted definition of physical and metaphysical spaces.
Kaibigan ng Lahaina takes on a monumental task but in reality it is not just agency that we bring to Lahaina. The work of doing disaster recovery was the door to usher in a movement that is more than just housing and economic recovery. Kaibigan ng Lahaina gives identity to Filipinos that go beyond a story of migration and assimilation - it invites Filipinos to properly replant themselves in Lahaina without having to sacrifice culture and keeping true to the heritage that existed prior to colonization, prior to immigration, prior to assimilation but within the context of today. It demands innovation and it welcomes collaboration not to make culture the main point but to use culture as a platform to bridge people together and to create community bonds that doesn’t require disaster recovery to be the binding points in a tapestry of resilience and sustainability. We are living connectors to our past, to our culture and with the community that feeds us and nurtures us and lets us be contributors to the health and wellbeing of a small town in West Maui.
