‘I'm just waiting and waiting': Filipino survivors feel left out of Maui fire recovery efforts

The Guardian

7 hours ago

Alfred Dasugo, 84, says he's tired of waiting for help.
A Filipino immigrant, Dasugo has called Lahaina home for more than a half century. As a young musician, he performed at the Royal Lahaina Resort with famed ukulele player Nelson Waikiki. Later, he spent 25 years working for Maui county parks and recreation, coaching volleyball and basketball to generations of youths.
After the catastrophic 2023 Maui wildfires engulfed the town, killing at least 102 people and destroying more than 2,000 homes, Dasugo bounced between hotels under a temporary housing program fully funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). Then, after 18 months, the agency began charging him rent.
Dasugo appealed to Fema, which deducted only a fraction of his rent, leaving him with a hefty bill of $1,215 a month. Unable to afford rent and three meals a day, he tried to get on food stamps, but was told his 'income was too high', even though he was living off social security checks.
He applied for a host of temporary housing projects, but none had any openings. The wait time for some modular homes, he said, is two years.
'All I'm doing is just waiting and waiting and waiting,' Dasugo said.
Filipinos like Dasugo accounted for about 40% of Lahaina's pre-fire population and form the backbone of its lucrative tourism industry. Two years after the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century, many say they have been left behind in Maui county's wildfire recovery efforts due to long-standing socio-economic disparities, as well as language and cultural barriers. It's a systemic failure that some advocates say reflects Hawaii's colonial history and the exploitation Filipino immigrants have long faced.
From 1906 to 1946, the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association recruited more than 120,000 Filipino migrant laborers, called sakadas, to work on the islands' sugar and pineapple fields. As the Hawaiian economy shifted from plantations to tourism, Filipinos became overrepresented in service jobs. Today, they are the largest immigrant and the largest undocumented group in Hawaii.
Filipinos are 'essentially seen and treated as a labor source' at 'the bottom of the social hierarchy in Hawaii', said Nadezna Ortega, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and executive director of Tagnawa, a Filipino feminist disaster response organization in Hawaii.
The disproportionately high number of Filipinos employed in the tourism industry has made them particularly vulnerable to the economic fallout of the wildfires, advocates say, as hotel occupancy rates and related jobs were slow to return to pre-disaster levels.
'Most Filipino families in Lahaina are living paycheck to paycheck, and that was before the fire,' said Eric Arquero, executive director of Kaibigan ng Lāhaina, a non-profit supporting Filipinos and immigrants in west Maui. 'We're realizing basic needs like food, healthcare are now taking a secondary, tertiary backseat.'
One in three Filipino wildfire survivors has experienced PTSD symptoms, and nearly half are struggling to put food on the table, according to a report from Tagnawa. This financial anxiety has also led to a spike in domestic violence. A more recent report from Tagnawa found that more than half of female Filipino fire survivors reported an increase in conflict at home. One in five said they felt unsafe in places where they sought shelter; a similar number reported engaging in 'survival sex' – kissing, hugging, touching or intercourse – in exchange for housing, food or clothes.
Community organizers say many Filipinos have been left out of relief programs that do not take into consideration their renter status and cultural background. Community surveys found that more than two-thirds of Filipino survivors were renters prior to the fire, but the $1.6bn in federal disaster funds were primarily earmarked for efforts to rebuild owner-occupied homes, leaving little for direct rental assistance.
The process of rebuilding Lahaina has been excruciatingly slow for all. As of early August, only 45 homes in Lahaina have been rebuilt, with more than 400 permits issued. No commercial buildings have been rebuilt. The majority of survivors remain in temporary housing or have left the island.
In addition, Filipinos in Lahaina primarily speak Ilocano or Tagalog; nearly two-thirds live in non-English speaking households. Yet applications and information about resources are often only in English.
'It's been quite a road for an organization like ours,' said Arquero, of Kaibigan ng Lāhaina, whose translators helped bridge the gap between survivors and government agencies. 'The Filipino community here became its own diaspora.'
Arquero said direct translations from English to Tagalog and Ilocano were incredibly challenging and time-consuming for an organization that has limited resources and staff.
Nelson Salvador, the interim executive director of the Hawaiʻi Workers Center, said the worst might still be forthcoming. Direct assistance programs through Fema are set to expire in six months, and if the government does not extend aid, he said evictions could rise after benefits end.
In late May, Filipino organizers with the Hawaiʻi Workers Center launched the Lahaina Filipino Fire Survivors Association, a grassroots initiative to address the most urgent needs of survivors, including pushing for an extension of Fema assistance, a rental assistance program and a community advisory board made up of renters, including many Filipino families and workers.
Another barrier survivors faced is new living arrangements that disrupted traditional support systems. Many lived in multigenerational households, relying on one another for care, and being separated into cramped hotel rooms was often a traumatizing experience. As a result, the mental and physical health of elders suffered from being isolated from loved ones, advocates say.
Chamille Serrano, a bank worker, and her family have moved four times in the past two years, going from hotels to Airbnbs to a brief period of homelessness. Her grandson, she said, was just two months old when the fire erupted.
'Even when we were moving from one place to another, it was also a full-time job,' said Cerrano, who immigrated from the Philippines to Lahaina in 1987.
Since moving into a modular home in Lahaina last December, through a county-funded temporary housing program, she said she's felt more at peace, knowing that her family won't have to uproot their lives again until their old house is rebuilt. But the trauma still lingers.
'Losing that house from my mom and my dad – I have not gotten to the acceptance phase,' she said, her voice breaking. 'It's been two years and it's still fresh for me.'