After Lahaina fire, 16 relatives crowd into one Maui house

Aug. 21, 2023 | By Julia Wick, Staff Writer 

AIKAPU GARDENS, Hawaii —  The 4-year-old girl sat in the center of the living room chaos, jamming two empty crayon boxes together.

“It’s going to be a house,” whispered Keona Valiente, who was perched precariously between a chair and the circular glass dinner table.

The table was crammed with tins of baby formula, a half-eaten bag of King’s Hawaiian sweet rolls, vitamins, plastic water bottles marked with initials in black pen — the clutter of 16 people under a single roof.

They had all been living in the three-bedroom house in central Maui since the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century laid waste to their beloved town of Lahaina.

A shirtless uncle washed dishes at the sink. Another uncle rocked a sleeping infant in one arm while scrolling his cellphone. Outside, the wind whipped through a rack of donated clothes left out to dry under the darkening sky.

Keona babbled wistfully to nobody in particular about Lahaina and things broken in the fire.

“The fire? What’d you say?” her aunt, Relyn Delfin, asked from across the table.

Aris Valiente carries his baby, Allison, at the Delfin family home in Maui, where he and other relatives displaced by the Lahaina fire are staying while looking for permanent housing.

Keona responded with a little sound somewhere between a whimper and a roar, prompting her mother, Rochelle Valiente, to glance over from a stool at the kitchen counter.

She spoke gently to her daughter, asking whether she was trying to build a house. But Keona didn’t answer.

The girl was suddenly vibrating with delight: Marshmallow, a Shih Tzu mix belonging to her aunt and uncle, had jumped on her leg.

Feelings can shift quickly when you are 4 years old. Especially when everything you own now fits in a single, Disney-character covered backpack.

Four of Relyn’s brothers, three of the brothers’ wives and six of their children — 13 people — had moved in with the Delfins since the Aug. 8 fire, when all four brothers lost their Lahaina homes.

A fifth brother and his wife also lost his home, but they’ve been staying at the Marriott where he works.

Relyn was the first of the Valiente siblings to come to Hawaii, migrating to Maui from the Philippines in 1997. Her husband Jowel joined her 10 years later.

Her siblings slowly followed her across the Pacific, building lives and families in Lahaina, where Filipinos make up about 40% of the population.

Relyn and Jowel moved out of Lahaina in 2012, but still commuted half an hour or so to jobs there and in neighboring Kaanapali.

They and their extended family bus the tables, prep the food, sell the souvenirs and tend the landscapes that made West Maui’s resorts feel like a manicured paradise, at least for the tourists who could afford the nightly rates.

Nearly all of the adults worked two jobs, juggling shifts to save for a better life and send money home to relatives in the Philippines.

—

Back in the living room, Relyn’s sister-in-law Beverly Valiente opened a can of evaporated milk and grabbed a jar of spices to take out to the backyard, where she was cooking a vat of chicken macaroni soup on a gas stove.

Her husband Knorlee was still out in Kaanapali, working an evening shift doing maintenance at the Outrigger hotel.

Jowel and Relyn’s 14-year-old daughter Aixa was in her room watching zombie movies on the queen-sized bed she now shared with her teenage cousins Crystal and Jennah. The girls sleep parallel to the head of the bed, so they can all fit.

Keona and her 4-year-old cousin Noah played like puppies on the still-folded sleeping mats in the corner of the living room, wrestling and kicking and hugging. Later that night, those same mats would be spread across the floor for five people to sleep. Two other people sleep on living room couches.

“No. His body,” Relyn said. “In the car. He’s dead.”

Everyone returned to clicking around on their phones. The network drama playing unwatched on the living room TV suddenly sounded very loud.

Someone switched the channel back to local news, where aerial footage of the disaster played on loop, interspersed with segments about where to find resources and donated goods. Everyone agreed it was strange, watching their lives on the screen.

Editor’s Note: For the full article, visit the Los Angeles Times website. Visit the GoFundMe page to donate relief funds for the extended family.

There was just so much to figure out, an unbearable amount. Someone had started a GoFundMe for the extended family, but so far it had raised only $650.