Noelani Ahia on Maui Wildfire Relief, Healing and Hope

The day after the Lahaina fire, Maui Medic Healers Hui mobilized to provide volunteer medical support to the people of Maui. Over a year later, they’re still there. Founder Noelani Ahia spoke about Maui Medic’s wildfire relief efforts and her hopes for Maui’s recovery in an interview with Kimberly Middleton, Program Officer for Tides’ climate initiatives.

Maui Medic Healers Hui is a grantee partner with Tides Foundation’s WE LEAD and Crisis Response funds. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How Did Maui Medic Healers Mobilize So Quickly?

Maui Medic Healers Hui was able to mobilize the day after the fires in Lahaina in August of 2023. We had some infrastructure already because we had done street medicine work at Mauna Kea in 2019, and we had a system for being able to bring volunteers in, check their credentials and get them signed up very quickly, and then get them on the ground so that we could actually respond to people’s medical needs, mental health needs, and be a presence in the community for stability and care and access literally immediately after the fire. We were on the ground setting up in the hubs by Thursday after the fires, which were Tuesday, and haven’t left since.

Creating a Healing Center at the Royal Lahaina Hotel

We created a healing center at the Royal Lahaina hotel, which was the only hotel that was only servicing fire survivors. All of the other hotels were fire survivors mixed with tourists, which was incredibly uncomfortable and painful for our local fire survivors. So Royal Lahaina was kind enough to allow us to use space there.

We set up a space where people could come seven days a week to get first aid, over the counter medicines, herbal medicines, and then we had practitioners there seven days a week doing either acupuncture or acupressure massage, lomi lomi, which is a Hawaiian style of massage, and other types of of integrative and sometimes somatic bodywork practices that help people with trauma.

[Note: In summer 2024, Maui Medic’s clinic moved to the Lahaina Comprehensive Health Center.]

Long-Term Health Effects of the Maui Wildfires

We recently participated in the Maui Wildfire Exposure Study with the University of Hawaii at Manoa. One of our nurse practitioners is one of the lead investigators for that. We hosted them in our space at Royal Lahaina to actually gather the data. So we had hundreds of fire survivors come through that did blood tests, urine tests, spit tests, everything that the scientists needed in order to gather data, and this will be a five year long longitudinal study. We’ll be partnering with them throughout this process.

We’re trying to be holistic about understanding the mind, body, and spirit of what’s happened for our folks, understanding the historical trauma that already is inside of our local people, especially our Kānaka Maoli, but also our Filipino and Micronesian and Hispanic communities and other communities that are marginalized already. We’re trying to make sure we’re looking at what they were exposed to, on every level, and then making sure people don’t fall through the cracks so that we can treat people and hopefully prevent major illnesses from developing as a result of exposure after the fire.

Maui Medic Healers’ Hopes for the Future

When I talk about my hopes and Maui Medic’s hopes for Maui, I go back to something that’s been part of my prayer, my pule for years, and that is the restoration of pono.

In our language, pono is like righteousness. It’s the right path. And what that looks like is the restoration of our āina, or our land, and the restoration of our water, including our fish ponds and our wetlands and all of the things that settler colonialism destroyed, which was part of what created the conditions for the fire in the first place.

And then it’s the restoration of our people to the āina, because for Kānaka Maoli, our āina is Kānaka and Kānaka is āina. When we plant our bones back in the ground after someone’s passed away, those bones have collective mana, which is a life force energy that nourishes generations to come. So we are very, very deeply connected to our land.

And so the restoration of Lahaina has to look like, not the restoration to what it was pre-fire, but the restoration of its potential pre-contact.

Why Hard Conversations Are Necessary for Progress

One of the pieces that’s really going to be crucial is communication in a community, and having the hard conversations. And so one of the things my Medic Healers Hui is working on is a healing justice campaign, and being able to discuss the historical wrongs in a way that is not blaming or intending to make people feel bad. But it’s just telling the truth, because many people, quite frankly, just don’t know what they don’t know. And it’s important to spread the truth.

Learn more about Tides’ WE LEAD Fund and Crisis Response Fund.