When Solomone Fifitaniua visited a shelter to seek services in the days after the Lahaina wildfires, he found the maze of government agencies overwhelmingly complex and couldn’t locate an interpreter to help him navigate it in his native Tongan language. 

“I was feeling frustrated,” said Fifitaniua, 54, who said he can communicate in English but has difficulty reading the language and understanding formal English and government jargon. 

At first, a friend who could speak some Tongan helped him complete an application for FEMA assistance, but when his friend was no longer available, Fifitaniua stopped seeking official help. 

“I think it was too hard for me, and I really never bothered to go again to the FEMA,” said Fifitaniua, who camped in his sister’s back yard for a few weeks after his apartment on Front Street burned. 

Grappling with the aftereffects of the Aug. 8 fires that killed at least 101 people and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings has been difficult for every survivor, but the struggle is compounded for those who don’t speak fluent English, advocates say. 

About a third of Lahaina’s residents were foreign born and 36% of those ages 5 and older spoke a language other than English at home, according to Pacific Gateway Center, a Honolulu-based immigration nonprofit that opened a resource center on Maui in November. 

The unique language needs and cultural sensitivities of many survivors presented roadblocks for some seeking aid. Grassroots organizations that mobilized to help fill the gaps initially left by federal and state agencies say officials must be better prepared to serve limited English speakers in the next disaster. 

Dozens of groups, including Pacific Gateway Center and Language Services Hawaii, are supporting a measure this legislative session, House Bill 2107, that would establish a language access coordinator position within the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.

The coordinator would be responsible for creating plans to disseminate information in needed languages before, during and after emergencies and ensuring certified interpreters can be dispatched quickly to areas in need. 

FEMA Wasn’t Ready

Kalesita Anitema, a Tongan bilingual case manager with Pacific Gateway Center’s Immigration Resource Center, said not enough in-person interpreters were immediately available to meet Lahaina’s unique language needs. Many survivors fell through the cracks.

After Fifitaniua’s friend helped him complete a personal property loss reimbursement application, he ended up getting around $700. But Anitema thinks he was likely eligible for more.

“If he had an official interpreter, I feel like he could’ve gotten more personal property loss money,” Anitema said. “His friend got busy, no one else was able to help him, so he’s been sitting with no help for awhile now.”

He’s not the only one in that position, she said. Anitema is now handling the cases of 37 fire survivors, 34 of whom are Tongan, who are still having difficulty understanding what resources are available to them. 

“If they were initially helped in their language, they would understand the application process better so they would be able to advocate on their own behalf,” she said. 

When FEMA first arrived on Maui after the fires, they had two interpreters each for Spanish, Ilokano and Tagalog, but it took some time to hire in-person interpreters for all the languages needed by survivors, said Jovanna Garcia, language services coordinator for FEMA. A 24/7 language hotline was always available for service providers to tap into if needed, she said, though she acknowledged that many survivors wanted to work with interpreters face-to-face.  

FEMA later contracted with Language Services Hawaii for in-person language interpreters as well as Hawaii Interpreting Services for ASL interpreters, but the contracts weren’t approved by the state until October. Once they were approved, interpreters were stationed on a rotating basis at the Disaster Recovery Center in the Lahaina Civic Center. 

FEMA’s six-month contract with Language Services Hawaii is worth $2.5 million, according to Sue Zeng, president of Language Services Hawaii. The company provided interpreters for Spanish, Portuguese, Ilokano, Tagalog, Chuukese, Marshallese, Pohnpeian, Vietnamese and Tongan. The FEMA contract initially listed languages, like Japanese and Korean, that didn’t end up being necessary, Zeng said.

Many advocates said they felt it took too long to get the contracts finalized and interpreters on the ground, especially for Micronesian languages. 

FEMA wasn’t “ready for the ethnicities here, the races here,” Anetima said. “They didn’t come prepared for the languages, and they didn’t come prepared for the culture aspect, too.”

Garcia, who also coordinated FEMA’s language access response during the Paradise fire in California, said the diverse cultures of Maui and the fact that many people did not feel comfortable dealing with government agencies, made the response in Lahaina unique. Interpreters not only had to interpret, but they also had to bond with survivors and help them every step of the way, she said.

“The interpreters are family to the voices of Lahaina,” she said. 

Grassroots organizations, such as Roots Reborn, Pacific Gateway Center, Maui Economic Opportunity, We Are Oceania and others, as well as dozens of volunteers, also played a major role in the response. The state’s Office of Language Access also stepped in to hire interpreters for certain events until the FEMA contract was finalized, Zeng said. 

Pacific Gateway Center worked with AlohaCare, a nonprofit health center, to record video messages in seven languages and loop them through televisions in hotels where survivors were staying. The videos contained a script written in English by Pacific Gateway Center immigration specialist Emma Bell that was translated into six languages — Chuukese, Ilokano, Marshallese, Spanish, Tagalog and Tongan — and read aloud by interpreters. The organization also established a multilingual hotline on Sept. 18 and received more than 1,211 calls from clients seeking services in Ilokano, Tagalog, Spanish, Chuukese, Marshallese, Tongan and English.

Community groups also hosted resource fairs targeted towards specific groups. They played music, served culturally specific food and had information available in people’s native languages in order to build trust and encourage more community members to come forward and seek aid, said Terrina Wong, director of social and immigration services with Pacific Gateway Center. 

Garcia said she plans to push for these types of resource fairs to be used as models for disaster response in other parts of the country. 

“That was another ice breaker and made everything better because we were able to understand the culture, the background of how people speak and how they interact with others or what’s their favorite food,” she said. “All these things make a difference in trying to service them.”

‘A Blessing’ 

Interpreters didn’t only help people not fluent in English communicate in the aftermath of the fires but also offered emotional support and guidance, said Victoria Silva, a Spanish-speaking Lahaina resident who had to evacuate with her husband and four children on Aug. 8. 

“You were a blessing,” Silva said in Spanish to her interpreter, Carolina Davis, on a recent morning outside the Disaster Recovery Center. Davis, who is an independent contractor with Language Services Hawaii, was first hired by the state to do interpreting services in Lahaina and later by FEMA. 

Because the home she was living in near the Lahaina bypass didn’t burn down, Silva didn’t think she qualified for aid. But her place was uninhabitable for around three months because of the smoke damage and ash, and Davis helped show her what kind of assistance she could get, including rental assistance, SNAP benefits and temporary health insurance. 

Davis also helped her gather necessary documents to finish her citizenship application, which she had started before the fires. She became a citizen last month. 

Davis said ensuring language access is vital in any disaster. 

“Imagine you’re in Japan and you don’t speak Japanese and nobody speaks English, and you’re in the middle of a tsunami,” she said. “What would you do? And if you put yourself in that mindset, you would realize how devastating that would be and how lost you would feel.” 

Lessons Learned 

Covid-19 revealed some gaps in the state’s language access services, but Wong said, unfortunately, lessons weren’t learned.

“I think you’re seeing a response to this by the bills that are being introduced that our state really needs a statewide, coordinated effort in times of disaster on how we can reach our limited English population,” she said. “We need a protocol, we need an implementation checklist, we need a coordinated response because the key, in terms of lessons learned, is people really didn’t know where to go for help, and we realized also that we really needed, sorely, to build capacity for trained linguists to meet this need.”

One thing that became apparent during Covid was the need to be able to disseminate realtime, accurate information in multiple languages, said Aphirak Bamrungruan, executive director of the Office of Language Access. 

“Some people might rely on machine translation, which we know is not fully accurate,” he said.  “So I wish that we can improve (and) create a centralized, multilingual website that everyone can come to and receive real time or up-to-date information right away – easy to find, easy to navigate.”

Wong said she would also like to see agencies that put out the original documents using simpler English that is easier to understand and translate. 

One bill that survived crossover, Senate Bill 2782, would create multilingual accessibility standards for state entities disseminating information electronically.

Advocates say next time there’s an emergency, they want to see language access considered as a crucial part of every stage of response. 

“A disaster is not just a matter of will it happen, it’s a matter of when it happens,” Bamrungruan said. “Language access should not be an afterthought, waiting until it happens and then thinking about it, it should be incorporated into the planning stages.”

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by the Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation, Atherton Family Foundation and Papa Ola Lokahi.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.