Seventeen-year-old Michella Cabingas’ voice still catches slightly when she recalls not only how close her family came to losing their home and lives to the Lahaina fire, but also how the tightknit Lahainaluna High School music program and a wave of community support have since lifted the spirits and helped the healing process for scores of young fire survivors like her.
“It’s like a patch on my heart,” says Cabingas, a Lahainaluna senior. “It’s super awesome, the communal effort, and seeing the aloha from other islands, too.”
The Lahainaluna band had already been running short on musical instruments when it lost nearly 20 instruments in the August fires, said Jalen Baraoidan, band and choir teacher at Lahainaluna. The school is intact and the band students survived, he said, but some students who had taken home instruments to practice during the summer break had no choice but to leave them behind as they fled the flames with minutes to spare to save their lives.
Since that time KHS America, a company 4,300 miles away in Mount Juliet, Tenn., has donated to Lahainaluna a pallet of 17 new instruments — flutes, clarinets, trumpets, saxophones and more — that Baraoidan estimates together are worth tens of thousands of dollars.
When the Lahainaluna students opened the massive crate and first laid eyes on the gleaming, high-quality instruments, Baraoidan said, “the students were excited, screaming, just the sounds of joy.”
Cabingas said the students’ reaction was “‘Ahh! Ohh! Such new, rich toys!’ So excited to bust them open and just, like, let loose!”
More donations and aid have come from other sources, including Kalama Intermediate School in Makawao, Maui, and Jim Thompson, a retired band director in California, Baraoidan said. Lahainaluna alumni, and supporters from the University of Hawaii, also have lent help. A Baldwin High School student named Chanel Higa has raised $10,000 to support her band peers at Lahainaluna, Baraoidan said, and at least one more music company has offered assistance as well.
Some of the donations are flowing through classic Hawaii-style connections: Chad Kamei, a band director at Pearl City High School on Oahu, belongs to a national organization of band directors, so he knew some who wanted to help Maui students affected by the fires and he helped to lead them to his colleague at Lahainaluna.
“They were so gracious in trying to meet the needs of the school and community,” Kamei said. “I was just happy to be able to connect them together so that their music can help their community continue to heal. It is an opportunity for their students to contribute to their community with their wonderful music, and I’m so grateful to have been a small part of this musical healing.”
Tabor Stamper, board chair at KHS America, said by phone that while the donated instruments can’t erase the fire’s impact for the students, “if they can have that time during the day where they can just think about making music and being with their friends in the band and creating something, maybe they can forget, even if it’s just for a short time, some of what they’ve had to go through.”
Stamper added that as a former band director himself, he knows that “for a lot of kids, band is the highlight of their day, the reason they stay in school. … If they don’t have their instruments, they can’t get that. So that’s why it was important that we got the instruments to them as fast as we could.”
Cabingas says for herself and fire survivors like her, playing music with her friends in the band is indeed a healing kind of escape.
The fire along Lahainaluna Road started in an empty lot across from Cabingas’ home, just below the three schools on the hill, and it set her yard and a neighbor’s yard ablaze, she said. Her dad and some neighbors fought the flames with garden hoses. Sometimes the water stopped. Nearby cars began exploding. Smoke blacked out the sky.
Cabingas said that at police officers’ urging to evacuate, she and her mother and sister drove out of the burning town and found safe harbor at a hotel a few miles away, but her dad stayed behind with neighbors to protect their homes. Several torturous days with no contact passed before they would finally hear that her dad and neighbors and their houses survived. She still doesn’t like to think about that time.
Cabingas, who plays trombone, didn’t lose an instrument to the fire, but she has witnessed her bandmates’ struggle as they initially had to share the instruments that were left. She said the students were thrilled to reunite while temporarily attending “school within a school” Kulanihakoi High School in Kihei. Returning to Lahainaluna and playing music at their home campus and band room together with their friends, and now feeling so much support, has deeply touched them.
In a community where football often gets most of the spotlight, Cabingas said, “now that we’re getting all these donations coming in (for the band), it’s like, ‘Oh my god, someone really cares for us!’”
Cabingas continued, “Band for me is like my second home. It’s really taught me how to come out of my shell. It encourages me to be a better person and work hard and strive for what I want.”
Abi Hufalar, a senior who is student president for the music programs and a percussion player, said in a separate interview, “It’s really nice when we come together and make music — it feels like we’re doing something productive together. And it’s just a nice comfort space. I’m surrounded by a bunch of people that we love, and they’re supporting us while we’re supporting them.”
When Hufalar and Cabingas were asked whether there is anything more they wish the band could receive in support, they did not mention material goods, only their hopes that the community would turn out for their winter concert on Dec. 16 (see accompanying box). “If the community would show up for the band … We want everybody to see how hard we’re working,” Cabingas said.
Lahainaluna High School Winter Concert
Featuring the school’s jazz band, concert choir, concert band and symphonic band
>> When: Dec. 16; 5:30 p.m. doors open, 6 p.m. concert begins
>> Where: Jimmie H. Greig Gymnasium, on the school campus
>> Cost: Free admission
