It was the first day of October, but the weather still held onto a distinct summer mugginess. At ten in the morning, the air was already thick and humid.
An industrial fan blew in the Nāʻālehu Resilience Hub’s narrow kitchen while volunteer Jesse Denny stood over a giant pot of chicken and vegetables boiling away on the stove.
“I’m usually not the cook. But I fill in wherever, it doesn’t matter,” Denny told HPR as he stirred the stew.
On a normal day, Denny would be out back, tending to vegetables in the hub's small garden. And on a normal day, about 150 people would show up at the hub over the next couple of hours for a free community meal. But ever since Lala hit, people in this community are still trying to figure out what normal means.
Denny said that torrential flooding during Lala brought “chaos” to the small towns of Nāʻālehu and Waiʻohinu in Ka’ū. Homes and businesses were buried in mud, the power and water went out, and the roads connecting the community to the rest of the island were blocked by debris.
The hub, housed in the Nāʻālehu Hongwanji, quickly became the heart of the response effort.
“This place was really busy. The building was packed from wall to wall, full of supplies, and it was a constant train of people picking stuff up, and lots of volunteers,” Denny said.
From hot meals to Lala recovery
The hub got its start as a meal distribution site during the pandemic. It serves about 150 free hot meals to the community three times a week and provides lunches to students during the summers. The hub knew how to keep its community members fed, but the scale of need in the wake of Lala was beyond anything the hub had responded to before, said Jessica Baker, one of the hub’s team leaders.
“We weren't just serving 240 elementary students. Now we were serving a whole community,” Baker told HPR.
And while the hub withstood the storm with only minor flooding, its kitchen was largely inoperable without water and power. Baker said that volunteers from far and wide showed up to help the hub provide meal service: a community member came over with a solar generator to help refrigerate the food the hub had onsite; another brought over their food truck, which acted as the hub’s satellite kitchen; and volunteers, many of whom lived in homes that were damaged by the storm, came to serve meals to their neighbors.
“It's like little blessings like that — big blessings actually — that showed up, and when you didn't even know you needed it, but you were like, yes, we can use that,” Baker said.
A chance to rebuild
For about two weeks after Lala, the hub served as the main distribution site in the area for food, water, propane, and other emergency supplies. The hub has now shifted its focus to addressing the long-lasting impacts of the storm, and Hub Team Leader Marcia Masters has been thinking a lot about what real recovery might mean.
Masters first moved to the area more than 50 years ago, when Nāʻālehu was a bustling plantation town.
“There were three banks, there was a movie theater, there was a grocery store, there were a couple restaurants. Plantation was going, and so there was a lot more going on,” she told HPR.
But when Kaʻū Sugar Company closed in 1996, the town lost its main economic engine, and Masters thinks Nāʻālehu never really regained its footing.
She told HPR that part of the recovery process should include bringing new opportunities to the region.
And she thinks the hub has a role to play in that — she and her team are working on building out a new commercial kitchen, which will be accessible to community members who want to sell value-added products, like smoked meat and jams. Another hub team member is hoping to put in a computer lab, and Masters said they’re toying with the idea of opening a little cafe.
“I'm hoping that the rebuilding of our community will be better than ever, and that we can come together and say, ‘What do we want to see happen here? How do we want to revitalize and become better than we were?’” she said.
