On a hot summer Wednesday afternoon in Lahaina, sisters Courtney Lazo and Ta‘ina Polanco watched six toddlers laugh and squeal on an inflatable backyard water slide. 

It’s been three long years since the sisters and their kids, nieces and nephews were all together. Polanco and her family moved out of state after losing their home in the August 2023 Lahaina wildfire and before getting to meet Lazo’s youngest child, who was born in 2024.

But the Lahaina homecoming event this weekend, with donated airline tickets and lodging, made it possible for the Polanco family to return.

“Things like this where our kids get to play together and hang out is really meaningful because we didn’t get to do this,” Lazo said Wednesday. “All of our kids, they just met for the first time yesterday.”

Reunions like these will be happening across Lahaina town this weekend with more than 100 people returning to West Maui for a three-day homecoming event put together by Maui County that will celebrate the cultures and community members that made the place so special.

The free community event starts Friday with a career fair from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Lahaina Cannery Mall and an evening of live entertainment at Kaibigan Ng Lahaina’s Palengke Night from 5 to 9 p.m. at Campbell Park.

It continues Saturday with over 30 Maui-based businesses, nonprofits and service providers offering crafts and services at Pa‘ūpili – Lahaina 3rd Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Lahaina United Methodist Church, as well as a ho‘olaule‘a from 5 to 9 p.m. at Campbell Park. 

The festivities wrap up Sunday with the main homecoming event from 5 to 9 p.m. at Campbell Park, featuring “an unforgettable epic jam sesh” with headliners like John Cruz and Brother Noland. 

“What we saw in the memorial events for the fire the first year was that gathering everyone together is like the most healing thing possible,” said Daryl Fujiwara, who is part of the Maui Economic Recovery Commission’s Maui Healing Journey Team that is organizing the homecoming.

Many people remain displaced three years after the fire destroyed more than 4,000 housing units in a town of about 12,000 people.

In a University of Hawai‘i study of fire survivors that’s been ongoing since August 2024, 42.3% of respondents who lived in the burn zone said they were still displaced from their home and the Lahaina area as of April and May of this year, while 43.7% said they were still displaced from their home but remained in the Lahaina area.

The idea of bringing people back to Lahaina for the three-year anniversary came from Lazo’s mom, whose husband is from a small town in Texas where they have a homecoming campout every year. How special would it be, Lazo wondered, if they could hold a homecoming not just for the people displaced by the fire, but all the Lahaina people who had to leave decades ago and longed to come back?

Fujiwara said the commission loved the idea and launched a video contest to collect the stories of people who had left the close-knit community. When the submissions came in, “we knew every single name,” said Fujiwara, a graduate of Lahainaluna High School who is also the founder and executive director of the Festivals of Aloha.

Originally, Hawaiian Airlines gave them 80 seats to fly Lahaina families home for free, “but we couldn’t tell people no, so we ended up taking the 103,” Fujiwara said. Luckily, the airline “was so gracious” and gave them additional miles.

The Hyatt Regency, the Westin, Outrigger, Honua Kai and Royal Lahaina Resort also provided rooms at no cost, “a huge lift as well” given that it’s the busy season for tourism, Fujiwara said.

Holding a community event in the heart of Lahaina town was intentional. The organizers wanted Lahaina residents to reclaim their space after the fire. Tourists have already started to trickle in for limited commercial tours out of Lahaina Harbor, and Fujiwara said they wanted Lahaina people to have a reason to return. 

“This is our opportunity to go back to the town first and be there before they open it up to the world again,” Fujiwara said. 

He remembered the one-year anniversary of the fire when they took community members on rides through Front Street.

“Right off the bus, we saw these old Japanese men crying,” Fujiwara said. “It was crazy. … They actually were saying to themselves, ‘I’m ready now. I saw my town. I know what it looks like. I remember what it looked like.’ And it was in those moments that we were able to see … yes, it’s a tough situation, it is very heavy down there, and a lot of people are still not ready to go back, but we need to create space for the ones that are ready.” 

Amy Petersen and Kamaile Luke, who work with the Hawai‘i Department of Health in Lahaina, said that the displacement has had a big impact on the sense of community, separating multigenerational families, co-workers, and community members who used to gather for sports, church services and other activities. 

Luke, the clinic site supervisor for the Lahaina Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic, said that many kūpuna who come for art groups or kanikapila jam sessions have felt lost since the fire. 

“A lot of what we hear from them is just this loss of not just home, but this loss of feeling like they don’t know where they belong,” Luke said. “A house is not just a home, and that couldn’t be any more well-expressed than in Lahaina.

“It’s a feeling. It’s the sense of community and love, and not knowing where to go and having that taken from you because of such a disaster, it’s been incredibly impactful. And three years later, it’s still impactful.”

Luke said some people who have never gotten therapy before or talked to anybody about the trauma of the fires are walking into the clinic for the first time to ask for help. Often, all they know is to “ask for Amy.”

Petersen, the assistant project director for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Emergency Response Grant, said with such a wide range of trauma and needs in the community, the best thing providers can do is meet people where they are.

“In whatever moment it is, that’s the emotion that you hold space for or share space with, without any expectation of changing that moment,” Petersen said. “I think it’s just being really present and meeting people exactly where they are in the moment that they come in.”

Petersen said the homecoming will likely stir an “array of emotions,” but overall she thinks the thoughtfulness and intention that went into the planning will create a “really beautiful” opportunity for the community to come together. 

“People recognize that you heal in communities,” she said.

At least for a weekend, Front Street will feel like the local-style marketplace it used to be, back before the mom-and-pop bakeries and fishing stores slowly gave way to trinket gift shops and tourist attractions, said Lazo, a member of the commission who ran the video contest and is also part of the community advocacy group Lahaina Strong.

She said it’s “surreal” to have her sister back in Lahaina for just the second time since the fire.

“I feel like it’s bittersweet, honestly,” she said. “I fantasize on what it would be like to have everyone back home and this not just be a weekend thing where I have to drop my sister off at the airport on Monday and we don’t know the next time that they’re going to be back.”

Before the fire, Lazo and Polanco lived on the same property. Lazo would bring Polanco’s family smoothies every single morning — “my other half, he misses that,” Polanco said — and convince her sister to do “weird little classes” like workout dance sessions.

After they lost their homes in the fire, Polanco worried about raising a 1-year-old child in an uncertain world. They had nothing but the clothes they were wearing on the day of the fire. Her dad and stepmom lived in Washington state, so they left Maui for the Pacific Northwest, trading daily Shark Pit beach trips for gloomy, rainy, indoors weather. 

“I had such a hard time being in Washington. I was really, really depressed,” Polanco said. “All I would talk to my other half about is just coming home and being on Maui.” 

A year later, they moved to Ocean View on Hawai‘i island, where they’ve been ever since. Polanco said she gets emotional every time she flies back to Maui because “it’s the only place I want to be.”

“We’re keeping our eye open to kind of hear how things are on Maui, and we’re always looking to see if it’s possible for us to come back,” Polanco said. “But at the moment, we’re just kind of settled on Big Island and waiting for the right opportunity to come back home.” 

When Lazo was raising her oldest son, who’s now 16, she felt like she had “a really big village helping me.” Now that her sister and so many people have left after the fire, “it really feels like I’m raising my family almost in isolation.”

“Every person who leaves Lahaina, they just take a piece of your heart with them, wherever they land in the world,” she said.

Lazo and Fujiwara said they hope they can make the homecoming an annual thing to keep people connected to Lahaina. 

“We’re not trying to sell some fantasy of what healing looks like,” Lazo said. “It looks like however it’s going to look that day, but we’re going to be able to do it together.”

On Thursday, Toni Tuipelehake, her sister and mom flew into Kahului Airport from Las Vegas for the homecoming. Tuipelehake and her family moved to Lahaina when she was in sixth grade, and she graduated from Lahainaluna in 2000. Her sister, a year younger, was Fujiwara’s classmate.

Tuipelehake’s most formative memories began in Lahaina. She remembers spearfishing with her mom’s boyfriend, eating musubi on the beach, swinging on the branches of the famed banyan tree and breaking her braces chewing on sugar cane stalks. After college, she and her friends would drive down Front Street “blasting music like idiots.”

“I feel like so many of the memories I have growing up … live only in my mind now, because it’s gone,” she said. “So it’s really emotional for me.”

The family left Lahaina in 2014 after Tuipelehake’s dad passed away. Tuipelehake’s husband is in the military, and she bounced around the world before ending up in Vegas. 

Tuipelehake and her sister visited Lahaina three months before the 2023 wildfire and had a “wonderful time” seeing old friends and eating at their favorite restaurants, and she’s grateful she got to experience it before everything burned. Her sister and mom came shortly after the fire to help hand out food and supplies, but this is her first time back. 

“I’m not ready to see the devastation,” she said. “I feel like it’s going to be really sad, but like incredibly beautiful to see all the people coming together. Because I believe that’s what makes the town is the people, the sense of community, the support that we can share and love that we show one another.” 

She said the family would love to come home to Lahaina someday, but given the costs and how limited housing is after the fire, “we really didn’t want to take away from the people who needed it.”

For now, she’s just going to enjoy as much of Lahaina as she can this weekend. As the plane flew over Maui, she looked out the window and felt the pressure of daily life slip away. 

“There’s just something so grounding about being in Hawai‘i, like there’s just a feeling when you get off the plane — the air, the smells, like everything just feels like home,” she said. 

Mayor Richard Bissen was also at the Kahului Airport on Thursday to welcome the Tuipelehake family and others back to Maui. The mayor has said the recovery from the wildfires “is about more than rebuilding homes and businesses.”

“It’s about restoring the connections that make Lahaina such a special place,” he said in an announcement for the event earlier this month. “Lahaina Homecoming celebrates our community, welcomes families back home, and reminds everyone that Lahaina’s spirit remains strong.”