They left Maui for college. Now they’re set on coming home and giving back.

Growing up on Maui, Chandler Cowell was always aware of what it would take to live on the island. 

“I grew up just knowing that, it’s very much a reality that the cost of living is pretty crazy in Hawai‘i, on all islands,” Cowell said. “I know that growing up that like if I wanted to come home and raise my kids, I had to like either go make a bunch of money on the Mainland and come home or find a really good job that I could just start working.”

It’s why she’s determined to never let her Upcountry home slip out of her family’s hands. 

“I’m like ‘Mom, like, I want you to always live here, please, please, please don’t ever like don’t live here,’ ” Cowell said. “She’s like, ‘Yeah, but if my grandkids are on the other islands …’ I said, ‘I will pay your rent in this house. As long as you keep this house, you can come live on the Mainland, you can come to Estonia with me. That’s fine, but we need to have property here that we can come home to.’ And my brother feels the exact same way.”

Armed with three college degrees, Cowell is now at a fork in the road. She’s among the many college students or recent graduates with life-determining decisions to make — will they return to the island where they grew up or move to the Mainland for the long term? The Aug. 8 wildfires that devastated the island only added significant complexity of the decisions facing Maui’s young adults.

But for some college students who got a taste of life on the Mainland, the cost of living in paradise is worth it for the chance to come home.  

MAUI AS THE END GAME

Cowell has options and plans before she steadfastly intends to return to the Valley Isle for good. 

After graduating from St. Mary’s College in Moraga, Calif., in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in communication and Spanish, she completed a master’s degree in communication in February, and this spring she completed a graduate certificate in conflict resolution at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

The big picture will always include Maui for Cowell, a 2018 King Kekaulike High School graduate. She wants to raise her kids here and maybe coach or find other ways “to give back to the volleyball community and my community as a whole because I would not be anywhere without the community that helped shape me.” 

On May 18, 2023, Cowell tore her anterior cruciate ligament in her knee in a UH practice, ending a five-year college volleyball career on the court. She was on crutches and in a lockout brace when she left Maui on Aug. 7, the day before the Kula wildfire came within 200 feet of her home. She said if she had stayed, she wouldn’t have been able to evacuate with her mom across a gulch. The fires, Cowell says, have made her “more determined to come home and give back to my community.”

However, she looks at the landscape and knows that not all of her generation will be able to live long term on Maui. 

“We have a lot of people who are just coming in and buying a lot of vacation rentals, timeshares,” Cowell said. “Especially now with the fires, there is so much going on and I think it’s really hard, especially being a young person. We don’t make millions of dollars, we’re in our 20s. Like that’s just wild, you don’t just come out of college and be like, ‘Oh, I’m so rich. Let me move home.’ That’s just not a reality. So I know a lot of people who are just going to be on the Mainland for awhile. I’m hoping that I can come home.”

Cowell has her sights set on playing beach volleyball professionally. Once she’s done with her pro career, she plans to find an industry that she can work in remotely or start a new business on Maui. 

“I hope there’s changes that can come in our economy that benefits its people first and not necessarily just how much money can you make from it,” Cowell said. “I hope people who are moving there and who are buying space there can acknowledge and realize how that is such a privilege. And that unfortunately there are people who cannot and will never be able to afford the spaces that they are occupying at this time.”

GROWING UP AND GIVING BACK 

Nanea Estrella is a Lahainaluna High School graduate who won four state wrestling titles and was the 2020 national winner of the Tricia Saunders High School Excellence Award by the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, the equivalent of the Heisman Trophy for high school girls wrestling. 

She has won national junior titles, an under-20 age group gold medal at the Pan American Games, and now wrestles at the University of Iowa for coach Clarissa Chun, who is from O‘ahu and an Olympic medalist in the sport.

Estrella was back on Maui earlier this month to give clinics to the island’s youth wrestlers, something that her father instilled in her as she was growing up.

“It’s something that my dad has always told both me and my brother to do, is when you can give back you want to come back, and you want to give back, you want to grow the community because the island and Hawai‘i wrestling has helped you so much. And it’s got you to be the person that you are now,” Estrella said on May 13 as she prepared for a practice with youths at the Nakamura Wrestling Gym in Wailuku. 

As a Lahainaluna graduate, Estrella is significantly tied to West Maui, although her family lives Upcountry. She was home when the fire happened on Aug. 8 and her boyfriend’s mother was in Lahaina when the devastation occurred. Everyone she knows escaped the fire physically unharmed.

“I carry the Lahaina community with me in my heart, I always have, but now it’s just a little bit heavier in my heart because of everything that I’ve been through I want to share my experiences with the community,” Estrella said. “Now, I want to bring my community forward with me and I carry them with me everywhere. I still feel it. Everything that I’m doing, I want to be an inspiration to Lahaina so there’s a little bit of a way out.”

Estrella is a marketing major and plans to open her own marketing agency when she moves back to Maui after her wrestling career is over. She wants to help local businesses grow, especially as more start reopening in Lahaina after the fires. 

Kale Spencer, a 2022 Kamehameha Schools Maui graduate, went even farther for college to Long Island University, where he is a sports management major and an all-conference volleyball player for the Sharks.

“I think my way to give back, my opportunity to help the next generation or impact the community is to go through sports,” Spencer said. “I think with my major being sports management I can go away to the Mainland, learn in New York, the mecca of sports, and learn from the best of the best there and hopefully one day come back and teach what I’ve learned and through sports elevate our community.”

While exploring New York City has expanded his horizons, the 6-foot-6 Spencer plans to come home one day after pursuing a professional volleyball career. 

His family and his ties to Maui mean a lot to him as a Native Hawaiian. He’s the son of Charles “Bala” Spencer, who was the girls volleyball coach at Kamehameha Maui before suffering a massive stroke during an operation to repair a dissected aorta in November 2016 — Bala has made progress, but is confined to a wheelchair and does not speak.

Kale Spencer was the student body president at KSM and was an all-star in football, basketball and volleyball in high school. He concentrated much of his extra time away from school and sports on advancing causes for Native Hawaiians. 

“It motivates me a lot, I take a lot of pride in being Native Hawaiian,” he said. “Being in New York, I will say it again, it is such a different world. Me and like one or two other guys on our team are Native Hawaiian and we take a lot of pride in being that small percent and we wear it on our sleeves.”

OPPORTUNITY ON OTHER SHORES 

While some who left are set on coming home, others who stayed may not be able to do so in the long run. 

Jenelyn Santos stayed on Maui for college after graduating from Baldwin High School in 2021. She is currently the student body president at UH-Maui College and recently finished her associate degree in liberal arts. She is now applying to the nursing school there.

Her cousin Danny Domingo is a nurse in Las Vegas and has been a large influence in Santos’ decision to go into nursing. She is grateful that her major is available on her home island and at a lower tuition rate than Mainland schools.

“I guess it’s because everyone is here, my home is here, so it was easier for me,” Santos said of her decision to attend UHMC. “Also the cost was less than if I went on another island or in the Mainland.”

She plans to move to Las Vegas after gaining her nursing degree here.

“Just because the Mainland has more opportunities for nursing than over here,” Santos said. “I feel like there is more nurses needed here on Maui, but again the cost of living is very high. So, I don’t think I can handle that here on Maui. I feel like it’s cheaper on the Mainland.”

Santos added that she has family in Las Vegas, which adds to her decision to ultimately move there. She pointed out that a typical home on Maui costs about $1 million these days, “so I’m pretty sure that’s going to be higher once I finish college. … There’s plenty of positions (here), but the pay is just very low.” 

Kulamanu Ishihara, the interim vice chancellor of student affairs at UH-Maui, knows that educating students locally doesn’t always mean they’ll be able to stay. 

“We try to train them in these high-wage, high-skilled positions, but at the end of the day, those are really hard choices that people have to make,” Ishihara said. 

One UH-Maui program that Ishihara views as a prime example of helping local residents get an education while making a living is the LPN Bridge Program, which gives certified nurse assistants the chance to take prerequisites and apply to the licensed practical nursing program. UH-Maui has worked with both Kaiser and Ohana Pacific Health to help CNAs keep their jobs while attending school and doing clinicals within their workplace. 

“It’s a wonderful model because it’s that opportunity to upscale,” Ishihara said. “So the employers are familiar with their employees and they can upscale to the next level of training. And I think that’s been the challenging part, especially coming back to school if you’re working already. … But this model allows them to still earn a living but still come to school within their workplace. It’s a win-win for both the employer as well as the college and our community because we get more LPNs.”

UH-Maui is also working on a similar model for teacher training that allows educational assistants to take prerequisites and apply to the UH-Mānoa College of Education. 

When asked if she thought more young people might leave in the coming years because of the fires, Ishihara said, “I hope not.” 

“I want to see our people be able to thrive in our communities and live and work in the place that they love and that they call home,” Ishihara said. “I hope we can figure it out as a community to figure out ways in which we can support our people and keep them here.”

*This story is Part 2 in a limited series called “Crossroads” that takes a look at how last year’s wildfires and the high cost of living are affecting young people’s decisions to leave or stay in Maui County. Read Part 1 here.