Kanani Oury cries at her computer a lot these days.
She launched “Makana no na Keiki” — an online Christmas gift drive and in-person holiday event for children directly affected by the Maui wildfires — to spark joy for that community, but she aches for the stories pouring into her email inbox from families asking for presents for their kids.
There are gift requests for nearly 650 keiki and counting.
There is the girl who needs size-10 shoes because the agencies handing out disaster supplies didn’t have her size, and she’s felt embarrassed wearing slippers to school. The family whose money has run out since their house burned down, asking for a laptop for their teen to use at college. The mom requesting a toy dinosaur for her 3-year-old because he feels sad that she couldn’t save his toys from the flames. Little kids who fear that Santa Claus won’t be able to find them now that their homes are gone.
And some families don’t ask for toys, just simple essentials such as food and school supplies. That worries Oury because it suggests to her that at nearly three months since the Aug. 8 wildfires struck, some Maui residents still aren’t getting even their basic needs met.
When Oury, who is co-owner of Stonefish Grill in her hometown of Haleiwa on Oahu, and a veteran event organizer, first decided to pull together the holiday drive, she assumed the requests would be simply for playthings. “I thought the kids would be asking, like, ‘Oh, I want a Barbie Dreamhouse’ — because I have three girls and that’s the stuff they want,” she said.
“But it has been really eye opening for me personally to see … they (applicants) are asking for clothes — a swimsuit, because a girl doesn’t have a swimsuit that fits her, or the mom doesn’t want her to have (a donated) one that’s used.”
She launched the “Makana no na Keiki” website after hearing heart-wrenching accounts of the wildfire devastation from her fiance, who is a Maui firefighter. She initially helped orchestrate grassroots efforts to get cellphones, batteries and other emergency equipment and supplies to Maui by boat and plane in the first few days after the fires, until disaster aid began to flow more readily from major organizations like FEMA and the American Red Cross.
“I felt like I still wanted to do more,” she said.
Oury at first discussed with friends the general idea of a toy drive for Maui’s affected children, but she wanted the keiki to feel they were getting meaningful gifts specially selected for them. “I want it to be like if they were going to their grandmother’s or their auntie’s house. … I know the difference when my kid gets a present, when that’s the present that they wanted,” she said.
A few weeks ago when Oury was briefly sick in bed, she hunkered down with her laptop and built the makanakeiki.com website almost overnight. “Gifts for the children of Maui’s wildfires,” the site reads at the top, a reference to the Hawaiian language title of the project. In only its first two days, the website received almost 200 gift requests, just through word of mouth.
How to register
To qualify to request a gift, families must be directly affected by the Maui fires in some way and have a child who is 17 years old or younger. Oury said she defines “directly affected” as “if the fires caused a material loss or change to your living situation. Our goal is to service families suffering loss and to ease the burden of that loss.”
Asked how she plans to ensure every gift recipient meets the requirement that they are “directly affected” by the Maui fires, Oury sighed. “I think that it’s important for us to have a little bit of faith in humanity,” she said. “I know some people can lie … but if some slip through the cracks and that’s the price that we have to pay in order to take care of the ones that really need it, I personally am OK with that, and I hope other people would be, too.”
The deadline for families to register on makanakeiki.com is Tuesday, to allow enough time for the gifts to be purchased by donors, shipped to Maui, wrapped and organized, and for organizers to get a head count to plan for a celebration for registered recipients and their families on Dec. 16 at Maui Nui Botanical Garden.
After clicking on the “Register” button, families are asked for the child’s name, age, an optional photo, a few words about the child’s likes and hobbies, and up to three “holiday wishes” for gifts. The requested items ideally should be available on the online shopping platform Amazon.
Each child is then listed added to the makanakeiki.com website with an ID number for an Amazon gift registry. (Oury said she refrains from publishing many of the sad details sent to her, because if she did, no thanks to the indelible nature of the internet, “this kid’s going to have to live with that for the rest of their lives.”)
Meanwhile, people who want to donate can click on the website’s “Gift the Keiki” button and view the wish lists. Clicking on the button below any child’s profile takes the donor to the Amazon gift registry, where keiki are listed in numerical order by their gift registry numbers.
There the donors can buy gifts directly through Amazon. The gift transaction is not touched by Oury or the organizations she is partnering with, including the nonprofit The Living Pono Project, Fujinaga Electric, Maui Oil, Stonefish Grill and Waste Pro Hawaii.
The item is mailed directly to a secured location on Maui. Volunteer “elves” on Maui already are starting to wrap the gifts on weekends.
It’s possible that not every request will be met, the website’s participation agreement and disclaimer says. “While we endeavor to fulfill as many wishes as possible, it’s important to note that this Christmas Toy Drive is donation-driven,” it reads in part. “The extent to which wishes can be fulfilled is dependent on the quantity and types of donations received. We appreciate your understanding that not all wishes may be fulfilled to the same extent. By registering you are acknowledging that your wish may or may not be fulfilled.”
However, Oury said in a Honolulu Star-Advertiser interview, “we’re gonna take care of all of them (the children). I don’t know how we’re going to do it. But if we get 1,000 kids, we’re gonna have at least 1,000 presents, (for) every kid that’s registered. I don’t care what I need to do. I will move mountains to make it happen, but we’re going to make it happen.”
Dec. 16 event
The plan is to distribute the gifts to registered recipients at the event being organized for Dec. 16 at Maui Nui Botanical Gardens.
Ka‘i Niles, a sales executive with Waste Pro Hawaii on Maui who is working with Oury and leading “on the ground” efforts on the Valley Isle to organize the live event, envisions a carefree day for registered families to enjoy food, games, live music and visits with Santa.
For Niles the cause is personal. Lahaina is her hometown, and “my family lost everything,” she said — multiple family members’ homes, including their generational home in Mala. She sees that many Maui children are suffering emotionally as their parents struggle to find new jobs and new places for the families to live. “We just wanted to give them a day where they could just enjoy, and kind of forget about all of that,” Niles said.
Oury said she told her volunteer team, “‘I don’t want any of us to talk about the fire to the kids. Let’s just let them enjoy,’” Oury said. “It’s not like you’re getting a present because your house burned down. You’re getting a present because you’re loved by your community.”
The alignment between the organizers is serendipitous: Waste Pro has been doing traditional holiday toy drives since 2019, had partnered with Maui Oil for the first time last year, and for this year had been trying to come up with a way to reach the families scattered by the fires, Niles said. Mutual friends connected them with Oury when she already had her website underway, “and we decided to collaborate because we’re doing the same thing, we have the same goal,” Niles said. “It’s an easy partnership.”
The gift drive and live event mean untold hours of labor and working through endless details, though. Oury is handling the website herself, and uploading gift requests as fast as she can between work and family duties, with hundreds of requests she hopes to get to this week. At last check late Sunday, about one-fourth of the 455 gift requests appearing 0n the website had been covered by donors, she said.
Niles said organizers will seek corporate sponsors to help ensure that all the registered children receive something. Also needed are more volunteers for the event, and donations of food, tents, tables and chairs, and other support, she said. People who want to help can connect with organizers at makanakeiki.com/volunteer.
Asked why she’s volunteered to take on so much, Oury said she feels she is trying to cultivate for her children the same kind of community cohesiveness and care she benefited from while growing up on Oahu’s North Shore.
“It was always the uncles at the beach making sure I didn’t drown, and kicking me off of my surfboard if I was at the beach when I should have been at school,” she said with a fond laugh. “I just really believe that if you don’t take care of the people around you, then really, where do we live and what are we doing? This is Hawaii. It’s supposed to be where you can count on your neighbor.”
MAKANA NO NA KEIKI
A grassroots, online drive on makanakeiki.com to collect gifts for children 17 and younger who have been directly affected by the Maui wildfires, plus an in-person celebration exclusively for registered recipients and their families on Dec. 16 at Maui Ola Nui Botanical Gardens.
Partner organizations include Fujinaga Electric, Maui Oil, Stonefish Grill, Waste Pro Hawaii and nonprofit organization Living Pono Project.
On makanakeiki.com:
>> Family and friends may register children with their top-three wish list for gifts; deadline is Tuesday.
>> Donors may purchase specified gifts through links to an Amazon registry.
>> Donors may also make monetary donations, to help purchase gifts for “unfilled wishes,” and to provide food and production support for the live event.
>> Volunteers can sign up to help with the Dec. 16 event.
For more information, see the website or email elves@makanakeiki.com.
