He Was Displaced From Lahaina in the 2023 Wildfires. Now He's Going to the Philippines to Learn How Islands Rebuild.
One of 42 public high school students selected for the 2026 Hawaiʻi Sister-State Study Tours.
Student Snapshot
Name: Gabriel Akima
Preferred Name: Gabriel
School: Lahainaluna High School
Grade: 9th
Home Community: Lahaina, Maui — displaced to Kahului after the 2023 Lahaina wildfires; considers Lahaina home
Delegation: Ilocos Norte/Ilocos Sur
Travel Dates: March 14–25/26, 2026
Focus Interests / Extracurriculars: Lahainaluna Esports Club President (manages 40-person team, traveled off-island multiple times); Lahainaluna Band; FFA (Future Farmers of America) — traveled to Kahoʻolawe; NALU (Nature Activities Learning and Understanding) program; agriculture program; presented at a convention in front of 100+ principals, vice principals, and superintendents on the benefits of esports in the classroom; presented on college-level environmental science topics for a billion-dollar funding and grants context; has traveled to Japan 4 times
Career Aspirations: Education — he explicitly names teaching as his post-college goal and connects this trip directly to becoming a more knowledgeable, globally aware educator
Why They Were Selected
Gabriel was displaced from his home in the Lahaina wildfires, moved to an unfamiliar side of the island, made new friends, and kept going. His essay isn't about resilience as a concept — it's about what resilience actually looks like: a ninth grader managing a 40-person esports team, presenting to a room full of principals, walking on Kahoʻolawe, and now going to Ilocos Norte specifically to learn how other islands rebuild after disaster. He's not going for himself. He's going for Lahaina.
What They're Excited About
Learning from a place his parents can't take him; connecting with people he'd otherwise never meet; the shock of being waitlisted and then getting in; understanding how other communities recover from disaster — specifically applicable to Lahaina's recovery
He Was Displaced From Lahaina in the 2023 Wildfires. Now He's Going to the Philippines to Learn How Islands Rebuild.
Gabriel Akima was at home in Lahaina when the fires came in 2023. Afterward, he moved to the other side of Maui — to Kahului, an unfamiliar place — and started over. New school, new neighbors, new social world. He kept going. He became president of his school's 40-person esports team, presented to a room full of principals on the value of gaming in education, walked on Kahoʻolawe through FFA, and applied to the PAAC Sister-State program. He was waitlisted. Then a spot opened. And the Lahainaluna freshman, who has been making new friends in unfamiliar places since the night Lahaina burned, is headed to Ilocos Norte.
Gabriel is a ninth grader who carries more lived experience than most students twice his age. He's the president of Lahainaluna's esports club, a band member, a participant in the NALU program that applies Hawaiian cultural frameworks to Western science, and a student who has presented college-level environmental science research for billion-dollar grant contexts. He has been to Japan four times. He wants to be a teacher. And he is going to the Philippines specifically because he has a question: how do islands get up after a disaster, and what can Lahaina learn from it?
Gabriel was selected because that question isn't abstract for him. He lived through the disaster. He knows what the before looked like and what the after feels like. His essay doesn't use the word "resilience" the way students sometimes do — as a credential. He uses it the way someone does who has actually had to practice it, in Kahului, without the neighborhood he grew up in. That is a very different kind of preparation for an international study tour.
"I hope to see how other islands are able to regrow after a disaster. It is important to apply different methods for growth to my community after the Lahaina Wildfire impacted Maui so devastatingly." — Gabriel Akima, Lahainaluna High School, Class of 2029
When Gabriel returns to Maui from Ilocos Norte, he'll carry something that Lahaina's recovery effort can actually use — a firsthand account of how another community rebuilt, from someone who already knows what rebuilding costs. For legislators and funders focused on Maui's recovery, that is not a student trip. That is community research, done by a constituent who has skin in the game.
