Melvin Moiha carries his mother from her wheelchair to the shower, from the shower to her bed. On Monday, he will dress her at 6 o’clock in the morning and drive his 74-year-old mother, Roz Moiha, from their Hana home to her dialysis treatment in Wailuku. 

For the three hours and 15 minutes that her blood filters through the dialysis machine, she will sleep in a reclined chair. Melvin will sleep in his Ford van. 

A nurse will walk to the parking lot and wake him. He will carry his mother home, cook her dinner and then clock-in as the nighttime dishwasher at the Hotel Hana Maui. “No can help,” Melvin Moiha says of the nights he has no time to sleep. “Only mom you got.”

Wednesday morning Melvin will wake his mother early, again. Roz Moiha will lovingly lay in her son’s arms, trying not to blame herself for her collapsed kidney. “It’s not my fault my kidney failed me,” Roz Moiha said. “What if your mom or your dad had? I wish they don’t have, but if they had, what you gonna do? What you gonna say?” 

In one month, Melvin spent an estimated one thousand dollars on gas, transporting his mother to her treatments on the “otherside.” 

Roz Moiha has spoken at public meetings, sharing her weariness with the Maui County Council. Traveling to dialysis three times a week for over a year, her testimony and exhaustion express the need for dialysis in Hana. Even though her blood must be filtered through dialysis, she does not want her days drained by the commute. “We not there fighting for ourselves, we fighting for everybody,” Roz Moiha said. “I not the only one gonna use that machine, one day your loved one gonna use it.” 

While a life on dialysis may be difficult to picture, Rebekah Soteros has contemplated the discouraging reality. The 27-year-old woman may strive to homeopathically prevent it, but the loved one on dialysis in her future may be herself.  “I was born with one functioning kidney and a little raisin,” said Soteros, who moved to Hana in October 2006. “The little raisin never formed.” 

A simple cold can burden her kidney, intensifying to the degree where Soteros must check herself into the hospital, needing dialysis. 

She tends to be the youngest patient in the room, although when she hears the machines beating on their individual rhythms, she moves slow, physically tires and feels she has instantly aged. 

“You see your life force being pumped out of you and put back in by a machine, this robotic thing,” Soteros said. “It’s a bizarre mind space....  “It’s like the whole thing becomes a dream and you almost forget the details that happen through the whole experience, because you have to de-sensitize.” 

Soteros grows endive in her garden and seasons her diet with herbs to help detoxify her kidney. She confronts dialysis only when ill. The thought of three times a week saddens her. When she considers kupuna religiously traveling back and forth, she sees their dialysis treatment as a bit of a contradiction. “It takes some of your life away,” Soteros said. “But really, dialysis should be a gift. It should be giving time back to people, time that could have been gone.” 

Equal to the drive, Soteros recognizes the culture shock. She looks out the Wailuku windows and sees the police department, not lauhala trees. She hears sirens and beeping horns, not mynah birds. 

Soteros sees the absence of dialysis in Hana literally taking people’s lives away from them. “I can’t imagine being born, raised and living here, where Hana’s ingrained in your body as home, then having to go to a place so industrial,” Soteros said. “Having to go there, to try and heal.” 

Unable to live at home and heal, 67-year-old Francis Lono was forced to relocate. “Six months I stay away,” said Lono, affectionately known as Uncle Blue. “I miss my family, being away so long.” Lono’s grandchildren live with him. Leaving them for six months felt like a year. The Maui Economic Opportunity bus allowed Lono to return home to Hana, transporting him every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to his dialysis care. The MEO bus picks him up shortly after his 7 a.m. breakfast.

Curving within inches of the one-lane bridges, Lono keeps the driver smiling, as he prepares himself to sit connected to his dialysis machine for four hours and 35 minutes.  “The doctor said, ‘You one big Hawaiian, we got to drain a lot of you,’” Lono said. “I lightheaded, they take out so much. By the time I reach home, I so dizzy, gotta just jump on the bed.” 

Lono relies on his sense of humor to strengthen the days he must leave behind the coo of his great-grandson or the familiar sound of Hana Bay rain, noenoe uakea. He jokes that the nurses wake him from dialysis by shaking his foot, because he one big Hawaiian and even though his left arm might be poked, he saves his right arm for swing. 

“Dialysis in Hana be better,” Lono said. “Soon as you done, you do something, have lunch, not fight the traffic.... “But need one spare generator. Hana always go off and we get hot blood.” Lono says he does not feel any discomfort during dialysis, unless he watches his machine. But when Lehua Cosma looks at him, when she looks at Roz Moiha and even when she looks at her own mother, she can see their strain. 

“Dialysis is painful, I feel it,” Cosma said. “I see it in them, when I look in their eyes and in their voices, they’re in pain but they’re not gonna tell you.” 

Cosma cries when it rains. She fears her father will encounter fallen trees on the dark road. And she prays her mother will not miss her dialysis treatment.  Cece Park, Cosma’s mother, must leave her Hana home at two o’clock in the morning, three times a week. She has watched her husband Andrew roll big boulders out of the fog and tow trees off the highway. Landslides trigger a tense thought, “I gonna miss my appointment for dialysis.” 

	Cici Park, 65, leaves Hana at 2 a.m. three times a week to make it to her dialysis appointment where she talks story with her friends. “Do it at home, you go that way, you on your own,” Park said. Photo by MARIA HOWELL/Hanaside News	Story continued next page.....