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When 21-year-old Menlo Park resident John Marc Bautista heard that Lahaina was on fire, he immediately thought of his family.
Bautista has 15 relatives who live, or have lived, in Lahaina. It started with two of his uncles who moved to Maui around 50 years ago and raised their families there. Now, multiple generations of Bautista’s extended family call Lahaina home.
“That was also my favorite place to be in the world. I would go visit them every summer,” Bautista said. “So it’s pretty devastating to hear everything that happened. Thankfully, they’re completely safe. But they have lost everything.”
Bautista said the fire claimed the homes of his grandmother, both his uncles and a couple of cousins. Some of his family members worked in the restaurant business and the restaurants they worked at were destroyed by the fire.
“They’ve lost their homes and their jobs,” he said.
As an act of solidarity with his family and to raise awareness about the devastation in Lahaina, Bautista decided to embark on a 100-mile walk beginning on Aug. 12.
“I walked over the course of 58 hours,” Bautista said. “I went from Menlo Park, up Skyline, down to Highway 1 to San Gregorio, walked all the way up Highway 1 through Pacifica and ended up in San Francisco.”
As Bautista’s walk started to draw attention, he encouraged people to donate to a GoFundMe set up by a friend of his cousin, from which all proceeds will go directly to Bautista’s family members on the island. Bautista estimates that the awareness raised by his walk brought in around $15,000 to the fund, which had raised more than $70,000 as of Aug. 17.
“I started off like, if I can hit $1,000, that’ll be pretty great,” Bautista said. “Then I was like, well, if I can hit $10,000, that would be amazing. Then it just became, let’s try to get the word out and raise as much money as possible.”
Bautista called the 100-mile walk one of the hardest things he’s ever done, but he said every step was worth it.
“Family is the most important thing. That’s why I did this walk, to show support for my family,” Bautista said. “My family and all the people of Lahaina will be suffering for the next couple of years, so I think it’s important to continue to think of them in the future, not just right now after it’s all happened.”
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