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Randy and Marilou Dadez roll out of bed on a recent Sunday feeling sleep deprived but grateful. It’s their 22nd wedding anniversary and it feels like they’ve just dodged a bullet.

Six days earlier their 9-year-old son Kobe, who wears hearing aids, announced he could no longer hear out of his left ear. A doctor confirmed the boy’s hearing had eroded, and it was suggested he might need surgery. 

Kobe abandoned his left hearing aid that day. At night, he asked God for a miracle. “Promise, I’m going to be a good boy,” he prayed. “I’m not going to be naughty anymore.”

Then something happened that the family counts as an act of God: Marilou Dadez was singing to herself while tidying the family’s FEMA-funded condo when Kobe called out, “Mommy? I think I can hear you!” 

Kobe grabbed the hearing aid he’d abandoned just five days earlier and inserted it into his left ear. With the support of the device, he could hear his mother’s singing voice clear as ever.

“Thank you, Lord!” Marilou exclaimed. 

The mother of four is emotionally drained but her mood is sunny. Her husband’s grandchildren, ages 4 years and 13 months, are spending the weekend at the family’s condo. Being around the baby in particular brings instant stress relief.

Marilou warms a pot of spicy Filipino soup and fixes the baby’s bottle. Outside the condo’s floor-to-ceiling windows, a gentle rain falls.

In recent weeks a gnawing feeling of uncertainty has intensified for Randy and Marilou as more upheaval to their living situation approaches. The family’s time at the FEMA-funded condo where they’ve lived since late October after being displaced by the Aug. 8 wildfire in Lahaina is up at the end of this month.

It’s a move that’s twice been delayed. This time, it feels inevitable.

Federal officials have vowed to find the Dadezes new accommodations, but, with the move just days away, the family is still in the dark on exactly where they’ll go to next.

All they know is what Randy said FEMA officials told him: his family will be relocated to a five-bedroom house somewhere in Lahaina, on or around Wednesday. Randy said he was told that his family would be able to stay in the house until February of next year.

On one hand, the prospect of moving into a house instead of a hotel room is a big step toward normalcy for a family that’s lived in a church and three different resorts in the five months since the deadly fire ripped apart their lives. The lack of details, however, is anxiety-inducing.

“You know that feeling, you know you’ve got to move and it’s coming but you don’t have it all worked out yet?” Randy says. “That’s the feeling.”

The Dadez family, plus the eldest daughter’s live-in boyfriend, numbers seven. On a FEMA request form, Randy said he asked for a three-bedroom house to accommodate them all. Their rental house that burned down on Aug. 8 had two bedrooms.

Randy is nervous about moving into a house with five bedrooms because he figures that when the Federal Emergency Management Agency eventually stops paying the rent, he and his family will have to move again. There’s no way he’ll be able to afford it.

“So it’s like immediately, once we move in, I have to start looking for something else for when that one year is up,” Randy says.

Recently one of Marilou’s friends, the matriarch of another Filipino family who lost their home in the fire, asked her to consider following them to Las Vegas when the school year ends.

With the Maui housing market so tight, the family decided to look to the mainland for more affordable real estate. In Las Vegas, they made a half-million dollar offer on a four-bedroom house.

But Randy and Marilou aren’t ready to give up on Lahaina. Not yet. 

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.