Where Are They Now – Nyssa Sugiyama

Contributed by Nelinia Cabiles

Near the end of the school year in 2016, Nyssa Sugiyama (née Barfield) and her best friend were hanging out at a coffee shop on Lānaʻi when the subject came up of where they might find work that summer. Four Seasons, the island’s luxury resort and a perennial choice among Lānaʻi’s high school students for summer work, had recently presented at the school’s job fair on campus.

Work was a topic that arose naturally enough for the ninth graders, having come of legal age to work, and living as they did on Lānaʻi, a former plantation town whose fields of pineapple — 20,000 acres at the peak of its economic productivity in the seventies and eighties — drew tens of hundreds of youths from across the island chain (Hawaiʻi, Oʻahu) and as far away as Utah every summer, the fruit’s golden time of harvest.

On Lānaʻi, a place where physical artifacts still remain of its agricultural past — Dole Park, field workers’ dormitories, the Labor Yard, the ghostly outlines of the island’s iconic and now-fallow pineapple fields as glimpsed from high in the sky through the window of a plane — one is constantly reminded that central to Lānaʻi’s character and identity is work. What else could have enticed thousands of young Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese and Korean men from the 1920s to 1960s to come to the island, leaving behind home and family, birthplace and country and all they had known, if not the promise of a livelihood?

Although the major economic driver on the island is no longer pineapple, Lānaʻi remains a working-class town. If one is old enough to work, one works.

Sugiyama recalls that all of her girlfriends would be working at Four Seasons that summer. But the resort, situated on a hillside overlooking Hulopoʻe Bay, is an eight-mile drive down a winding two-lane road, and Sugiyama, who did not have a driver’s license then, did not want to burden her parents with chauffeuring duties. That narrowed prospects to jobs in town, a realization on which Sugiyama’s best friend pounced. She dared Sugiyama to pop in to Rainbow Pharmacy and apply for a job. If she did that, the best friend would buy her a treat from the coffee shop. The next five minutes would alter the course of Sugiyama’s life in ways the ninth grader could not have expected. Sugiyama says she “hauled down there and asked Kert Shuster, pharmacist and owner, for a job, and he told me to report [to work] that next Monday.”

Sugiyama would spend the next five years at Rainbow Pharmacy, working after school, absorbing the world of pharmacy life. Shuster proved to be an excellent mentor. Sugiyama graduated from Lānaʻi High School in 2020, and in 2021, moved to Las Vegas, where she enrolled at Northwest Career College’s nine-month pharmacy technician program, learning metric systems, conversion rates, how to compound medicines and other core practices of the trade. She graduated in October 2021, and having completed an externship in a hospital — 240 hours of inpatient work — received a pharmacy tech license from Nevada that same year. The license will be up for renewal every even year with the hope of good standing CEs (continuing education modules). (Each state has different licensure requirements.)

While Sugiyama has worked at both pharmacies (outpatient) and hospitals (inpatient), she prefers the latter. “I love caring for patients, but without directly interacting with them. I would rather work behind the scenes. [The work] can get very emotional. In the ER, people are in pain, they are hurting,” she says, acknowledging that at the precipice of dying, and bearing witness to that suffering, a certain detachment is necessary to be effective.

Her work as a technician has taken her to various sectors in the hospital: the ER and OR, the ICU, Labor and Delivery, Ortho. Each hospital has its own system, says Sugiyama, “which will tell me if a drug is compounded for a specific medication. Whatever gets pushed on the floor, IV (intravenous fluid), medications, has to be approved by the pharmacist … [they] review the recipes, the doses, the mixture, the medication.” So, while a pharmacy tech must absolutely know processes and what needs to be done, the system is designed to have these safeguard measures in place, an extra layer of review. And what is critical in this exchange is the trust between the pharmacist and the technician, she says.

At Alaska Regional Hospital, Sugiyama worked primarily in the operating rooms, where she replenished the machines that dispense medication to anesthesiologists or surgeons. She notes that intravenous (IV) compounding is just one task among many that a technician performs. The work is varied.

For example, a med tech rec talks to patients or their loved ones in the OR to ascertain prior medication history in order to determine the proper treatment plan, she says. “There are technicians who perform rounds on hospital floors, replenishing medications in the Pyxis machine that dispenses medication to nurses to give to their hospital patients,” she says. Still other technicians “triage phone calls,” answering calls from doctors and nurses and forwarding them to pharmacists.

In the Fall of 2024, Sugiyama returned to school, this time taking psychology classes at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. She deeply enjoyed her classes — in direct contrast to her work as a pharmacy tech.

“After five years, I found I was falling out of love for the work,” Sugiyama says, reflecting on the past year. She recently quit her job to focus on her studies, as she works on getting a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Psychology. It was a difficult decision, she says, but an important one to make. Having gotten married recently, Sugiyama says her perspective on the future necessarily widened to include her husband, which meant she needed to think about a job that is financially sustainable and could support her husband’s dreams should he want to change careers. She could see herself as a psychologist, an occupation that her therapist encouraged, and is leaning towards either forensic psychology or becoming a psychologist who specializes in children.

“My parents are foster parents, and I’m very proud of that. I could easily slide into being a social worker, or work with children as a school counselor,” Sugiyama says, who also plans, after obtaining a bachelor’s degree, to pursue a Master’s degree in Psychology. Some states require only a master’s and licensure to practice, she says.

“I owe this all to Kert Shuster,” Sugiyama says, of her current academic path, and of her time at Rainbow Pharmacy. “I gained so much knowledge. He pushed me to be the greatest person I can be. He told me, ‘don’t settle to be a pharmacist, be a doctor’. I was rebellious in my youth. I didn’t go to college [right away]. But I don’t regret that route, because I’ve met incredible people.”

She credits her growth and mindset to the island that helped rear her. “The community is so small, but it’s built with courage. They push you to get out and off the island,” she says.

As with generations of dreamers before her whose hard work and sense of purpose helped shape Lānaʻi, Sugiyama understands she needed to leave home and her family and all that she had known to make her own way in the world, so she can build a life and earn a livelihood that is sustainable and meaningful.

 

“Where are they now?” features alumni from Lānaʻi High & Elementary School, shedding light on their journeys post-graduation.