Deep Field (19 page)

In the morning, I went out with some volunteers to see what the typhoon had done to parts of Palau and how the recovery effort had gone. Nearly 100 houses had been destroyed along the coast, as well as many plantations. The government, with significant US backing, had the response in hand a few months after the typhoon hit. Most of the houses had been entirely reconstructed, with some arguments to be had about what colour they should be painted; in contrast to the Philippines, where emergency assistance basically amounted to some tools and plastic sheets. It was hours before we saw our first house—not because these were far away, but because the route chosen circuitously passed a number of shops and gardens where the finest produce of Palau could be obtained in order to fuel our visit. Cans of Coke and sickly pineapple juice were stacked in the boot, while several roast chicken and fish dishes were ordered and collected. On the way, chocolates flowed and the volunteers munched on a bitter local berry mixed with a peculiar concoction of miso soup and KoolAid. Hitting a small speed hump, the driver turned to me and slurred through a mouth plugged with betel nut and tobacco, that the speed humps were enough exercise for the day.

It was quite the opposite to Typhoon Bopha as experienced in the Philippines. This was a well-funded response in a small but relatively prosperous society. Clearly no one was going to starve—the main complaint was that the three-bedroom houses being built by the government were sometimes too small, although painting them a light blue made them look bigger. There was no need here for cockfighting. In Palau, Budweiser, American football and occasional news of the typhoon broadcast on a flat-screen TV above the bar of the Pacific diner really did say it all.

I OPENED THE THROTTLE
and tore down the tarmac, pushing a rusty motor scooter into the encroaching dusk as fast as it could go. The warm night air, thick with salt, flowed around me as the scooter cranked out its top speed and I headed for the edge of the island, to the sea. The atoll narrowed and the houses thinned and within a few minutes of what seemed like flight, I had arrived at a narrow isthmus on the Funafuti lagoon—a metre-wide strip of land that separated the moonlit mercury of the lagoon from the crashing waves of the great Pacific Ocean. In Tuvalu, one of the smallest countries on earth, the trip from end to end took a mere twenty minutes on a clapped-out motor scooter. But that short journey into the vast night of sky and ocean, sand and stars—a unity of the elements—made the Pacific so much greater than the sum of its micro-states. While during the day there was the risk of ‘island fever’—a sense of being trapped forever on this minute coral atoll—at night, as everyone went to bed, the country seemed to expand with space and freedom and I urged my scooter faster, through the evening laughter, past the parliament buildings and the shanties at the edge of town and on, into the roar of the ocean and the sonorous grunting of the local pigs.

But this nocturnal freedom was confounded during the day. As the sun rose, Tuvalu’s vulnerability was evident everywhere in this country where the highest point is around four metres above sea level, making it the second lowest country in the world (after the Maldives). Each year, during the king tides, a third of the island is submerged as water washes over the low-lying areas and bubbles up from below through the porous coral atoll. More alarming still, while Tuvalu is generally outside the cyclone belt, these are not completely unknown. The last cyclone, Bebe, which struck in 1972, caused the total inundation of Funafuti and destroyed all the island’s buildings. When I arrived the climatic stress placed on Tuvalu by an unusually dry spell was immediately evident. Far from the lush tropical islands of Fiji or Tonga, Tuvalu seemed dry, hot and dusty. In the hotel there was only half an hour of water a day and reserves had been depleted to near catastrophic levels. As I travelled around the island the signs of drought were everywhere. Palm trees had turned brown and could no longer support their branches, which fell dying and discoloured all around.

As I walked around everything seemed in miniature. The Tuvalu Development Bank was a one-room building a few metres from the airport and the parliament building was a small open-sided meeting hall used by children to watch the arrival of the biweekly flights from Fiji. Nearby, a towering government administrative office, built by Taiwan in exchange for diplomatic recognition, was the only building more than two stories high on the atoll. There were other signs of Taiwanese influence—the hotel I stayed at was ‘inaugurated by HE Hugh O’Young, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of China’, and a small market garden project that sought to improve the Tuvaluan diet by introducing vegetables lined the runway. I wondered who Hugh O’Young was and if I would meet him, envisaging some washed-up old Chiang Kai-shek nationalist in a white suit who might emerge from behind one of the hotel’s plastic palm trees.

The main feature of Funafuti was the runway. Built by the Americans during World War II it occupied the widest part of the island and, when not being used as an airstrip, was the focus of island life. Twice a week, the Tuvalu National Fire Truck would start its sirens and drive quickly up and down the landing strip to clear it of pedestrians, soccer players, and children gathered to watch the latest arrivals come in. For the rest of the week, however, the airstrip was the place to go to play soccer, to sit and talk with friends, to socialise and have fun, and—when the nights became too hot or people felt the need to escape from the pressures of living with their extended families, the airstrip was a place to sleep.

While the airstrip was the hub of social life, however, it had come at a cost. At either end of the runway, at the narrow tips of the croissant-shaped island, coral had been cut out of the atoll for rubble aggregate. This had left deep trenches at both ends, and as the population had gradually increased with migration from the outer islands, people had settled in the only land available to them—the trenches. Quickly these had filled with water and large communities had developed, living in shanties built over and around the trenches, which had also filled with rubbish in the absence of any waste disposal system. Every time there were heavy rains or strong winds severe damage was caused to the unstable houses in these areas. During drought, it was the opposite problem—the absence of water and the rubbish-strewn surrounds posed sanitation and hygiene risks from which people increasingly became ill. For all its charm even this miniature nation had its social dilemmas caused by ‘development’.

A United Nations team had arrived on the same flight as me intending to show the Tuvalu government how it could use the latest Global Information Systems (GIS) to map the country’s geography, topology and demographics from space. We sat in a small room with the UN team and representatives from Tuvalu’s government and NGOs learning how to use the new software, each of us staring at our laptops as satellite images of atolls slowly came up on screen. In principal, it was a great idea—immediately available information that in larger countries could form an invaluable evidence base for a disaster response. But in Tuvalu, the global machinery of governance and technology reached its logical inconclusion and stumbled against the reality of a Pacific micro-state. Within minutes of everyone logging on to their computers simultaneously, the entire internet connection for the country was overloaded and none of the programs worked. While for a brief moment we could see Tuvalu from space, a short motor-scooter ride or even a twenty-minute walk would be able to reveal the realities on the ground in the event of a disaster. In any case, Tuvalu’s problem was not sudden onset disasters like cyclones and tsunamis (although these were not entirely impossible) but drought, climate change and rising sea levels—things that were daily apparent even if the country’s internet connection couldn’t support more technologically complex ways of mapping them. Shortly after I had arrived in Tuvalu, a national emergency was declared because the island had literally run out of drinking water, and desalination plants had to be flown in from New Zealand and Australia to provide potable water for the 5000 people living on Funafuti.

If Tuvalu embodied the heroic, even titanic, struggle of small nation-states to be heard and to survive independently, Kiribati and some of the outer Cook Islands suggested a grimmer vision of the future. From the air, the prospect of arriving in Tarawa was breathtaking. After three hours’ flight from Fiji over endless ocean, a small L-shaped atoll emerged in the distance and as we descended it resembled the fabled images of Pacific paradise. White sand beaches shaded with palm fronds lined the island, etched against the turquoise waters of the Tarawa lagoon—or at least so it seemed from thousands of feet in the air.

The reality, however, was very different. I soon found out that Tarawa, the main island of Kiribati, was one of the most densely populated places on earth, with a similar number of people per square kilometre to Beijing. Despite the country’s total population being only 100,000 (in, if you include its water territories, an area greater than the size of Australia), most had migrated to Tarawa in search of jobs. The introduction of a money economy, combined with changes in occupation and lifestyle—pushed in part by the increasing difficulty, unpredictability and unfashionability of strenuous agricultural life growing yams and fishing on the outer islands—people had begun to concentrate in Tarawa. To accommodate them the government had begun to reclaim land, and a large number of the increasingly centralised population were now living in the Tarawa lagoon on land reclaimed with rubbish.

This concentration of people also brought other problems, particularly waste disposal. Traditionally, the ocean had been the great sanitiser of island life—with small populations and the vast currents of the Pacific waste, effluent and excreta had been instantly dissolved in seawater. But as the population had grown, the balance had shifted. The shallower waters of the lagoon were now so contaminated with sewage that we were under strict instructions not to eat fish for fear of contracting instant ciguatera poisoning. More alarmingly still, Kiribati was dependent for fresh water on rainfall that was stored in a water lens under the atoll, a layer of fresh water that sat above the heavier salt water of the ocean. Changes in sea level had begun to alter the balance of salt and fresh water in the lens, and the existing fresh water had become increasingly saline—a problem compounded by excessive water pumping from the additional population burden, and waste disposal directly into the fresh water lens itself. Despite Kiribati’s idyllic appearance, the twin processes of ‘development’ and climate change had even led the president to put out a call for a new land (although this may have been an attempt to capture attention back from the Maldives, whose own president had started holding cabinet meetings underwater).

Another emblem of this process of change was the island of Mangaia in the Southern Group of the Cook Islands. At its height, the island had more than 2000 residents but these had now dwindled to a few hundred mainly elderly people. In the 1960s and ’70s several New Zealand teachers made their way to Mangaia and started working in the local school. With talent and enthusiasm, the school quickly became one of the best in the country and educated successive generations of capable students. These students then promptly left for the main island of Rarotonga or for New Zealand as better job opportunities opened up and the hard life of cultivating taro and yam patches was made harder by rising sea levels, with salt water intruding into the soil. The pull of urban centres, development in the form of education, and regular flights between Mangaia and the capital now meant that those who remained were either too old or too sick to leave, or they remained on the island to maintain family properties.

The symbol of Mangaia was the adze—both an agricultural tool and an instrument of war, carved with an inverted Ж which was the stylistic representation of two brothers in battle. Outnumbered by the enemy, they tied themselves together with pandanus rope, back to back, and fought on against the odds with their stone adzes. The motif of struggle against the inevitable led to the use of the adze as a way to peace through sacrifice. When the Mangaia tribes fought, the side that thought it was about to lose would call a truce. A youth selected for ceremonial sacrifice would be dismembered with the adze and the remains distributed evenly to the island’s villages as a sign that the dispute had been settled, if brutally—a sacrifice for the greater good.

But the symbol of the adze lived on even in more peaceful and depopulated times. I visited one woman who lived alone, surrounded by wall-to-wall pictures of family and friends, once from the island but now leading lives elsewhere. Moments of fun, excitement and merriment stared down in joyous but deafening silence on the one member of the family left behind: a moment in which the combined processes of development, climate change, and new economic opportunities were gradually starving the life of the island. There were children attending the school and elderly people tending to their taro patches, but the intervening generation had all but vanished, present only in the yellowing photos on the walls—the lives left behind had been figuratively adzed for the sake of future generations. In making the elderly stay behind, Mangaia’s departed youth had reversed the cycle of history.