by Roz Savage
Nicole had marginally better luck filing the press release, but the slow Internet, lack of mobile phone coverage, and our obscure time zone all contributed to making Kiribati a PR professional’s worst nightmare—even worse than Crescent City. Many potential interviews fell by the wayside due to our communication problems. Exasperated with the local infrastructure, I continued to use my satphone to upload blog posts and tweets, just as I had done from the boat.
David was incredibly kind to us. Nothing was too much trouble. A couple of days after my arrival, I had carelessly mentioned that I would love a massage to ease my aching shoulders, and he immediately replied that one of Tessie’s relatives could do a great traditional Tarawan massage. A quick call, and it was arranged. He drove me to his home, which turned out to be more of a small estate, comprising various peripheral buildings as well as the main house, and introduced me to a large gaggle of his wife’s relatives, sitting in a row of small, shady, thatched cabañas on the lagoon side of the island, whiling away the hot hours. Two of them tended to me, while a small audience of aunts, sisters, and children watched nearby. I sat on palm matting under the thatch while I was rubbed down with oil and water, and my aching back muscles soothed with long, gentle strokes. Then I was sponged down with a wad of coconut wrapped in muslin and dunked in hot water. Coconut milk ran down my skin. A gentle breeze wafted in from the lagoon. It was all very pleasant indeed. I smelled like a piña colada.
My masseuse and I chatted as best we could across our differences of language and culture. She was the same age as I was—41—but had eight children and three grandchildren, while I had none. Her eldest child was 26 and the youngest was 7. Her husband had died of cancer four years previously. I looked up the stats later and found that life expectancy here was low—60 years for men and 66 for women, putting Kiribati 170th out of 221 countries in the world ranking.
I spent the rest of the afternoon writing in my journal in the cabaña, covering several pages with my reflections while the relatives chatted amongst themselves in the melodious language of Kiribati, played dice, crocheted, ate, and snoozed in the shade. A litter of new puppies slept in a furry heap underneath the cabaña. A pig lay in its pen, also dozing. I couldn’t remember the last time I had ever had such a lazy day.
Towards dusk, David’s wife, Tessie, came home, and David himself arrived with Nicole, Hunter, and Conrad. We sat in the cabaña drinking toddy, the diluted sap of the palm tree. It was unlike anything else I’d ever had, and it was delicious. It smelled strangely of hot dogs, but tasted much better—sweet and fresh. Conrad begged to differ, though, and barely touched his. David told us they gather it by climbing to the top of a palm tree and shaving the bark at the site of a new palm frond to get to the rising sap beneath. As we had driven around the island, we’d seen the jars attached to palm trees to gather the juice.
After sunset, we sat on the beach under the palm trees, watching the moon rise over the lagoon. Conversation was varied and interesting, including talk of climate change, which was very much on the minds of the Kiribati government. David explained how the country is especially vulnerable. It has one diminutive hill of 81 metres (265 feet) on the island of Banaba, but most of the country lies at less than six feet above sea level.
The first problem they would encounter would be the contamination of their freshwater supply, he told us. They have no streams, springs, or rivers. Drinking water comes from a freshwater lens that forms between the coral bed of the island and the sand that lies above it as a result of local rainfall. The inhabitants dig wells just a few feet deep to reach this fresh water. But when there is a storm large enough to send waves crashing in over the fringing reef, the water becomes brackish, and it takes a while before the salt settles out and it once again becomes fresh enough to drink. Long before the islands disappear beneath the oceans, the water supply will become permanently compromised. With tragic irony, there would be water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
Neither Tessie nor David were making any moves towards the kitchen and my stomach was starting to rumble when Tessie said, “Come on, let’s eat.” I turned around and saw to my surprise that a long table had silently appeared on the sand behind us, and it was laden with an array of platters. We walked over and helped ourselves to the buffet—coleslaw with local tuna, chicken, and white rice, washed down with coke, cold beer, or a very nice New Zealand Pinot Noir, according to choice.
This, I learned, was how their household functioned, in a perfect state of symbiosis. David and Tessie worked to support the relatives financially, in return for which the 20 or so members of the extended family provided them with cooking, cleaning, and massage services.
THE NEXT MORNING, IAN TULLER ARRIVED on the island to help out with the boat. Ian was one of the angels of my Pacific row. I truly do not know what I would have done without him. It is one of the many perks of my unusual work that over the years amazing people have gravitated towards my adventurous projects, wanting to help in some way. My boat and I may be the most visible part of the picture, but I never could have achieved as much as I have without an ocean of support from Ian and my other volunteers.
A retiree from San Francisco, Ian has a boat of his own, a small sailboat called the Phoebe. She is usually docked in Sausalito, California, and I have stayed on her at various times when in need of a bed. Ian worked hard during his career and was now enjoying a full and active retirement, regularly traveling overseas, hiking in Yosemite, or flying halfway around the world to lend a hand to a certain British ocean rower. Twice he had come out to Hawai’i to help me, at his own expense, and now he came to Tarawa. The best word to sum up Ian would probably be solid. Physically, emotionally, practically, he is solid. He’s stocky yet fit, with a balding head and glasses. He rolls up his sleeves and gets on with things. He tells it as he sees it, and he makes me laugh. There’s no hidden agenda; he just wants to help. I would trust Ian to the ends of the Earth, and indeed that was where we now found ourselves. We picked him up from the airport, and headed over to visit the Brocade.
One of my big concerns before making landfall had been whether I would be able to find somewhere to store the Brocade. In Hawai’i, I’d had tremendous problems finding a suitable place. For the last couple of months there, she had resided happily at Pacific Shipyards, but apart from that one final staging post, the rest of my search for appropriate storage in Hawai’i had been a frustrating saga of dead ends and dashed hopes. If it had been such a challenge to find boat accommodation on a relatively spacious, well-developed island such as O’ahu, I feared that the chances of finding somewhere suitable on a tiny sandbar in the middle of the Pacific would be slim indeed.
But we were in luck. Tarawa was the location of the renowned Kiribati Marine Training Centre (MTC), where cadets trained to become some of the best-respected merchant marines in the world, going to work on foreign ships and sending money home to their families. Established in the same year that I was born—1967—the Marine Training Centre was an oasis of efficiency, organization, and military discipline amidst the general atmosphere of gentle chaos that characterized South Tarawa. This would be the Brocade’s temporary home.
WHEN WE ARRIVED AT THE MTC, the guards swung open the big chain-link gates to allow our car to drive in, and after parking, we were issued day passes at the sentry box. We were escorted through the grounds, past neat borders of red flowers, and up an outside staircase to the Captain Superintendent’s office. The door opened in response to the sentry’s knock, and Boro Lucic, a tall, burly Montenegrin, greeted us cordially and welcomed us into his office. It was air-conditioned and cool, a welcome respite from the heat outside. Maps, photographs, and nautical memorabilia adorned the walls. This was evidently an establishment with a strong sense of pride in its history and its reputation, and justifiably so.
Boro was keen to help. In his strong Eastern European accent, he promised a round-the-clock guard, a room in which to store the Brocade’s contents, and boat-cleaning services. A
fter all the problems I’d had in Hawai’i, when I was always being made to feel my boat was an unwelcome oddball that nobody wanted to shelter, this was a dream come true.
Nicole, Ian, Boro, and I went over to take a look at the Brocade’s new residence. It was a sturdy structure, with a corrugated tin roof resting on four stocky columns. A lattice of metal struts crisscrossed the underside of the roof. Judging from the array of towels and garments dangling from the struts, it was mostly used by the cadets for drying their laundry.
If her shelter looked perfect, Brocade did not. She was a mess. The boobies had done their worst, and white bird poop was liberally spattered and streaked across her forward cabin. Despite my best efforts to keep them at bay, gooseneck barnacles studded her sides, and her port side was thick with dark green algae. The deck paint had peeled in the sun. I was embarrassed by her shabby appearance.
“We need to clean her, I think,” Boro opined. “I will get the men to help.”
In fact, the men did more than help. They did it all. About 20 cadets were assigned to the project and set to work with buckets, sponges, and a lot of enthusiasm. Many hands made light work, and within an hour, Brocade was almost as good as new, her silver paint gleaming, her solar panels booby-poop-free.
We attempted to rally the cadets for a team photo, but they were unwilling to be distracted from their task. “In a minute, in a minute,” they said, as a couple of them still scrubbed away at the last stubborn spots of green algae in a corner of the deck. To my embarrassment, a couple of them had even found my bedpan and were scrubbing that too.
At last they were satisfied that the Brocade was as clean as she would ever be and consented to line up for a photo with Nicole and me. The picture shows them striking jokey poses in front of my boat, their smiles gleaming nearly as brightly as the Brocade did.
BESIDES THE CLEANING, THERE WAS MUCH else to do, and Ian and I spent most of the rest of the week at the centre, cleaning, sorting, and storing equipment in the section of the MTC kit store that had been set aside for our use. Ian then turned his attention to the mystery of the broken watermaker. As I described, a few weeks before I arrived in Tarawa the system had lost all pressure and refused to produce water, so I had been surviving on the reserves of water in the ballast bags ever since.
For a couple of days it defied all Ian’s attempts at diagnosis. He called Spectra, the manufacturers, but they were unable to offer much in the way of helpful suggestions. I grew concerned. The watermaker is a highly specialized piece of equipment. The MTC was able to offer me a lot, but I doubted they could offer me a trained watermaker engineer. If Ian was unable to fix this problem, my entire Pacific bid might be in jeopardy. It was unimaginable to set out to sea without this piece of equipment, relying purely on the reserves in the Dromedary bags, but the alternative—quitting—was equally unimaginable. Flying out an engineer from California, plus a week of his time, plus accommodation, would be prohibitively expensive.
One day, after I had been at David Lambourne’s office trying and mostly failing to access e-mail, Nicole and I drove to the MTC to collect Ian, who had once again been labouring over the watermaker. By this point I had all but given up hope, so it was a wonderful surprise to see him grinning broadly as our car pulled up in front of the entrance gate.
“I’ve found the problem!” he exclaimed. It was a punishingly hot day and his T-shirt was soaked in sweat, but I had never seen him look happier. “It was the pre-filter cup!”
I had suspected that it was something to do with the pre-filter, but I hadn’t realized that the problem lay not in a mucky mesh, but in the outer casing. The pre-filter consists of a wire mesh tube inside a clear Perspex cup, and it resides in the footwell. Other than the intake hose, it’s the only part of the watermaker that is fully exposed to the elements, the rest being housed in a locker under the rowing seat. Its job is to filter out the larger particles—of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and, of course, plastic—before the water progresses to a finer filter, and then finally to the membrane where the salt is removed by a process of reverse osmosis.
Adding together the combined days of the Atlantic crossing, the aborted attempt of 2007, and the first stage of the Pacific in 2008, this filter had now spent 212 days at sea in all weather. Its cup had become crazed by prolonged ultraviolet exposure, causing the loss of pressure. Ian had figured this out by isolating each part of the watermaker in turn, until all components had been found innocent apart from the culprit.
Even if I had been able to figure this out while at sea, I didn’t have a spare pre-filter cup on board. To guard against future problems I ordered not one, but two, new cups from the manufacturers—thus almost guaranteeing that it would never go wrong again.
ONE DAY TOWARDS THE END of my time on Tarawa, I found myself sitting on a leatherette sofa in the office of Anote Tong, the President of Kiribati. Unlike the Oval Office, this looked like a proper work space, the President’s desk piled high with neat stacks of folders and documents. Orange curtains sagged slightly at the windows.
The President sat on a matching sofa on the other side of a low coffee table, a slim man with a dapper moustache, wearing an elegant lavalava, the traditional sarong-like garment. His fingers steepled together, he was telling me about his concerns for the future of his people. Conrad was recording the interview on camera, so the words that follow are selected from the transcript.
He told me what he had seen on his family’s home island. “There is no longer what was there,” he said. “Where they used to have their homes, the sea is there. We don’t know how to explain it to people. As a young child I was living there, and the village was there, but now I go back and it is no longer there. On a daily basis we are getting complaints from people who are losing their homes. I thought we had a long time, but the projections are getting much worse. The time frame is getting shorter. I have grandchildren, and I wonder where they will be in 50 years’ time.”
“Where will you go to?” I asked, “when you can no longer stay here?”
“We would much prefer to stay here, but in the face of all these uncertainties, it is important to keep exploring all the options available. I don’t think we will focus on a single option. I think we will use a combination of options. They are not mutually exclusive. Personally, I would like us to build up some of our islands, so we still have somewhere to call home.”
He told me that he was soon to meet President Obama, to ask him for aid money to finance defence measures against rising oceans. He hoped to secure enough money to pay for vocational training for his 100,000 people, so that when they were forced to relocate to other countries, they could find gainful employment.
“It’s the least painful for all concerned, because it falls in line very much with the integration policies of the different countries that do accept migrants, so all we need is assistance with the training of our people, so they can become qualified, and so we would be able to fill in the skills gaps where they exist in the countries that would be able to accept our people. If we do migrate, if we do relocate, I’d much prefer to see it to be on merit, with dignity for our people, and to be as worthwhile citizens that will make a contribution to their new communities.”
I wondered out loud how his people generally felt about climate change, whether their thoughts, as they lay in their hammocks, were often troubled by concerns about the future.
President Tong said, “You’ve been here some time, and I think you have seen our lifestyle, very simple. We tend to live on a day-to-day basis, and so we don’t plan for 50 years. Hardly anybody plans for 50 years, but as leaders, we must be able to do that. I would like to be able to reply to the question ‘What did he do?’ and say yes, at least I provided the option, whether they take it up or not. There are options which take time to do. Building up the islands, all it requires is a lot of resources. But to train our people, to up-skill them, it’s going to take a lifetime, a generation.”
He told me that he had faced dissension from
within his own ranks. “I am being criticized. In the last parliament I was being called a defeatist because I am advocating this migration policy.”
I heard later that even the President’s older brother, Harry, who had fought him for the presidency in 2003, had argued publicly that God had sent the rainbow as a token of his pledge to Noah that he would never again flood the Earth.
“So we will be fine,” Harry had said, “because God has made his promise.”
The President also planned to ask Obama for funding for sea walls, to buy themselves extra time from the encroaching waves. “I don’t know if the international community will be willing to help us with it, but I think they should. I think they owe us that.”
Third, he would make a plea for mitigation, beseeching the United States and other developed countries to limit their emissions of greenhouse gases in the hope that other low-lying countries might be spared a similar fate. He explained, “We might be on the front line. Others will follow. This is what carbon trading is about—so that the next line does not fall. But we have fallen. Something must be done about the victims.”
I looked at this dignified, university-educated man sitting across the table from me, and asked him what his hopes were for that December’s COP15 climate change conference.