“I come for the leprosy,” he said in a peculiar French-Australian accent. “And the tuberculosis.” Then he coughed violently.
I gave this the full attention it deserved. He made it sound like a spa treatment. Some go for the aromatherapy and an enzyme peel, while others choose the all-inclusive leprosy/tuberculosis option with a cholera treatment thrown in for free. He was a doctor, and he informed me that he made this trip four times a year.
“And are there still many cases of leprosy on Tarawa?” I asked.
“Yes, many,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
“And how does one go about acquiring leprosy in this day and age?”
He sneezed. “It is very contagious,” he informed me as he searched for a tissue. “It is in the air.” I looked at him, saucer-eyed now. “And you must have a certain gene. I have been treating leprosy for thirty-five years and I have never been infected.” I observed him closely. He was gnarled and misshapen.
I hadn’t informed anyone in Kiribati that I was coming, of course. Imagine that you live in Barton County, Missouri, and that for two years some city boy from downstate came and lived among you. Everyone was very kind to him, but sometime later, you discover that he wrote a book called The Moral Depravity of Barton County. What would you think? Exactly, which is why I thought it best to keep things hush-hush. People can be so sensitive about book titles.
And then I saw the islands, the first of the Gilberts, palm fringed and lonely, the forgotten crests of undersea volcanoes. No place looks more intriguing than an atoll rising from the great depths of the ocean, curving around a luminous lagoon like a sea serpent coiled around a sparkling jewel. There are about 100,000 people now living in Kiribati, on thirty-two low-lying islands dispersed over an area as large as a continent, though nearly half reside on Tarawa. We flew low over the northern part of the atoll and I could see that the tide was out, revealing a vast expanse of sandy lagoon flats and the desolate reef shelf. We landed and . . . was that a wrecked plane in the bushes? And, wow, there still isn’t a fence next to the runway. But there were people, and I waved, good morning, Kiribati.
They say that you can never go home again. You look for everything to be the same and when you find that things have changed, you are left reeling, crestfallen and dazed. Fortunately, this didn’t seem to be a problem on Tarawa since as far as I could tell everything remained exactly like it had been, as if it were frozen in a teardrop of amber. It was, even at 9:00 A.M., staggeringly hot, a kind of heat that seeps into your bones, crumbling them into ash. I walked across the tarmac, breathing in the heady humidity of the equatorial Pacific. The terminal was exactly as I remembered it, made of cinder blocks, wood, and tin, with hand-painted signs. One sign informed us that it was for TRANSIT, and I looked around and wondered to where. I was a trifle worried about getting through Immigration. I dimly expected to be greeted with a raspy voice saying, We’ve been waiting for you to come back, and then I’d be hustled on board a Royal Thai Navy plane and flown to Kwajalein, but the immigration officer was too busy cracking jokes with the other passengers to give me anything other than an arrival stamp.
I’d called a guesthouse the previous day from Fiji. Teetang and her husband, Titi, had arrived at the airport to pick me up and I followed them out to a pickup truck and tossed my bag into the back. I asked them about the changes to the island. What’s new?
“There are many Chinese now,” Teetang said, as we drove over a potholed causeway that had my teeth rattling.
“I thought the Chinese were gone. Didn’t the government decide to recognize Taiwan instead?”
“Yes, but many Chinese stayed and started businesses.”
Yes, of course they have. “Has any other country come to open an embassy?” I wondered. Sometimes the Great Game is played at the very margins of the world. That Kiribati kicked out the Chinese and invited in the Taiwanese was unsurprising. Pacific Island countries often switch their fealty from one to the other depending on the size of the aid offered. But I was curious if there was a new player in town.
“Cuba.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you said Cuba.”
“Yes,” Teetang confirmed. “Cuba. They have an embassy here and all the doctors now are from Cuba.”
“Really. Well, that’s awfully nice of them.”
“But many people think it’s very strange. They say why would a small country like Cuba open an embassy in a small country like Kiribati? So they think the Cubans are here because they want the body parts.”
“The body parts?”
“Yes, they take the body parts and sell them.”
She said this very matter-of-factly, as if discussing a recent change in shampoo preferences. I didn’t think for a moment that the Cubans were gouging out kidneys in Kiribati and selling them on the black market—at least not for the fun of it—but I liked that people were talking about it. When I lived on Tarawa we were all convinced that the Chinese were bringing in heavy armaments to the island. It’s what one does on atolls. You see something that interests you and you create a story, and if it happens to be dark and scary, all the better.
It had rained in recent weeks and the island exuded an unexpected lushness, a greenery that far exceeded that of my memory. Unlike Fakarava, the lagoon here retreats like a vanquished army during low tide, leaving behind a desolate desert that reflected a blinding, piercing sunlight as if it were a mirror casting signals. There were more people. Parts of the island that I remembered as unsettled now beheld an array of homes, nearly all done in the local style, with a platform raised on stilts, a thatched roof, and mats made of pandanus leaves that could be rolled and unfurled and used as walls. The Mormons too had been busy building more schools and churches. In the South Pacific, no church is more aggressive in its missionary activities than the Mormons. People don’t wear much on the islands, but you’d be surprised how many are wearing magic underwear. Then I noticed the seawalls. These were often built to extend a family’s available space a little farther into the lagoon or to protect what they had from erosion. They were nearly all ruined now, like the walls of some ancient fortress that could not withstand a siege. And the island’s lone road had all but dissipated, leaving a cratered moonscape for drivers to navigate.
The guesthouse was located in the middle of South Tarawa, the populated lower axis of the atoll, and it faced the lagoon. It was two stories, which was very exciting, making it sort of like the Empire State Building of mid-South Tarawa. Upstairs, I looked out the window and saw the thatched roofs below, where, to my amazement, I noticed cats nestled in the dried leaves. So that’s where they lived. I’d always wondered where the cats hung out. No one kept them as pets. Kittens were generally scooped up and drowned. You need to be resourceful to survive on this island if you’re a cat.
I dropped off my backpack and immediately headed to the road and flagged down a passing minibus. I wanted to indulge my memories. There were only nineteen people inside this minibus, which meant that I didn’t have to sit on someone’s lap, a luxury akin to hiring a Lincoln Town Car. And the music? It was familiar. Old. What was this again? It was on the tip of my tongue. It’s . . . Cat Stevens. It’s not the sort of thing I’d want to listen to every day, but I was expecting a brain-melting, techno-electronica bastardization of a Katy Perry teeny-bopper anthem, so this was akin to scoring tickets to La Scala. I hopped off in front of a familiar dirt-road cul-de-sac leading toward the ocean and saw a recognizable store, Angirota Enterprises General Merchants, which had been our go-to shop for our everyday needs when my wife and I lived nearby. Of course, after two years on Tarawa our everyday needs had been reduced to those of a single-cell organism, and I remembered with fondness the simplicity of our lives back then. Really, you didn’t throw up once today? Me too. And we celebrated and called it a good day. The shop was exactly as I remembered it, a sky-blue cinder-block storehouse with a tin roof and a
counter behind which lay cans of corned beef and bags of rice. I took a gander at the fridge, which contained the familiar boxes of Longlife Milk, stacks of Victoria Bitter and XXXX Gold, and a few wilting vegetables. I left feeling strangely elated. It’s. Exactly. The. Same.
I followed the curve of a muddy track, instinctually picking up rocks in case I was pestered by dogs, and followed it toward our old home. Was it always this derelict looking, I wondered? These were all government-owned cinder-block houses, and even shrouded with a verdant foliage, they looked like the grim remains of the Battle of Stalingrad, with gaping holes in the roofs and crumbling walls. They were invariably surrounded by a constellation of well-crafted traditional dwellings, which encircled the Western-style house like mourners at a funeral. I walked on, waved a friendly howdy to the kids who were yelling i-matang i-matang, the local word for “foreigner,” as if Bigfoot were walking past dressed in a clown costume. Then I saw two familiar casuarina trees, which leaned over, offering shade to a family of pigs snorting in the bush, and I knew I had found our old home.
I had to stare hard to recognize it. Our house was green, but this one was yellow. Of course, I thought, as I stood there withering in the heat. The sun had cooked the paint. And I knew we had two cement water encasements, which collected rainwater from the roof. But here, there was simply a pile of shattered gray cement. The door was missing, and as I approached, I announced my presence with a genial mauri, the I-Kiribati greeting. The interior of the house was barren of all furnishings. There were two naked children sitting on the tile floor, staring blankly at me, next to a woman who was on her side snoozing, and as I spoke, she opened her eyes. I tried to explain that I once lived here, that I had heaps of fond memories, that right where you happen to be napping there had once been a dining room table, upon which a volunteer vet had operated on a dog, and it sure is swell to be back, reliving all those sweet recollections, and . . . she merely grunted and went back to sleep.
So it went that day. I crisscrossed the island, visiting the relics of bygone years. My wife Sylvia’s former organization, the Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific, used to have an office with a well-tended demonstration garden and a staff of ten. The office was now used as an Australian visa-processing center and the garden was no more. FSP had been reduced to a two-person operation, inhabiting a small office above a store, and I recognized neither of the employees. The Otintaai, a government-run hotel where we used to gather for Cheap-Cheap Fridays, had really intriguing signs plastered over its walls. DANGER. THIS BUILDING IS UNSAFE. U.N. STAFF NO ADMITTANCE. SINCERELY, U.N. SECURITY. What made this particularly interesting, as I soon learned, was that the stickers had been placed there immediately after a visit by Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. Secretary-General. I don’t know why, but this tickled me. Good, I thought. For once, someone from the U.N. is denied the option of a room at the Four Seasons, and is forced to endure a night or two of reality. Well done, government of Kiribati. The rest of the world thanks you.
It was only later, as I gathered behind the guesthouse, standing on a seawall to enjoy the sunset, that I sensed profound change. There is not a more spectacular sight than that of the sun descending in crimson and orange grandeur along the equator, its wispy light casting radiant flares across the expanse of the lagoon and the cascade of palms following a sliver of land to the horizon. A gathering of fairy terns fluttered near shore, diving into the lagoon and singing melodically. I could hear the songs from the boys high up the coconut trees, which they had climbed to gather toddy, the tree’s nectar. The tide had come in and I watched it rise. And rise. And rise. Soon, it was bubbling beneath me, seeping into the seawall, and escaping like babbling fountains. The seawall was but a soggy, collapsing peninsula, suddenly surrounded on three sides by ever-surging waters. I looked around me with particular interest, and noted the trees and bushes that just an hour or two earlier had been dry and undisturbed, but now lay immersed in the lagoon. Many of the coconut trees, I now saw, were dead, standing like mute sentries above the encroaching water. The island was sinking, its destiny foretold in the great beauty of the gathering sea. And then I saw a dead cat float by in a gentle current and I exhaled. This, at least, was familiar.
Chapter Sixteen
When I was in Fiji, I saw a newspaper with the headline: ENTIRE NATION OF KIRIBATI TO BE RELOCATED OVER RISING SEA LEVEL THREAT. The article went on to say that the government of Kiribati was in the process of purchasing five thousand acres on Vanua Levu, the second-largest island in Fiji. Initially, the plan was to use the land as a farm to secure Kiribati’s food needs, but as things got more dire, it would be a place for the I-Kiribati to settle after rising sea levels made their islands uninhabitable. “This is the last resort, there’s no way out of this one,” Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, was quoted as saying. “Our people will have to move as the tides have reached our homes and villages.”
I don’t know about you, but if I heard that we would soon be leaving our country because fish were about to swim through our doors, I’d think this would be a news story I should probably pay some attention to. There’s a difference between emigrating and abandoning the motherland. Emigrate, and you still retain the option of one day coming back. Perhaps you didn’t like the food, or the weather, or they didn’t have your favorite cereal, and you decide to return home. This, however, was something far more apocalyptic. There’s no going back after a family of octopuses has moved into your kitchen drawer.
To prepare for this eventuality, the government launched an Education for Migration program. Again, I noted the doomsday language, even though education rhymes with migration as if it were a verse in a limerick. It sounded so final, like one of the things you check off as you prepare for some seminal event that will forever mark the boundary between before and after. I met with one of the instructors, Mary, an I-Kiribati friend from the good old days, when sinking below the ocean was not on our list of pressing worries. After the usual flurry of news and gossip, I asked her about the program.
“We teach the youth vocational skills so that when they leave Kiribati, they’ll have something to do,” she said.
“But how do people feel about being forced to leave Kiribati?”
“They are resigned to it,” she said.
This struck me as an unsatisfying answer. How could anyone be resigned to losing a country, an entire country, to rising sea levels? It’s not as if you can just conjure up a replacement nation out of thin air. There are worse places, of course, than Fiji, but the I-Kiribati will never become Fijian. Many people, for one reason or another, become expatriates or immigrants, finding themselves in a new land, but when they pack for a trip home, they don’t usually include scuba gear. Losing a state to the ocean is not quite the same as losing your accent.
“What is that English expression?” Mary wondered. “The canary in the coal mine. Kiribati is the canary in the coal mine.”
But because canaries are small and cute, just like Kiribati, they’re easy to dismiss. Of course, in the past few years, parts of both New York City and New Orleans have spent time underwater, albeit due to storms and not tides, so perhaps it will take the loss of Denver before it finally occurs to some that maybe it’s not such a good idea to pump so much carbon into the atmosphere. I know, I know, mustn’t do anything to stifle growth. The important thing is to expand the gross domestic product. There must always be more. This is how we measure our well-being. I understand the sentiment very well. I am wired for more, understand it intuitively, deep in my bones, can see its allure, that equation that says if I consume just a little more, the world will be suffused with sunshine and unicorns. But honestly, I don’t think it’s a great idea for nations to do things my way. Nation-states should be measured and thoughtful and prudent. They should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to behave like a junkie in pursuit of a fix. There are consequences to be dealt with, victims even, such as a nation of low-lying atolls like Kiribati,
which will soon become nothing more than a modern Atlantis, a sunken underworld that lives on only in legend.
Was it really that bad, though? Or were the tides that I was seeing, so high that they swept over causeways and inundated homes, an anomaly? I tracked down Atenati, who used to work in the demonstration garden at FSP. I visited her at her home, in the center of the island, equidistant from both the ocean and the lagoon. She told me that even here her well water was becoming brackish. “But I still have my garden,” she said. “For the people that live near the lagoon? They lost their gardens. Nothing grows anymore because of the seawater.”
Since I had last seen her, Atenati had spent a few years in Australia, where her daughter lived. She had married an Australian, and when they had their first child, they pleaded with Atenati to move to Brisbane. “I didn’t want to go,” Atenati said. “I like my island, but my daughter, she begged, she said that she needed her mother, so I went. I lived in Australia for two years. But I didn’t like it. No smiles. No laughing. Everyone always very serious. No one friendly. I like it here, on my little island. Here I speak and laugh with everyone around me. When I want to talk to my neighbor, I just raise my voice, like this.” And here she bellowed, which was immediately met with a dozen replies floating over her traditional fence. “I like it here,” she said with a laugh.
Bwenawa, however, was far less cheery. He too had worked in the FSP garden with Atenati and he had guided me through the history and customs of the islands. He lived near the hospital, where, apparently, the Cubans were busy harvesting human organs, and I took a minibus to find him. His home was located nearer the lagoon, in a densely populated swath of land, where crumbling cinder-block structures and wood-and-thatch homes competed for space with mangy dogs, pigs, chickens, and some really agitated roosters. Soon, I saw the source of the roosters’ distress. A cock fight. A group of men were busy sending their birds into battle.
Headhunters on My Doorstep Page 21