Plastic Beaches

Tarawa atoll, Kiribati

Kiribati is little more than thirty-three small atolls lying astride the equator in the central Pacific, some five thousand kilometers northeast of Brisbane, Australia and three thousand kilometers west of Hawaii. It consists of three main groups, the Gilbert, Phoenix and Line Islands. Except for Banaba (formerly Ocean Island) which is of raised coral limestone, all the other islands are atolls. Their highest point above sea level is less than five meters. Few of the islands are more than five hundred meters wide. An exception is Kiritimati (Christmas Island). It is the largest atoll in the world with a land area of 388 km².

Composed of unconsolidated coral sand and rubble, the atolls are largely infertile and have no surface water. There are no known mineral reserves. Coconut palms and pandanus trees dominate the vegetation cover, with breadfruit trees, papaya and banana clumps about the only trees providing fruit. There are precious few animals. You see some sea birds, some land crabs and a few small lizards. That is it!

Kiribati society centers around the maneaba, a large structure which serves as the village center. This structure embodies the whole of society: the kainga (extended family), the village and the island as a whole. The word maneaba is made up of the words, manea, meaning to accommodate and te aba, meaning both people and land.

It thus incorporates the people and the land on which they live. Each community on Tarawa has its own maneaba. When you travel through the islands you can see them every two or three kilometers.

If you believe popular wisdom, the tragedy facing Kiribati, along with so many other places I visited in the Pacific—The Mortlocks, Tuvalu and so on—is the threat of global warming. It must be said that the islands seemed to be disappearing before my eyes. People measured erosion according to how many rows of coconut trees disappear.

One row disappeared whilst I was there. The issue though is more complex than the global warming bogeyman alone. Having been sent there to help them deal with a lack of potable water I began to realize that the atolls were rapidly becoming uninhabitable and for reasons other than global warming and rising seas.  

Years before I went there, I was always intrigued by what were then known as the Gilbert and Ellice Islands: visions of Robert Louis Stevenson and peaceful days sitting under palm trees lapped by the gentle Pacific: aha! Such visions. The reality turned out to be a little different.

When I finally got there in 1999 to try and resurrect Australia’s reputation in aid, it took weeks before any government official would even open their door to me. It turned out that the previous Australian aid program had been a disaster. The company managing the project had decided to cut costs when installing drinking water mains for Tarawa, Kiribati’s main island. Instead of the top class pipes proposed in their submission, they did it on the cheap and scraped together some old lead lined pipes from an irrigation project somewhere along the Murray River.

Lead is not something you should drink in any quantity, as some of the children of the island may or may not have realized just before they died. So it was no wonder that I got a cold reception.

The fact that the local Australian consulate was not proactive did not help. But then, Kiribati hardly rated the appointment of top class staff in the diplomatic pantheon of desired appointments.

In Kiribati, the first thing you needed to learn was how to pronounce the name.  No, you don’t pronounce it the way it is spelled and you can blame the missionaries for that. Their missionary position was odd. They decided that the simple natives of the islands did not have the mental capacity to cope with a 26 letter alphabet so they left a few out, like s and j and x and so on. Who needs them anyway? So the sound ’s’ is represented by ‘ti’. So please say Kiribus, not Kiribateeee. Logical isn’t it?

No one asked why these particular proselytizers followed an alleged saint who died with a gun in his hand whilst escaping from prison. Christianity had (and probably still has) a grasp over the islanders that bordered on the obscene.

Police were regularly deployed on the Sabbath to prevent clashes between followers of different faiths.

‘So you are a Catholic? My goodness. You are of the devil! Get off my turf. I am a Methodist or a Mormon’.

The Mormons were the first ones to arrive and infest the islands, so they had a huge following which was not a good thing for the cigarette sellers.

Sensibly the Seventh Day Adventists rarely clashed with the other supermarkets, sorry, religions. I suppose it helped that their services were held on a different day.

My house was situated in a delightful spot. Step off the front verandah and I stepped onto a delightful sandy beach on a small cove. Between my house and the ocean a small offshore island provided protection. If I went out the front door and walked fifty meters, I was on the beach that faced the Tarawa lagoon.

I recall waking up one morning and thinking: goodness, I can hear the sea very clearly this morning. I looked out. My house was an island. Seawater covered the spit of land on which I lived.

One of the most off putting aspects of living in the country was their waste disposal system: rather, the lack of one. They simply dumped everything in the ocean.

Tides took it out to sea where marine life ate what they could and the rest (most) simply washed back along the beaches.  But it was not something you talked about.

I kept my own stretch of beach clean by going out every day and collecting the hundreds of cans, bottles, plastic bags and syringes from the hospital up the road that washed up on to it. I kid you not! Many of Tarawa’s beaches were simply a trash carpet. What did I do with it? I had no alternative but to dig a huge pit (no problem in the sand) and bury it.

I mentioned how disgusting this practice was at a function at the president’s bungalow marking Independence Day on July 12^th 1999. I asked innocently why the president should have his bungalow on perhaps the most polluted of all of the island’s beaches? Why did he not demand action?

No one answered me. People coughed into their beers and walked away from me till the lights fused, which they duly did. Twice!

Next morning, the Australian Consul called me in and told me that if I said anything stupid like that again I would be deported. I had offended the nation’s leaders. So the trash and syringes and plastic bottles and discarded cans destroying the stunning beauty of an ephemeral island paradise don’t actually exist?

I was expected to ignore reality? I learn something new every day. Certainly nothing about the trash ever seemed to cause any concern. Perhaps it was a case of ‘if we ignore it, it might go away’. It didn’t.

Kiribati had no free press or radio or television. But it did have cheap alcohol. On my weekends I would cycle around the atoll’s islands, carrying my bike across the shallow channels between each of the islands. By eleven o’clock beware. It was not uncommon to find people sprawled out drunk from kava and arrack.

Belligerence was common. Some villages had a reputation for being hostile drunks. You tiptoed through them pushing your rapidly rusting Chinese made bicycle.

I recall riding through one village and not seeing a wire strung across the path. It caught me under the nose and threw me off the bike. It was not pleasant. Instead of concern and attention I was asked for damages for destroying their clothesline.

But that was a rarity. Mostly, apart from when they were drunk, the ‘natives were friendly’ and kind. I’d even met a couple of them thirty years earlier in a theological college in Brisbane. I remembered their names: Nehri and Benam and I looked them up. We met often and it was a joy to chat with them on the long lonely nights.

Three young Japanese had set up a diving business on the island hoping to attract foreign tourists. They had a small base in a hut next to my house and a guesthouse on Buariki which they used as a base for trips to the outer reef. They ferried their few customers to Buariki by canoe across the lagoon, a distance of about thirty kilometers.

I spent a couple of days in the guesthouse one weekend and though I am no diver, found it amazing. It was the trip back over the lagoon that was the low light! A peaceful Pacific Lagoon. Water as calm as a millpond! No way!

Barely ten minutes after we set off in their flimsy outrigger for the return journey to the main island, fierce winds sprung up. The waves were horrifying, huge, humungous—any word that means horrific! I was dead scared. Sugiyoto, my friend from the dive shop, remained stoic as he attempted to steer a path through the maelstrom. Of course we made it, but…

I love sea journeys, but only when there are no major waves. Whoever said the Pacific was not, was spot on!

Nonetheless, I love the ocean. I spent too much of my free time simply gazing at its majesty. I would sit on my front veranda and look off to the west toward the curving line of coconut palms spanning the 40-mile coast of the lagoon.

 It was usually hot, though cool breezes kept it comfortable. When I first arrived there used to be three rows of coconut trees along my section of the shore. When I left there were only two.

But the issue was, who caused it? The people of Kiribati were not good custodians of their fragile islands. The lagoon in Tarawa was one of the most polluted on earth.

The garbage and the waste seeped into the remnant water table making the ground water undrinkable. The beaches were dredged for ‘building and development’.

The generally accepted opinion was that the people of Kiribati did precious little to aggravate climate change. They could and did, thank America and China for that. But if global warming is what some say it is, ultimately Kiribati will be one of its first victims. But it will also be a victim of its own lack of care for the fragile environment that has nurtured it for centuries.

Whatever the cause and whatever the blame, it makes you wonder about aid and development. No matter how much they develop in the next decades, if they poison themselves beyond redemption or if in fifty years' time they are going to go under, what is the purpose of it all?