We are all Tuvaluans
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Mark Hayes
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Mark Hayes' biography and other articles by this writer
View images of Tuvalu featured in Edition 12: Hot Air at photographer Jocelyn Carlin's website.
Tatou ne Tuvalu Katoa – "We are all Tuvaluans" is often used in Tuvalu as an expression of national unity, calling on islanders to pull together in the collective interests of their tiny, isolated and vulnerable country. It is also used by some environmentalists who understand that global warming and rising sea levels, while gravely threatening the existence of low-lying tropical island countries like Tuvalu, threaten us all.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006. It's going to be another hot and steamy day on Funafuti, the main atoll in Tuvalu. There is just the hint of a breeze, and the vague promise of a shower from the clouds to the north-east. This won't cool things down, just add to the humidity.
I'm standing in the middle of the widest part of Funafuti Atoll, near the airstrip that dominates this part of the island. Directly to the east, about 400 metres away, the coral rock and sand wall thrown up by a cyclone in late 1972 protects the atoll from surges. If it weren't for the breezy drone of the power station, I could hear the Pacific Ocean, rolling white coral rocks like bowling balls up and down the rocky, barren shore. I won't go out there unless I have to. It is scary and weird. You sense the brooding ocean is out to get the place.
To the west, up a paved lane, past the blue-roofed and white-walled three-storey Government Building, I can see the lagoon and, far away, the motu (islet) of Tepuka about twelve kilometres across Te Namo (the lagoon). Te Namo is placid this morning, its waves gently lapping the atoll's western shore.
Funafuti Atoll, viewed from space, looks like a boomerang. From the cockpit of the Air Fiji twin-engine, turbo-prop plane that makes the thrice-weekly two-and-a-half hour flight north to the tiny airport with the best destination code on the planet, FUN, Funafuti comes into view like a thin green snake laid almost south to north in the vast open ocean. It's twelve kilo-metres long, with motu at each end, and scattered along the western edge of the wide Te Namo. The atoll is about eight degrees south of the equator. There are no hills or mountains here, no rivers or permanent streams.
In 1897, the Australian scientist T.W. Edgeworth David led an expedition to Funafuti Atoll, then part of the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony – Polynesian Tuvalu was the southern, Ellice Islands; the northern Micronesian Gilberts is now Kiribati. Professor David wanted to test Charles Darwin's hypothesis that tropical atolls were perched and growing atop ancient volcanoes or mountains, so his team drilled holes deep into the centre of the atoll to partially confirm Darwin's theory. The nondescript spot – a small concrete circle with a hole in the middle tucked away near the hospital on a side road – is still called David's Drill or David's Hole, but I call it Mt Funafuti, much to the amusement of my Tuvaluan friends.
Tuvalu consists of nine low-lying islands with a total land area of twenty-six square kilometres. The name, taken at separation from the Gilbert Islands in 1975, means "eight standing together". The southernmost atoll in the group, Niulakita, has been re-inhabited more recently.
The national slogan, Tuvalu mo te Atua, means "Tuvalu for God", reflecting the islanders' strong Christian beliefs, with virtually all the population members of the Ekalesia Kelisiano Tuvalu (EKT), a protestant denomination based on the work of the London Missionary Society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The country has an estimated population of 11,500; just under half live on densely inhabited Funafuti, with a land area of less than three square kilometres. The problem of "urban drift" from the outer islands to the capital, increasing its population by a tenth in a decade, is significantly contributing to the country's challenges. Their home islands and extended family ties are central to Tuvaluans' identity, and so many people from the outer islands crowding Funafuti adds still more pressures on this atoll's environment and social fabric.
In every respect, Tuvaluan life is lived pretty close to the edge; either subsistence fishing, gathering natural or small plantation coconut, pandanus or breadfruit farming, or, more usually, a mixture of developing island Western-style living and traditional practices. The biggest employer is the Tuvaluan Government, the next biggest being a seafarer hire company that contracts 400 to 600 Tuvaluan men to crew cargo boats worldwide. Their remittances home help their families to live comfortable lives, but at the cost of long separations from wives and growing children. The average Tuvaluan family lives on about $1,200 a year, though many get more and some less.
This Wednesday morning, locals are starting to stir. The few who were sleeping on the airstrip have rolled up their taapa (woven coconut or pandanus fibre) mats and pillows and wandered back to their fales (open-sided, roofed, raised platforms) outside their houses for a little more sleep. They're not supposed to sleep on the airstrip, but it's one of the few places to catch a breeze on hot, still, tropical nights.
Solo, a man in his early twenties, walks towards me with a wicked-looking knife and a couple of bottles with woven string ties at their necks, smiles, bids me a cheery talofa ("hello") and starts climbing a coconut tree.
Along the road, locals are walking, or riding bicycles or small motorbikes. Children, some already in their crisp light-blue and white school uniforms, have been sent to the fusi (small co-op supermarket). Some folks are carrying large white plastic biscuit buckets filled with kitchen scraps and coconut meat and making their way to their pig pens along the seawall to the east.
High up in the coconut tree, Solo's busy, carefully paring back a frond stalk so the sap can flow better into the bottle he ties beneath to catch it. Two half-full bottles collected overnight are ready to be carried down. Locals use the sap, called toddy, to make a sweet dessert, a local liquor and for cooking.
Solo is whistling a rather tuneless song, and occasionally breaks into words.
"What are you singing?" I shout up at him.
"Oh, just a song," he says, in his quiet Tuvaluan way.
"What's it about?"
"It's a song to call the maidens," he grins.
I wonder what his young wife in their nearby house would make of this. Folks are passing as the day begins and we exchange waves or greetings.
The sun finally punches through the clouds to the east, bathing the atoll in slivers of bright white light, and I feel sweat starting to form on my back.
On the far side of the square, near the entrance to the Government Building, some men in overalls are sweeping up leaves and litter while a very bored policeman sits nearby watching. These are prisoners from Funafuti's gaol serving time for committing some of the few crimes serious enough to warrant custodial sentences. Most crime here is alcohol-related, and the worst offenders are unlicensed, often young, male drivers caught drink-driving.
Another challenge for Funafuti, since the roads were paved in 2002 using windfall money from leasing Tuvalu's dot tv internet country code, is the steady increase in vehicles. Not that there's anywhere much to drive to on an atoll this small, but locals seem to manage. More vehicles add to Funafuti's problems because, in the salt-saturated air, rust eats into the chassis, and abandoned cars and trucks litter the atoll, with some being used as part of the defences against sea surges from the lagoon.
Sema, a Fijian woman married to a man from Nukufetau, one of Tuvalu's outer islands, who works at the Filamona Lodge where I'm staying, comes to work, sees me writing, comes over and peers at the laptop screen. I want to get this just right, so I show my developing story to some locals. I'm a wordy palagi (white person, outsider) who's here to try to tell part of the
current Tuvalu story.
"Oh, wow," Sema says. "That's good."
"Fakafeti lasi," I gratefully say, and return to the keyboard.
A bit later, Hilia Vavae comes by and also looks at my writing. She is the director of the Tuvalu Meteorological Office, housed in a white bungalow next to the power station on the eastern side of the atoll, and the local expert on Tuvaluan weather, with twenty years' experience. Her daily data is sent worldwide and added to three-day regional weather forecasts, and the fearsome climate calculations and simulations that fuel the scientific debates about global warming. She's happy too, so I'm satisfied I'm getting this right.