Brucetta and I ask first at the church and then around the village, for directions to Iakobwa’s house. He knows we are coming, and he finds us before we find him. We see him striding towards us arms flapping like featherless wings, his knees somehow jammed into red and black plastic thongs to protect them from the sharp coral gravel. He is unexpectedly tall for a thirteen year-old walking on his knees, and his smile is enormous. He beckons us to follow and marches ahead, head held high, lower legs trailing, big toes acting as rudders.
We are on remote Kiritimati, pronounced Christmas. It is the world’s biggest coral atoll and the largest of the thirty-three coral atolls which make up the nation of Kiribati, including the atoll chain once known as the Gilbert Islands. Straddling the equator, and covering the central Pacific from above Tuvalu to below Hawaii, while Kiribati’s sea area equates to half the size of Australia, the combined land area of its tiny atolls is no bigger than Canberra.
Few people have heard of Kiribati. With a language based on an alphabet of only twelve letters plus two sounds, ng, as in song, and ti, generally pronounced as s, even fewer pronounce the name correctly—Kiri-bas. Occasionally someone will ask, ‘Isn’t that the country that is disappearing due to rising sea levels?’
Sadly, it is.
With the height of its atolls averaging only two metres above sea level, on current sea level rise projections, Kiribati will be one of the first nations destroyed by climate change.
I have come to Kiritimati with Brucetta to film for a video to advocate the Kiribati Ministry of Education’s new Inclusiveness Policy. In the past in these atolls anyone with a disability has tended to be kept at home, hidden away. Iakobwa was born with limited development in the muscles below his elbows and knees. His parents, seeing him teased unmercifully as a youngster, did not enrol him in school.
But now Iakobwa is a big kid, and he’s more resilient. In fact he is personality plus, hard to miss. A year ago he attached himself to a visiting disabilities consultant, cadging lifts in her car. She recognised that here was a boy with whom nothing could be taken for granted, and convinced his parents to enrol him in primary school. He began first class at the age of twelve. Now, at the end of his first year, and looking somewhat of a mountain among the little kids, he manages the classroom and playground rough and tumble, giving as good as he gets. He negotiates the school’s few steps and stairs with deft manoeuvres of knees, toes and fingers. Half way through the year he progressed to Class 2. He is now reading and writing.
Iakobwa is intellectually as sharp as a tack, articulate and engaging. Sitting with him and his mother in their buia, the corrugated iron and wire family home, I am surprised at how much he anticipates as Brucetta and I discuss in English the questions I plan to ask. We speak at length with him and his family about his experiences at school and in the community. Then, holding a pen between the twisted fingers of both hands, he slowly, neatly, shows me how he can write his name. When he begins a drawing I guess his subject, the Lion King, from his first deft lines.
The next day we meet at his school for more filming. Interviewing his class teacher and the deputy principal it is clear his teachers are proud of him, his fellow students are proud of him, he gets a lot of respect. And he surprises with unexpected skills. We hear how he fixed the wiring of the PA in the local maneabwa (meeting hall), how he has taught himself to use a laptop. Alert, and attuned to what’s happening in his community, he seems mature beyond his years.
Iakobwa is ambitious. He wants to become a manager, a not inconceivable outcome on this small island of 6000 people, where fishing is the main employment and many children do not complete school. As, I am sure, Iakobwa will. His answers to our questions over several hours of filming are considered. He has a deep and pleasant voice for a thirteen year old. I suggest he should try getting work experience at the local radio station. Maybe he’ll end up as a DJ.
If I could choose one adjective to describe Iakobwa it would be resilient. He, and his country, need resilience to deal with an uncertain future.
Kiribati faces the harsh reality of its population of over one hundred thousand people, becoming climate change refugees. Of leaving the atolls they love, where their ancestors are buried and revered, where spirit and identity are defined by the creation stories explaining the shape of land and sea, where they have built buias of pandanus and palm and lived simply on fish, breadfruit, coconut and taro from the bwabai pits.
Kiribati’s atolls won’t disappear quickly, but they face becoming unliveable. Super high tides occur with increasing frequency, undermining buildings, roadways and seawalls, uprooting vegetation. Coconut palms, a diet staple and source of exportable oil, are dying because of rising salt levels. Coral atolls do not have lakes or rivers. Traditionally drinking water is sourced from wells sunk into the freshwater lens. The lens forms when rainwater seeps through the porous coral sands to be contained, like water in a bowl, by the pressure of the heavier salt water. Rising sea levels breach this natural barrier, making the freshwater undrinkable, the land unliveable.
The i-Kiribati will have to be resilient to survive as a landless nation.
This is a poor nation. Iakobwa’s parents are lucky to both be employed but there is little money to spare. Iakobwa is desperate to have his own laptop. A laptop could be a life-changing tool for a boy with his disabilities. The family is saving. It will be a long process.
Back in Tarawa, the base of Kiribati government, I source a second-hand laptop. Sending it to Iakobwa, with a note from Brucetta, I offer to find a software package to help him learn English. Reading, writing and speaking English will give him a huge advantage in finding future work.
Advantage is what is needed now, for Iakobwa and his family, in fact all the people of Kiribati. Resilience and every possible advantage other countries can offer, as they face evacuation from their home due to rising sea levels.
Dael Allison is a painter turned poet who, like Ian Fairweather - the subject of her 2012 poetry collection, Fairweather's Raft - has spent a lot of her life on islands. She's currently living and working on Kiribati in the central Pacific. The winner of the 2007 Wildcare Tasmania International Nature Writing Prize, Dael's poems and essays have been widely published in Australian literary journals.