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Outside Magazine December 2002

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Tuvalu Toodle-oo (Cont.)


	Siligama Taupale, who drifted for five months at sea before being rescued. (Photograph by Matthieu Paley)

I WANT TO TALK to the endangered people. It shouldn't be hard to do. Even on a good day, Fongafale Islet feels as secure as a precipice. It snakes in a graceful north-south arc for about seven miles, and ranges from 20 feet wide at its narrowest point to about 400 yards at its plumpest. As Paani Laupepa muses during one of our conversations, Fongafale's highest ground is the upper level of the guest house where I'm staying-about a dozen feet above sea level.

I start out on foot on Fongafale's eastern side, where a 15-foot surf is breaking close enough to shore that I can reach the waves with a good fling of a rock. A few footsteps inland is a tidy whitewashed structure with yellow window frames, housing Tuvalu's Department of Meteorology. On a wall opposite the entrance to the building is a framed photograph bearing the caption high tides 9 FEBRUARY 2001. The photo shows the staff of six standing in calf-deep water outside the office.

About a quarter-mile away, across the airstrip from the meteorological office, I meet up with Siaosi Finiki, the chief of Funafuti-a largely ceremonial position, but one that carries great respect among the islanders. Finiki, 68, is barefoot and wears a bright orange sulu, an orange tropical shirt, and a straw hat. For ten generations his family has survived by fishing and planting crops on Funafuti, a practice that he believes he will be among the last to perform. He shows me what is left of his croplands-a plot, perhaps 25 feet square, grown thick with stalks of pulaka, a starchy root vegetable that is one of Tuvalu's historic staple foods.



	Adieu, Fongafale.(Photograph by Matthieu Paley)

"Look at this plant," he says dejectedly, running his finger on the yellowed edge of a leaf. "It's limp. It's no good." He dips a finger into the water that runs in a shallow drainage channel. "Salty," he says. "Taste it." I sprinkle a little brackish water on my tongue. Seawater, Finiki says, has infiltrated the layer of fresh water that sustained his plants. When did it start? "Maybe five years ago," he says, referring to the same storm that swamped Tepuka Savilivili, in Funafuti's lagoon. "A big wave came ashore and covered the land. Since then, people aren't planting so much. The fruit is smaller and doesn't taste good. Sometimes it's rotten."

Finiki glances around at the untended gardens. "Life has changed so quickly," he says matter-of-factly, "because of how Westerners have oppressed us. When I was young, we lived on fish, pulaka, coconuts, breadfruit. Now everything is money, money, money. I'm the only one in my family who still eats pulaka. I urged my children to try it, but they don't like it. They like imported foods that take no time to cook, like tinned corned beef. That's OK, because the crop is no good anymore." We turn and walk back to the road, where the chief's single-gear bicycle is leaning in a ditch. "I'll plant as long as I live," he says. "The crop is no good, but I'll keep planting."

Four miles away is the northernmost house on the island, a cinder-block compound occupied by Bikenibeu Paeniu, Tuvalu's current finance minister and a three-time former prime minister. In 1989, Paeniu became the first of Tuvalu's leaders to press ardently for international recognition of Tuvalu's vulnerability to global warming, and he was for a time a darling of the environmental movement. In 1993, he toured the United States and Japan with Greenpeace, delivering pleas concerning "genocide by environmental destruction," and received an indelicate snub in his attempts to gain a five-minute audience in the White House with the environmental champions Clinton and Gore. Now 46, of squarish build and weary as an old boxer, Paeniu affects a philosophical approach to his country's seeming insignificance.

"It's really sad, the American stance on Kyoto," he tells me. "I think the global powers know in their hearts and beings that climate change is taking place, but it's simply not the priority for them that it is for us."

We sit in the yard beside his house, shaded by fruit trees. Discarded car parts lie near a clothesline. A few women sit on a raised platform, weaving palm leaves into a mat. The ocean is so close I can feel a salty glaze on my skin.

"Listen to that wind," he says, as the leaves rustle above us. "This is supposed to be the calm time of the year. Now, everything happens randomly. Cyclones come in the dry season, and instead of once every few years, they come two, three times a year. It's quite unusual. To others, climate change is just a political dispute, but we are experiencing its effects firsthand, and we lack the resources to contend with it." He kicks the ground with a bare foot. "We have the God-given right to this land," he says. "If we are forced to move somewhere else, we are nothing but aliens."

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