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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

A remote nation like no other


A young Tuvaluan schoolgirl looks up from her work at her school in Funafuti. 
 (Associated Press photos / The Spokesman-Review)
Charles J. Hanley Associated Press

FUNAFUTI, Tuvalu – The 40-odd faithful, Bibles in hand, drive straight onto the prison grounds in pickup trucks. No problem: The fence, more a hint than a hindrance, reaches only halfway around the tiny compound.

They catch the convicts dozing in hammocks beside the beach on a breezy mid-Pacific morning. In T-shirts and shorts, the six men stumble into place for impromptu prayers, listen politely to the congregation’s encouraging words, reply humbly with their own words of thanks.

The good deed done, the inmates line up to shake their departing neighbors’ hands – smiling matrons, little girls in white dresses, burly men in South Seas sarongs.

Then back to the beach.

“We didn’t even know they were coming,” confides prisoner Lopatia Iacopo. “This is Sunday. It’s our day of rest.”

And this is Tuvalu, a place like no other.

A far-flung scattering of islands in a turquoise sea, “Too-VAH-loo” is one of the planet’s smallest and most remote nations, located just west of the International Date Line and just south of the Equator.

The 9,000 Tuvaluans live on nine islands and atolls comprising 129 islets and adding up to barely 10 square miles of dry land. It’s as though half of Manhattan island was sprinkled in pieces over 468,000 square miles of ocean – a swath the size of France and Germany combined.

Tuvalu has few resources, erratic politics, mounting pollution and a growing fear that the sea, rising because of global warming, will someday drown its flat, palmy profile into oblivion.

“Tuvalu is a very small country with a high degree of vulnerability,” Asian Development Bank officials observed in a 2003 report.

Even 60 years ago, American author James Michener found it unpromising.

“A truly dismal island,” Michener wrote of Funafuti, the main settlement, after passing through during World War II.

But bankers’ bottom lines don’t tell of the real Tuvalu – of churches full of song and weddings lasting days, of surprise visits to incarcerated sinners, of half an island turning out each dusk to play soccer or volleyball up and down the idle airport runway, their twice-a-week link to the outside world.

As for Michener’s dismal time, he must have missed Pole O’Brien’s dancing.

Old snapshots show that with her grass skirt and Polynesian beauty, the local nurse charmed American GIs at native performances in 1942-43. Today at 82, this Irish trader’s grandchild knows that her islands, in a world full of strife, are still special.

“The people are happy,” she tells a reporter visiting her home. “If you look at them, you can see it in their happy, smiling faces.”

Where else, after all, would the prison fence not quite fence the prison in?

“No one tries to escape,” Iacopo assures a reporter. “We’re fairly treated, and so we do the same.”

Tuvaluans still subsist in traditional ways: men in little skiffs fishing for tuna; families cultivating breadfruit and pulaka, a taro-like plant; coconut harvested to export its oil. Many families, in their plywood or cinderblock houses, also depend on money sent home by the one in four Tuvaluan men who work as merchant seamen around the world.

The islands have found new revenue sources, as well. Brightly hued Tuvaluan postage stamps bring in steady income from collectors. The sale of fishing rights to Japan, the United States and other tuna-loving nations brings in even more. The Internet produced the latest moneymaker, with Tuvalu’s domain name, “.tv,” being licensed to television stations worldwide that want a “dot-TV” Web address.

But Tuvalu does face a serious challenge: The sea is encroaching, apparently because of climate change. With family burial plots sitting just yards from beaches, the ocean eats away the sand. Inland, seawater seeps into pulaka growing pits.

Prime Minister Saufatu Sopoanga’s government hopes to arrange contingency evacuation plans with New Zealand, but Tuvaluans are torn.

“I’ve been to Fiji, Australia, New Zealand. They’re nice developed countries,” a young mother, Siemai Apinelu, says after church one Sunday. “But I would miss Tuvalu’s simple, easy life.”

“They say Tuvalu is a paradise,” says Funafuti’s traditional chief, a sturdy 70-year-old named Siaosi Finiki. “There are no guns to make you afraid. Somebody told us that in other places they have to lock their houses up.”

“I don’t like the idea of leaving the island,” says the chief. “I think God has a way for us.”