Sunday on Nanumea

Sunday on Nanumea

Lotolelei Church in the main village of Nanumea is a large building which has an interesting Gothic look:

It took 7 years to build from 1931 to 1937 – this was before the “American Passsage” had been blasted through the reef, so access to the island was problematic.  The story is that the rock and other building material had to be dragged in over the reef at the far end of the island, and transported all the way round to the current church site.  It was originally taller than today, with a lit cross on top, which could be seen at night from the neighbouring island of Nanamanga.  There are large underground concrete water tanks around the church to catch the runoff from the roof, but this may have been a later addition:

The inside of the church is even more impressive – it was renovated in 1987:

Heather and I went to the morning service at 10:00am:

Up front there is both the church mixed choir, and the womens choir, but the rest of the church was not crowded.  The hymns, sung in multi-part harmony, were wonderful, but the rest of the service was in Tuvaluan.  The really surprising thing was that the service was largely run by the women – the male pastor was allowed to speak for about 10 minutes near the end of the hour and a half service.  (I get the feeling that the women play a major role in running the island.)

As a result of going to the church service, we were invited to watch a singing competition in the evening – this was held in the big open hall next to the church.  This event was being held to celebrate the 60^th anniversary  of the womens choir (not clear how many are foundation members!)– it was a competition between this all-female choir and the mixed church choir.  The singing went back and forward from one choir:

To the other:

The womens choir sang without a conductor, but a different person from the church choir jumped up to conduct each time.  The pastor was seated opposite us enjoying the banter:

 Eventually he jumped up and did some conducting himself:

This created much hilarity.  All in all, it was a very friendly encounter, with lots of laughter, especially during some speeches at the end.  I think the womens choir was declared to be the winner, mainly for their skill in singing without a conductor.  After the speeches we were invited to join them in light refreshments.  The womens choir were keen to have a group photo:

The Coming of Age in Tuvalu

The Coming of Age in Tuvalu

We have now attended several local functions on Nanumea and there are always lots of kids around – here are kids outside the local dancing competition:

But there are no kids of high school age.  It is currently term time, and all the high school kids are at the boarding school on Vaitupu – as are the Tuvaluan kids from all of the nine islands – approximately 600 in all.  The school has been there for over a 100 years, initially established by the London Missionary Society, but, since independence, about 40 years ago, this has been run as a boarding school for both boys and girls, as the Motufoua Secondary School:

So there is a well-established culture of high school kids living away from home, and therefore, I assume, with parents having very little involvement in the education of their children.  This seems to be a very significant feature of Tuvaluan society, and I suspect has major ramifications far beyond the dearth of job opportunities for Tuvaluan kids.

There are several interesting side effects to this story.  Firstly the removal of kids from any parental control, just as they are reaching puberty.  My understanding is that the kids are together during class time, but the sexes are kept apart at all other times, including meal times.  At the beginning and end of term, two ferries are required to transport the kids back to their home islands – a boys ferry and a girls ferry.

There was a very tragic outcome in March 2000, when 18 girls and one matron were killed in a dormitory fire.  To maintain separation of the sexes, it had become routine to lock the girls in their dormitory at night.  My understanding is that, since then, high fences, better lighting, and more security guards are used to try and maintain separation of the sexes.

It was concluded that the fire had been started from a candle, used to provide a light for reading.  This resulted in the school being prioritised for a 24 hour electricity service provided by a solar/ battery installation.  This 46kW installation was funded by the Italian government and was completed in 2010.  It is unclear what is the current operational state of this system, and there is no provision for integrating this system into the 400kW solar/ battery system currently being installed on Vaitupu by the New Zealand government funding.

Japan has assisted greatly with the development of Motufoua Secondary School. In 1996 Japanese funding provided classrooms, dormitories, special classrooms, dining hall and kitchen. In 2011 Japan funded 12 new classrooms, dormitories for boys and girls, a gymnasium. a multi-purpose hall, tennis, volleyball & basketball courts and procurement of library, medical, administration, kitchen and computer equipment.  This seems excellent use of overseas aid, but it is interesting to note that Tuvalu votes with Japan on whaling.

Rain showers can be very heavy at times, and the kids use such opportunities to play and wash hair:

Cats and Dogs (Chooks and Pigs)

Cats and Dogs (Chooks and Pigs)

Dogs are everywhere on Funafuti.  It was always a bit of a worry cycling around, that a dog might try to take a bite out of your leg.  Mostly they were OK, just barking a lot, but sometimes they would run after you.  Shane’s solution is to turn your wheel towards them, rather than cycle away from them – probably works OK for him.  Of course the other worry was that you would crash into a scurrying dog.   It is not clear that anyone actually feeds the dogs, but they tend to hang around houses where there is a higher probability of finding scraps.  There are also cats on Funafuti, but the dogs dominate the place.  There was a mother cat with a batch of kittens on the roof next door to our house in Funafuti – she was a bit of a careless mother and would drop a kitten down on the ground occasionally – Hadley is the softie who would come to the rescue and throw the kitten back up on the roof.

There are no dogs on Nanumea – the story is that they were eliminated at some stage.  So the cats dominate.  Again, it is not clear that anyone feeds them, and I assume they are tolerated because they control the rats and mice.  But they will also have an impact on the native fauna.  So scraps are also important to the cats.  We had been keeping our scraps in a bucket in the house, with the aim of getting them to our landlady’s pigs – but, of course, the cats find them first.  With louvered windows and flaps everywhere, there are many accesses to the house for cats, and so they invade the house after we have all gone to bed (and sometimes even before).  Shane has used some of his spare thinking power trying to devise ways of scaring the cats sufficiently to discourage any return visits – there has also been discussion about trying to set traps to catch them.  Heather’s solution is to put the bucket of pig feed in the freezer for the night – this seems to work well.

Pigs are a major source of food on both Funafuti and Nanumea.  On Funafuti there is a main piggery area on the far side of the runway, beside the one natural lagoon on the island (the rest are borrow pits):

The unfortunate result is that this lagoon is totally contaminated by the runoff from these pig pens – doubly unfortunate, because the pig manure, combined with mulched greenery, can be made into excellent compost (as demonstrated by the Taiwanese nursery):

On Nanumea the pigs are mostly over the far side of the island, where there is little habitation.  The pigs are in nicer surrounds here, either living in pens out in the jungle:

Or roaming free in the jungle:

It is unclear if all these pigs are “owned”, or of some are wild, and need to be trapped in order to get on the dinner plate.

There are chickens everywhere on both Funafuti and Nanumea, roaming wild - here is one at our back door:

They are a source of puzzlement to us all.  In general there seems to be little attempt to keep them in pens and feed them up for the dinner table – although there is one chook pen on Nanumea, just between the solar panel array area and the lagoon:

Chickens are a major food item, but for us they need to be sourced from Fiji, and shipped to Tuvalu in refrigerated containers.  Of course, containers can not be delivered to the outer islands, so the frozen chicken has to be manhandled to shore – it is difficult to ascertain how many times the chicken gets melted on the dock, and re-frozen.  So why are there no enterprising Tuvaluans with battery hens being fattened up for the local market?  Maybe it has something to do with the artificial economy of the islands.  As far as I can see, the supply ships are funded by the Tuvalu government, and all food travels free, on both the supply ship from Fiji, and the ferries to the islands.  Would an enterprising chicken farmer on Tuvalu be charged to ship chicken feed to his chickens, rendering him uncompetitive to the imported product?  Or maybe the concept of subsistence farming is too ingrained into the culture – each family just living off their own chooks, with no concept of commercialising chicken production?  This is most likely the situation on the outer islands, where there are very few outsiders like us, and therefore no real market for chooks – but on Funafuti the chickens are indeed imported from Fiji, so there is obviously a market for them there.

We are similarly baffled by the lack of local egg production.  Well actually, there must be local egg production, with all these hens and cocks running around – its just that no one is harvesting them and selling them on the local market.  Once again, all eggs for human consumption appear to be imported from Fiji.  I assume many of the local eggs are eaten by rats, which in turn feed the cats, etc.  In order to harvest the eggs, the hens would have to be kept in rat-proof pens, and fed – so the same questions arise as above.  Although some eggs must survive long enough to hatch, because there are plenty baby chicks running around, following mum:

I guess the hens and cocks must get killed for food at some stage, despite their scrawny appearance – else why would the locals put up with the cocks crowing at an hour that even beats the local church bell at 5:00am.

Anyway, here is another way of having fun at the end of a hard day's work:

Nanumea

Nanumea

Nanumea is the most northerly of the Tuvalu islands; it is also one of the islands formed round an atoll.  But the lagoon is much smaller than the lagoon on the Funafuti atoll, and the U-shaped island forms almost three sides of the atoll.  The main township is in the upper left arm of the U, and the base, and right arm, of the U are largely uninhabited, although there are many pigs, both in pens, and roaming loose.  So there is quite a large area of jungle and palm trees, with a few rough tracks running through.  Without a doubt, the best way to get round the island is on a fat bike:

The skyline of the township is dominated by the church building, with its tall spire:

The Funafuti lagoon has two natural entrances for relatively large ships; it would therefore be a natural safe harbour from early shipping days, and it is probably this feature that has resulted in Funafuti being the capital of Tuvalu.  But, with its northerly position, Nanumea is closer to the Gilbert islands, and so, in 1943, it was the obvious place from which to launch an attack on the Japanese there.  The Americans took over Nanumea, and moved all the locals onto one of the smaller islands round the atoll, and created a large military base on the main island.  They cleared at least half of the jungle and palm trees to create runways etc, but after 70 years the jungle is once again in control.  But the 200 meter long channel, blasted through the reef by the Americans, has stood the test of time, and still provides a way into the lagoon for small boats; but not large ships:

We arrived at the entrance to the “American Channel” on the morning of the 27^th June in the Baldur, a small charter ship, after a 25 hour trip from Funafuti:

Being a small ship without any stabilisers, the Baldur rolled all the way in the relatively light 2 to 3 meter swell; but it is still not small enough to get through the channel.  Two wooden launches, with outboard motors, were used to transport our team and all our equipment onto the island:

There was also some equipment to be transported out to the ship.  It took two days for all this to be completed, with the continuing swell complicating the transfer between ship and launch.  Here is our main living accommodation:

And I am sleeping in the annex next door:

The infrastructure on Nanumea is similar to Funafuti, with the main differences being that, there are no sealed roads,  no Wifi connection to the internet, and no mobile service.  Every building has at least one plastic water tank, but on Nanumea they appear to have been funded by the EU, rather than Australian Aid.  At this time of year there are sufficient rain showers to keep these tanks supplied with fresh water.  Electricity is distributed via underground cables, with all the distribution boxes being the original concrete ones:

(On Funafuti some of these concrete boxes have been replaced with more modern plastic ones.)  Electricity is generated by one of 3 diesel generators – so long as there is sufficient diesel, the service runs from 6:00am till midnight.  Once the new solar/battery installation is completed, the service will run for 24 hours, with the diesel generators being kept for cloudy days and emergencies.

At some stage a landline-based telephone service has been installed on all the inhabited Tuvalu islands; in some ways this is unfortunate because there is now less incentive to imitate other third-world countries that are leapfrogging straight to a mobile service.  Funafuti has managed to justify a mobile service, and also a WiFi connection to the internet is available, so long as you are not too far away from the government building.  DSL services are supposedly available to government and some households, but to us visitors on Nanumea the only internet connection available is via the “Internet Café”, where you can plug into an ethernet connection and share the satellite link to the outside world with the rest of Tuvalu – yes, it is very slow:

A project has been identified to run a cable communications link from Funafuti to Fiji, at a cost of A$33M, but this has not been funded.

Garbage disposal is not such a big issue on Nanumea, compared to Funafuti, mainly because there is about a tenth of the population.  But there is still no obvious sorting of garbage; it is just that the pit required is much smaller.

The Nanumea locals have been very welcoming, and on our second night on the island we were invited to dine with a local family:

Shane’s helicopter has also been a great hit with the local kids – here he was encouraging them to jump off the wharf, while the helicopter was taking a movie from overhead:

But after a hard days work, there is nothing like a cold coconut: