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Well, my name is Timei Keitaua
I am 47 years old now. I am old.
I am not from this Island
I came here
back in 1999
I am from the the capital, Tarawa.
And I have met my wife over there,
or she met me
Tarawa is so crowded,
my wife and i decided to come to Christmas Island
where there is more opportunities, job opportunities here.
Until now we have six daughters
no boys
We are still hoping to have boys but as we are getting old I don't know if we gonna have boy or not.
When we first came here back in 1999, until now
we are still having that problem
the shortage of food
no food, you know?
all we always
ran out of food
Especially...
rice, flour and sugar.
We are more dependent on this food.
As you can see,
on this island will don't have a lot.
Only coconut trees.
Thats all we can eat.
...and fish.
But then, this new generation...
They don't like to live on the coconut and fish.
They like to live on rice,
flour and sugar.
Most time we
run out of food.
There are times when...
everybody is hungry.
There are times when everybody gets sick.
Because they can't eat that coconut alone, everyday.
You know, when I first came here,
-this is the fact-
I always saw tuna fish around this
area
you know just by standing on the shore, on the on the beach,
you could see tuna
jumping out of the water.
You can see a lot of birds
after the tuna
I haven't seen that for five years.
You know what happened?
There is a ship over there
There is a fishing vessel.
Thats the cause of
why i haven't seen
tuna around
here anymore.
if you want to eat tuna, you have to go very far away to catch them.
I believe that this
fishing boat
fishing vessels from Spain
are wiping out our fish
are hunting our tunas.
Whatever they
they catch
with that net...
they catch everything.
It's not only the tuna inside the net
it goes with a lot of other fishes
you know they don't
need other fishes
so they throw that fish away.
Thousands and thousands of
'Kingfish'...
Thousands and thousands of 'Uau'
Undersized tuna...
Thats sad, you know?
They waste
our resources
the deplete our resources.
That's very sad
That's my bellowed,
my bellowed Irena.
The nun said...
told me to,
pray that I find or right wife.
Irena was a little bit of a 'tomboy'.
And not really interesting getting married
She went to work for China the Chinese store in Gizo
away from here
and I realised I missed her!
and the voice said and my ears
"Perry, that is your wife"
-What? -"That's your wife"
Okay, except that I wasn't interested in getting married
and then I said, well yeah
then i realised then - she is, she is!
That is the one that sister told me about!
That great smile she has here... It's a wonderful, wonderful lady...
This in an Almanac.
It is the Kiritimati Almanac.
Eaten by worms.
It gives details of weather,
navigation details also.
These are cloud conditions here
I have seen all those different clouds when being at sea and other I haven't seen before.
But over the centuries they recorded all these things.
This is where we are.
Right on the tip of this peninsula here.
We just come from about here.
So its quite a long island...
And this is the
'Role engineers fossil road' here.
It goes all the way down to the end of the island.
If you leave the main road, you will get lost in this area here.
These are the lagoons and the inner roads.
Hundreds of lagoons.
And the island is not sinking!
Sea levels are not rising.
That is a farse.
I say it's not true, they are not rising. We know. They are not rising.
You see that lagoon over here?
It is all a dry land now.
It is all dry land...
It used to be a lagoon. We used to catch Mullets in there.
Now it is all dry land here.
So if anything, the area of the island is increasing every year.
We don't know how much, but it is increasing.
-Why do people say that it is sinking?
Politically it is a right thing to say so we can get more of aid money.
Maybe I shouldn't say that...
In the Western and Central Pacific there has been a sea level rise.
But the Christmas Island...
There's no really good solid data
At one point the sea level actually dropped here.
So the sea level rise and fall here
is really dependent on the El Nino
You know, it's called the Southern Oscillation. Like Perry said, the islands seem to be ecreeking now.
So sand is continuously being produced on the reef
by animals that grace on the coral reefs and so forth.
That sends the deposit on the beach.
In these atolls, sand is very really lost completely to the Ocean.
it's always it moves around depending on the currents and so forth...
So whatever is eroding in one area
- might be building up in another.
so often a lot of the studies and the interpretations of sea level rise
and erosion and so forth...
I think are a little bit far-fetched
because they often measure
places which are eroding because they fit the pictures that they want to
convey that the islands are slowly disappearing.
When in fact
They don't measure the areas that are building up.
A lot of the the rhetoric and the hype,
along with
global warming,
I think it's is geared toward
islanders looking for funding. Looking for adaptation. Funding for adaptation
for the future.
This is a long-term project were talking about.
It's not an immediate threat.
One of the problems is that we haven't been measuring sea level long enough,
to determine trends.
And a lot of these trends may be very long-term trends.
For example sea level on the island here was about a meter higher than it is now
five thousand years ago that's why we have a lot of exposed coral
that's been the case everywhere everywhere the world.
That's five thousand years. Thats long before the industrial revolution and greenhouse gases
got loose in the atmosphere and created global warming. So that's a natural sort
of cycle.
And then there's always the up lift in the down welling of the Oceanic
Islands as they move across the Pacific in any oceans really on these
sub oceanic plates.
It's a good idea i think to adapt.
Adapting to climate change and to sea level rise. Here's it's really difficult in these
islands where you go. The island are all about six or eight feet above
sea level so you can't go to the high ground. I mean the only high ground is a
top of the coconut trees.
So it's really it's tough to get away.
Kiribati does have the 'KAP'. It's The Kiribati Adaptation Project. And Its based out of Tarawa.
And it's very well-funded and they are trying to come up with
first of: The sea level rise scenarios that
really will affect the island and then they are trying to come up
with ways to prepare for it. One of the things that they're doing is looking at
water conservation.
Right now we depend on water lenses which are below the surface now. The
fresh water table sits atop the sea water table and we draw fresh water off
of that through wells.
But it's the level rises you know those freshwater lenses might get inundated
with seawater
in which case it would pollute the fresh water supplies that we rely on.
It's just in general
coastal engineering and the paying attention to what what you're
doing with the land
it's really important that you want fried is preserve your land for
as long as possible.
They basically
created a camp of five thousand
servicemen here
it was down in their main camp which is now fifty miles up the road from where we are
sitting right now.
There still is a lot of remnants of that leftover
And in fact my water tower out here... I have got a steal 'I beam' that says
'Operation Grapple' on it. Its a historical piece here to the house
They were not quite what they have hoped for. They were not the big thermonuclear hydrogen
bomb blasts that they really wanted. They were not in that range.
Several tests were
carried out here.
They really wanted to join the 'Thermo-Nuclear Club'. The 'Hydrogen Bomb Club'.
They were horrible.
When they first did their testing
he was still on the island.
And they were...
He was still sitting in his house
and the doors were ripped off
and the windows...
And some of them were taken
out in to the sea, on ships
away from the islands.
He was with those people who stayed on the island.
There was a playing lying about
communicating back to them
through the speakers
and they kept listening
they were even told that the bomb is finally released from the plane
and is going to explode.
They were aware of that.
They were kind of given a choice.
during that time they were given things to
cover their eyes and ears.
especially those who had big families
they went on ships, because
they have found it hard to put on those things in one time.
They were really afraid.
But what else could they do...
So they just sat and
accept whatever might come.
I left the Island just before the testing and arrived back in 1993.
It was decided by the leader of the British Army to divide the local population to 3 groups.
We were dispersed to different camps. One stayed on the island and worked on a military ship.
The second was relocated to other islands of the Republic. And the third aboard for more than one year
at which preparations for the bomb testing were made.
Since my departure Island has grown in population dramatically.
At the time in my village there were about 200 people, including 60-70 British Government Civil Servants.
Today we count not in hundreds but in thousands.
We feel we need to reject people from Kiribati group as more land is occupied.
So much have changed...
Some of the changes I can see concern fish which are poisonous.
Such as 'Milk Fish', 'Banauewa', 'Red Snappers'...
Explosions caused many cases of radiation sickness.
Not to bad mouth the British, but the ministry of defense in Britain basically
stonewalled any kind of queries any kind of information
anything about the nuclear testing here and also in Maralinga.
basically - making a long story short - the British didn't
claim that any servicemen were
burned with radiation. But there were intact. And now there's a class-action
lawsuit being
just brought within the past 2 years there seven hundred plaintiffs already
in this lawsuit
and their composed of
Brits
New Zealanders
Fiji Islanders who were also here
and i don't know whether any Kiribatis were actually in that suit, although
couple people here did get burned by the radiation.
Some children during that time
got their eyes problems.
They found it hard to see properly.
-Did British Government help them out afterwords ?
No. (Still) no until these days.
The company that was here during the 'Big Cleanup'
didn't find any radiation. They found some hazardous materials
the radiation was mostly in radium dials and some other gauges and so forth
so there wasn't really any radiation. And one of the directors of that program (or managers)
told that they have checked a couple of times
with geiger counters or whatever and found nothing.
But then -again- they were hired, this company was hired by the Brits
so I don't know...
you know... Whether the guy was... I don't know... I kind of...
tend to believe him, you know
but i don't know. You know I'm not sure he didn't want to
blow the whistle on them...
"We are the first nation in the world... "
"To see sunrise of new millennium"
"Oh, word 'Kiritimati'"
"Lead the world" "Oh, word 'Kiritimati'"
"Lead the world"
"To see the sunrise"
"Kiritimati - lead the world to see the light" "See the light"
"And share the best of two thousand years to the world."
"And share the best of two thousand years to the world."
"Kiritimati - Lead the world"
"To see the light" "See the light"
"And share the best of two thousand years to the world."
"Greetings and peace" "We send to the world"
"From Kiritimati" "On the new millennium"
"Greetings and Peace" "We send to the world"
...We've decided to
have a place where we can rest in quiet
Where there is nobody to make noise...
My family and I decided to
clean up a site.
Far from the village
Far from everybody.
So when we are tired one day
when we are stressed, we go there. And we cleaned up that place...
It is not ours though.
It is the government property
but we did it. We cleaned it up.
We are doing fine, you know?
We are in paradise. Christmas Island I call - its a paradise, you know?
Less crime over here...
We almost know everybody
We almost know everybody's name.
"Kiritimati - lead the world" "To see the light"
"See the light"
"And share the the best of two thousand years to the world"
"Oh, world - Kiritimati, here we are" "Oh, world - Kiritimati, here we are"
"To see the new break of the day..." "The day..."