Programs Blog

Author: Caleb Dittmar, Williams College

Ship’s Log

Date: October 18, 2023
Time: 10:06 pm
Location: 200nm South of Tuvalu
Weather: Rolling seas, 6 foot waves and cloudy

Last Friday, the Robert C. Seamans and her crew anchored in Tuvalu for the
first time. No one aboard the ship had ever been to this small, remote
pacific island nation before. On our navigational chart, the islands of
Tuvalu make up a dashed ellipse encircling a lagoon.

It is a place that messes with your sense of scale, tiny on the chart,
bigger than you might expect in real life, but still so small on the scale
of nations. In the US, it is common to express scale in terms of how many
times Rhode Island could fit inside some landmass or other. The country of
Tuvalu could certainly fit inside Rhode Island, lagoon and all.  Its entire
population, about 12,000 people, is about a third of that of my hometown. In
the US, it wouldn’t even register as a small city; it would be a small town,
similar to the town that hosts my home institution, Williams College.

Anchored in the lagoon, we can see the whole extent of Funafuti, the capital
island/city of Tuvalu that hosts the majority of the population. Barges and
little fishing vessels are anchored just off the shore. Along the coast are
houses, a radio tower, a government building topped with solar panels, and a
half mile or so stretch of massive sandbags piled high against the lagoon,
with bulldozers milling about on top. This, we would soon learn, is a “land
reclamation project,” part of Tuvalu’s plan to combat sea level rise and
make space for its citizens to continue living on the island. We see a plane
take off, one of three flights from Tuvalu each week. Fiji Airlines
purportedly holds a monopoly on air travel to and from Tuvalu, so a ticket
between the two nations can cost upwards of $1000, more than a much longer
flight from the San Francisco to Fiji.

Onboard the dinghy heading ashore, I ask Cap and Jan what system of
governance Tuvalu has. They encouraged going into the government building
and asking around to find out first hand, so Grace and I do just that. I
climb up to the top floor, reading public health postings as I go along. One
window faces the calm lagoon; the other faces the rest of the Pacific Ocean,
waves breaking over the edge of the reef. There is not more than half a mile
of land between these coasts, and at 3 stories tall, this seems to be the
tallest building in Tuvalu. I’ve unintentionally crossed an item off my
bucket list: reach the highest point in a nation state.

Back on the ground floor, Grace has befriended some people in the Ministry
of Local Government. Seemingly unsure how to answer our questions, they send
us up to the Office of the Prime Minister. A friendly man in flip flops
greets us and introduces himself as Semi, the Secretary to the Prime
Minister. He has a meeting to get to but will be happy to answer our
questions later that afternoon. He encourages us to ask around in other
offices and explore the island in the meantime. We learn a somewhat random
spattering of information: the ministry of culture oversees and maintains a
site where European oceanographers drilled 300 meters of core samples in the
1890s, attempting to verify Charles Darwin’s theory of atoll formation,
Tuvalu gets about 2000 tourists per year, and a lot of the businesses in
Funafuti are purportedly Chinese-owned, or perhaps Taiwanese.

The streets of Funafuti are long and narrow, filled with a constant stream
of motorbikes. An SUV would take up both lanes of traffic. I mostly only see
trucks in construction sites and cars parked in spaces labeled for ministers
of various branches of government. Walking along the narrow street, I
imagine a typical American parking lot, like you might find at a suburban
Target. It would easily span the width of the island. With such space
constraints, widespread car ownership is not a real option here. On foot, I
note the lack of fellow pedestrians and cyclists. Transit here is powered
with imported gasoline.

Unlike in our previous stops in Levuka and Savu Savu, most houses here seem
professionally built, made of cinder blocks, wood, and bricks, and not
walled with corrugated steel. Where do extra or old building materials go on
this island? I pass a solar power plant, some closed restaurants, a school
bus with a sun-faded sticker that reads “From the People of Japan.” There
are no flights today, so the airfield, which employs about 20 people, is
open to thru traffic. In the evening, the green by the runway will host
games of soccer and volleyball.

I reunite with some of my shipmates, headed for a beach. We find a monument
depicting important moments in Tuvaluan history. Two of the sides are in
Tuvaluan, illegible to us; the other two commemorate Hurricane Bebe in 1972
and the landing of US marines on Funafuti in 1942. Back onboard the ship,
Jan hypothesizes that Tuvalu and many other pacific islands still might not
have airports today if they hadn’t been built during World War II. Now, an
airfield is being built on another Tuvaluan island south of us, to host
domestic flights and make travel between islands faster.

I make my way down to the University of the South Pacific satellite campus,
where I meet an Australian cultural geographer and her half-Aussie, half
Tuvaluan daughter, who just finished high school. They were in Australia for
most of covid, but they have been here since. The daughter says that the
Funafuti feels more crowded than it did a decade ago.

Headed back, I pass the judiciary building, the hospital, the Funafuti  town
council house, a housing project seemingly funded by the government of
Taiwan, and the empty expanse of the land reclamation project. Looking for
filtered water, I am directed to a conference center, which was built in
2019 for the 50th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting. Inside, it is
air-conditioned and spacious, with floor to ceiling windows and polished
tile floors, like a conference center anywhere in the world. When I meet
again with Semi, he says that he and his co-workers say that going down to
the conference center feels like going abroad. A lot of interdepartmental
government meetings are held there, as well as international conferences on
various aspects of climate change and life in the pacific. Today, I see
posters left over for GMN: the Global MTCC Network, a global network for
energy-efficient shipping, funded by the EU.

Semi is very generous with his time, answering to the best of his ability
all of my questions about government structure, history, climate change, sea
level rise, local media, economy, and limitations and opportunities of being
a small nation. He expresses pride that people in Tuvalu are willing to
share what they have, so no one is truly poor. I learn that Tuvalu has no
newspaper; there is a local TV broadcast for the main island and radio that
reaches the outer islands. I learn that Tuvalu had zero covid cases up
through late 2022, when it reopened its borders, but the global supply chain
disruptions were very challenging. Tuvalu imports over 90% of its food, so
when the ships didn’t come for a month or so, people started to panic. I
learn that Tuvalu is one of the few nations in the world that fully
recognizes the sovereignty of Taiwan. When Semi’s co-worker pops in, he
directs my fisheries questions to her, and I learn about the fishing days
that Tuvalu sells to the offshore fishing fleets of Taiwan and other
nations, as well as the challenges of policing illegal fishing, an area
where much international cooperation is needed. Tuvalu’s domestic fishing is
all coastal, run out of small craft with outboard motors that can’t take on
the open ocean.

Eventually, it’s time for Semi to go to dinner, and me to go back to the
ship. We part ways, and I think about the ocean side of the island, where
broken bits of coral exoskeleton form a mound against the tide. This island
exists in a delicate balance. Some climate activists make the case that
Tuvalu will be almost entirely underwater by the end of the century, if not
sooner; therefore, life here cannot continue. Certainly, this place faces
existential challenges, but maybe the ships will continue to come, bearing
food and sandbags. Maybe the coral reef will keep growing and breaking off,
pulling new rock from calcium and carbon in the ocean just fast enough to
keep this place above the surface.

P.S. I didn’t mention this at the beginning of this post, but I’m Callie
(they/them). I study Computer Science and English Literature at Williams
College, and I’m from Menlo Park, CA.

P.P.S. Hello to all the folks at home! Mom, dad, Susannah, Kinsey, Memo, and
now Santi! I’m doing well on the ship, and learning a ton. I can’t wait to
see all of you when I get back.

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