6/26/2023 0 Comments Burly men at sea problems"We're fairly treated, and so we do the same." "No one tries to escape," Iacopo assured a reporter. Where else, after all, would the prison fence not quite fence the prison in? "If you look at them, you can see it in their happy, smiling faces." "The people are happy," she told a reporter visiting her home. Today at 82, shrunken and an invalid, this Irish trader's grandchild knows that her islands, in a world full of strife, are still special. Old snapshots show that with her grass skirt and Polynesian beauty, the local nurse charmed American GIs at native performances in 1942-43. "A truly dismal island," the American author wrote of Funafuti, the main settlement, after passing through during World War II.īut 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, the twice-a-week link to the outside world.Īs for Michener's dismal time, he must have missed Pole O'Brien's dancing. Even 60 years ago, James Michener found it unpromising. "Tuvalu is a very small country with a high degree of vulnerability," the Asian Development Bank observed in a 2003 report. 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. 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. 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 our day of rest."Īnd this is Tuvalu, a place like no other.Ī far-flung scattering of islands in a turquoise sea, "Too-VAH-loo" is one of the planet's smallest and most remote nations, just west of the International Date Line, just south of the Equator. "We didn't even know they were coming," confided prisoner Lopatia Iacopo. 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. In T-shirts and shorts, the six inmates stumble into place for impromptu prayers, listen politely to the congregation's encouraging words and reply humbly with their own words of thanks. They catch the convicts dozing in hammocks beside the beach, on a breezy mid-Pacific morning. No problem: The fence, more a hint than a hindrance, reaches only halfway around the tiny compound. The 40-odd faithful, Bibles in hand, drive straight onto the prison grounds in pickup trucks.
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