Betio. The walk to the shop

From my Diary:

Betio. The walk to the shop.

Sometimes you just forget where you are. You become acclimatised to the heat and immune to the Island lifestyle.  You notice the tradition dancing, but in the same manner that you would notice a show or movie.

And after that immunity and acclimatisation you just carry on living within the restrictions and limitations. You have become an islander.

And then suddenly you realise that you are a long way from anywhere on a small atoll, and you see it differently. 

I walked out of the office to go to a shop. 

The sentence brings incorrect visions into your mind. The office is a long grubby hut, left over by the British in 78.  It has ceiling fans and curtains to try to keep the intense heat at bay. 

The shop is a wooden shack in which a woman lives and works. You don’t enter her home, but stand at a small glassless window and tell her what you want. She rummages around and hands the goods to you through the opening.  

Behind me is the Kiribati port. A row of old corrugated iron sheds and hanger like structures, falling down from rust and decay.  Workers scurry around unloading goods. This isn’t a port as most of the world would know it. There is no deep water facility. Ships anchor offshore, and unload onto small lighters, that bring the goods into the port. There they are unpacked on the dockside and manually loaded onto small trucks, or repacked for further shipping to more remote islands. 

The image is one from a 1930s movie in the Pacific. Nothing has changed.  Bare-chested natives sweat as they lift bags of rice onto their shoulder and carry them from a waterside lighter to a roadside truck. Children fish on the dockside, young female clerks giggle and flirt with the labourers as they walk past, the girls counting each sack of rice. 

A single 1930s crane lifts containers off the small boats and drops them on the dockside, where they are unpacked. 

The traffic on the road between the shop and the port is sparse. A few vans and trucks. No cars drive past.  Women walk by, bare brown feet on rock hard coral and scorching hot tarmac.  They are immune. 

This is Betio, the port and industrial centre of Kiribati.  

Down the road there is a cigarette factory full of young girls. Opposite there are hundreds of small houses. All identical, single story, all painted green or blue, with removable panels for windows.  These were left by the British.  Factory built prefabricated housing.  

Occasionally you find a street of larger houses, two or three times the size. These were for the British workers who ran the port, the power station, the water system, the phone company. 

Time has stood still since 1978, and in reality time has stood still since the immediate post war years. 

Those black and white movies I saw as a child, featuring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in “The Road to Somewhere”, are staggeringly real and in technicolour. 

It wont last for ever. Already there is a container truck that picks up the containers and delivers them complete to the door.  There are plans for a deep water extension to the port, so the supply ships can come in and unload directly. 

Batio will change. But until them it is an old movie.  I can almost see Bob and Bing walking through the docks. 

The old woman hands me my goods and laughs when I call her darling.  She has only ever known this atoll, this life.  I pause and wonder if she ever thinks about my life.

I turn around and watch the sweating dockers in the mid morning heat.  Between the iron sheds I can see the Pacific, and further away I can see a freighter unloading more containers. 

A van drives by, and pips its horn.  Someone I know, on an atoll where everyone knows everyone. 

And suddenly you feel you know where you are.