The Sex Lives of Cannibals

dehydration, and because you will be the most useless person on the boat, you will be regarded by the others as a potential food source.”

I didn’t like the imagery here.

“And,” she continued, “if you’re off drifting on the ocean, who will do the shopping? And what about the nights when it’s your turn to cook?”

Can you feel the love?

Nevertheless, I proceeded with my plans because a line had been drawn and lines must be crossed. I would, however, bring extra sunscreen and lots of water. I tried to think of ways to be useful on a boat adrift in the Pacific, but I could not come up with anything except shark bait.

The following day Sylvia came home and said that she had spoken with Temawa, Bitaki’s sister. Temawa worked at FSP as an environmental education officer. It often seemed as if the FSP staff alone were related to the entire country.

“She said Farouk had gone fishing with her brothers.”

“And… what did he say?”

“You should ask him.”

I sensed a trap.

Farouk was Temawa’s husband. He was, like nearly every other foreigner in Kiribati, a missionary. What made him a little different was that he was a Muslim missionary from Ghana. If you were an I-Kiribati woman looking for a way to subvert traditional mainstream island society, you could not do better than to marry a Muslim missionary from Africa. This streak of good-hearted independence is what drew Sylvia to hire Temawa when she was eight months pregnant with their second child. Temawa held a graduate degree in environmental studies from a university in Canada (“It was so cold,” she said), and rather than seek lifetime employment with the government, she genuinely wanted to do something which would allow her to “make a difference.” You believed her too.

Her husband Farouk was a gentle man with a sly sense of humor. “A man walks into a bar and says ‘Allah Akbar.’ What should you do?”

“What?”

“Duck.”

Farouk had yet to convert a single I-Kiribati to Islam. Not even Temawa would make that kind of leap, but he remained in buoyantly good spirits, working primarily as a minibus driver to help out with the family’s expenses. When I asked him about his experiences fishing, he broke out into a wide grin and declared: “I have never been so scared in my life.”

Did I mention that Farouk had fought the Russians in Afghanistan? No? Well, he did. Farouk was one of those fearless souls whose life had become one long adventure. He was deeply at ease with himself, exuding an air of preternatural calmness, and so when he remarked that he had been shit-scared while fishing with his brothers-in- law, I paid attention.

“I just wanted to lie down in the middle of the boat, close my eyes, and pretend that I was somewhere else. The waves were so big, and the boat goes up and down, up and down, and I became very sick,” he said. “But I couldn’t lie down.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was busy bailing. It is a very leaky boat. For twelve hours I did nothing but get sick and bail.”

Score one for Sylvia.

Fortunately, sweet necessity soon reared its head. We had planned to fly to Maiana with Bwenawa and Atenati, who also worked in the FSP garden, in order to conduct nutrition and gardening workshops in each of the island’s villages, but Air Kiribati was once again grounded, awaiting spare parts from the other side of the globe. An efficient airline Air Kiribati is not, and a sea journey was thus happily needed. One would think that given the troubles of its airline, inter-island shipping would be a high priority for the government, but this is not so. There is but one creaking, rusting hulk of a vessel that periodically sails to the outer islands to deliver supplies and gather copra, the dried coconut meat used in soaps and oils, which provides outer islanders with their only source of income. The ship’s schedule is mysterious, its sightings infrequent, and most islands go four months and more between ship visits. Pleas from outer islanders requesting more shipping are duly and ceremoniously acknowledged and then ignored altogether. The more cohesive and industrious islands have taken it upon themselves to buy their own island boats. There is the Abaiang boat, and the Onotoa boat, and so on, and the man who builds them is John Thurston, a Californian who left the United States some thirty years ago.

It is one of the small pleasures of living in Kiribati that the foreigners one meets tend to live life in a vivid and eccentric sort of way, and when you listen to their tales of high adventure in the South Seas, you find that you are subsequently ruined from a conversational point of view, that you can no longer even pretend to be remotely interested in someone’s trip to the mall, or their thoughts about the stock market, or their opinions about the relative merit of a football player, and soon you will be branded as aloof, simply because once, on a faraway island, you heard some good stories. John had some of the more colorful tales. He was a surfer from Anaheim who one day picked up and left for Hawaii to surf the big waves. In appearance and mannerism, he reminded me of Brian Wilson, the tormented genius behind the Beach Boys. There were demons. They were slayed. And the story of that battle manifested itself in the lines on John’s face and the near-stuttering quality of his speech. He had become a Baha’i, which is something I never asked him about, because I once heard that members of the Baha’i faith are not permitted to proselytize unless someone asks them about their faith, and it says much about the graciousness of John and Mike and the other Baha’is I met that I remain as clueless about the religion now as ever.

In the early 1970s, John set out for Tarawa, where he was charged by the Baha’i powers that be to start up a youth center similar to the one he had run on Maui. Soon enough, he discovered he was broke and so he began to build boats, catamarans, and trimarans with shallow drafts to accommodate lagoons and reefs. They were made of plywood and whatever other material he could find, and John set up business as an inter-island trader. With independence in 1979, he moved on to the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Fiji, Samoa, and eventually to Papua New Guinea, where he lived for six years, trading food and tobacco (but no alcohol) in exchange for shells in areas where few had ever encountered a westerner. The violence and mayhem of Papua New Guinea eventually compelled him to leave, and he returned to Kiribati with Martha, his yellow 36-foot homemade trimaran, which would become our home on the voyage to Maiana.

His house, an airy bungalow that took him two months to build after a fire reduced his old place to little more than flickering embers, overlooked the lagoon. It was as much a workshop as a home, and I stopped by one day to get some help repairing the sail I used for windsurfing. A tumble on the reef had created a foot-long gash. As John set about lining the tear with sail tape I set about prying stories from him. John is a modest man, friendly in that wholesome American kind of way, but hardly one to expound unbidden, but eventually he told me about the girl he’d found floating in the ocean.

“We were sailing off Abaiang when Beiataaki noticed something strange in the water,” he began. “At first we thought it was a turtle, and then as we got closer we saw that it was a body, a little girl, couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.” His eyes widened, as if to say, Can you believe that? “We sailed alongside. She was just bobbing in the water. Her eyes were closed and we thought she was dead. She was about ten miles or so from land. And, I’ll never forget this, swimming through her hair were all these little fish, little colorful fish, blue and red, like flowers. We were about to pull her in, when suddenly she opened her eyes. Well, that was a surprise, I can tell you. We got her aboard and gave her some water and some food. She had been drifting since the day before. We took her back to her village and arrived right in the middle of her funeral.”

“My goodness,” I said. John was the sort of person to whom you could say my goodness without feeling self-conscious. “How did she end up drifting in the ocean?”

“She saw her father and brother fishing from a sandbar in the lagoon. She tried to get to them, but the tide got her. They tried to reach her, but couldn’t, and so she drifted right on out of the lagoon and into the ocean. The entire village set off in canoes looking for her, but they couldn’t find her.”

“You must be a popular figure in Abaiang.”

“They’re good people. They’re all good people here.” He paused for a moment. “Well, there are a few bad apples, just like everywhere.”

Once, when I happened to be elsewhere, Sylvia noticed two drunks lurking around the house. It was during the day, which was unusual. Sylvia called John, who immediately rushed over. He is a big man, and he literally