The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“My goodness, would you look at that,” Hillary said. She was very exuberant about her work.

“It’s… uh… very interesting.”

“I have never seen so much fat on a dog. It’s astonishing.”

Mama Dog was not a fat dog. By Western standards she would probably be described as scrawny. This fat was her in-house store of energy. Darwinism at work.

“Oh dear.”

“Anything wrong?” I asked.

“Yes. Quite a lot. See this?”

“Um… yeah.” (Details omitted.)

“Her puppies died. See? They have already turned into pus. This would have killed her in a few days.”

“That’s not good.”

“No. This is actually turning out to be major surgery. You’ll give me a hand, won’t you?”

For the next hour, I followed Hillary’s directions—hold this, put your finger there, pull, now stuff it all back in. When Sylvia arrived home, she was not the least bit surprised or perturbed to find her dining table used as an operating table for a dog, though she did spend an awfully long time cleaning it afterward. I knew then that we had both made the mental leap from the continental world to the island world, where anything can happen and usually does.

A few hours later, I was amazed to see Mama Dog up and about, wagging her tail. She had just, quite literally, had her guts removed and yet she behaved as if it were just another day in a dog’s life on Tarawa. Was she a freak of nature, or was this what nature produced when allowed to go its own way, unhindered by breeders? If fed and trained, it seemed to me, these were good dogs. I would wager that in a match of strength and intelligence, a Tarawa dog would far outperform a Western dog with a pedigree.

Thanks to Hillary and the British taxpayer, I believed we had settled, once and for all, the number of animals making our home theirs, and so when one night we awoke to the cloying arf-arf of a puppy outside our window, I was in no mood to be generous. I went outside, picked up the pup, and took it to the reef, and to make my point clear, began to throw small rocks in its direction, encouraging it to skedaddle. Twenty minutes later, the puppy returned. Arf-arf. This continued for three sleepless nights, until finally I lost my patience and I stomped out of the house, grabbed the puppy, took it to the reef, where I had every intention of snapping the dog’s neck and tossing it into the sea. The puppy was doomed one way or the other. But I couldn’t do it. Yes, he looked upon me with sad, puppy-dog eyes. Instead, the following day, I picked up the little dog, walking around with it until I found a female dog with similar markings. Close enough, I thought, as I set the puppy down in front of his new mother. I never saw the puppy again.

CHAPTER 15

In which the Author describes the Behavior of Government Officials (drunken thuggery), the Peculiar System of Governance (Coconut Stalinism), the Quality of Government Services (Stalin, at least, got something done), followed by a recounting of the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition, when for nearly Two Months all government activities Ceased, not that anyone noticed, followed by the Shocking Conclusion to the competition, when the Ministry of Housing won with a dance that Shamelessly incorporated Polynesian influences, leaving the other Competitors to stew in their Bitter Bile.

Elsewhere in the world, governments typically confine their activities to the defense of their nation, the education of their youth, monetary policy, and the disbursement of pensions. True, a few—maybe more than a few—governments have pursued more nefarious ambitions, such as global hegemony and world dominance in rhythmic gymnastics, but most… okay, many… all right some—let’s not get into this—confine their energy to security and improving the quality of life of their citizens.

Not so in Kiribati. The country lacks a military force because the I-Kiribati wisely acknowledge that no one else wants their country. Even the I-Kiribati aren’t too thrilled about having their country. Certainly they wanted to live there, but all things being equal, they would rather have had the British govern it. Nor does the country have any say about monetary policy, since it uses the Australian dollar as its currency. There was a brief pang of worry in Canberra that President Tito’s decision to double the salaries of all government workers would lead to inflation in Australia, but then they remembered that this was Kiribati after all, with a population that could easily fit inside the new stadium in Sydney. Besides, even by doubling his salary, President Tito, the highest paid government official in Kiribati, still pulled in less than US $10,000 per annum, which didn’t strike me as particularly inflated. Like us, he probably couldn’t find anything to spend it on either.

The government in Kiribati also has very little to do with education. There is but one state-run school on Tarawa, the King George V High School, where government workers send their children. At any given time, half of the I-Matangs on the island were there to do “curriculum development” for KGV. This had gone on for several years without any discernible change in the colonial-era curriculum. The consultants, however, did swallow most of the country’s education budget. The rest of the nation’s children made do with church-run schools. And pensions? Few in Kiribati live long enough to collect a pension.

One can then reasonably ask what exactly does the government of Kiribati do? As far as I could tell, the government spends a lot of time drinking and brawling. No workshop on global climate change is complete until the assistant secretary of the environment has passed out in a pool of beer barf. No meeting to discuss interministerial cooperation on transport issues can occur without a climactic brawl between the principal welfare officer and the deputy secretary for transportation. And no reception for the rare visiting diplomat can be considered a success until the chairs are hurtled in a fine display of drunken carnage. The higher one is, the more such displays are expected. The vice president, for instance, decided to honor the visiting Japanese ambassador by guzzling a dozen cans of Victoria Bitter and then punching his wife as the horrified Japanese delegation looked on.

One would assume then that the government of Kiribati practices a laissez-faire approach to governance. This would be an incorrect assumption. The government of Kiribati has, in fact, emulated the North Korean model of governance. It practices what I like to call Coconut Stalinism. It controls everything. It does nothing.

On the outer islands, this was good—the do-nothing part. Subsistence living is rarely eased through diktats from the capital. But on Tarawa, indifference and inaction could be exasperating. The government owns the food co-ops, which specialize in expired tinned fish, just the thing for the fish-weary consumer. It controls the infrastructure and, as a result, rare is the stream of electricity that lasts longer than a few hours before it fizzles. Air Kiribati, government-owned, is a disaster waiting to happen. So too are the state-owned ships.

The government also manages the hospital, and I am using the word hospital very generously here. It is a complex of dingy single-story buildings where dogs wander through the patient wards; where flies torment the unfortunate denizens because no one has bothered to install screens on the windows—even though screening is readily available at the island’s hardware store; where the emergency room lacks a sink and is therefore stained with the blood of innumerable patients; where the incinerator has failed to work, oh, for several years now, resulting in an island littered with hazardous waste; where the X-ray machine stands idle because no one bothered to order film, or general anesthesia for that matter, which means that patients undergo operations with only a local anesthetic, which just makes me shudder. In brief, the hospital on Tarawa was where one went to die.

The I-Kiribati knew this. That’s why no one ever went to the hospital until they were ready to meet their maker. In the meantime, they resorted to local plants presumed to have medicinal value, healing massages, and magic to treat their ailments. Only when the tumor bulged alarmingly under the skin, or the wound turned dangerously gangrenous, or the knife could not be removed from the heart was a patient delivered to the hospital, when, of course, it was too late to do much anyway. It wasn’t as if all of the half-dozen or so doctors on Tarawa were incompetent, though frankly I too was wary of seeking medical counsel from doctors trained in Burma, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea. The United Nations, in its wisdom, sends doctors from the most medically deprived corners of Africa and Asia to the Pacific Islands. In turn, it sends doctors from the most medically deprived corners of the Pacific to staff the wards in Africa and Asia. I am sure there is a very good reason for this, but my brain is too feeble to grasp what that reason could be. But I digress. The main problem doctors faced on Tarawa was that they simply did not have the diagnostic tools, the medicine, or a clean recovery ward, to allow them to do their job.