The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Sylvia offered. “I’m meeting with an English consultant tomorrow.” While not quite as obsessive as I was, Sylvia was notably curious about recent affairs in Washington. This was her president after all.

“Well, I asked her about the cigar,” Sylvia said the following day.

“And?” I asked, positively drooling for the lowdown.

“She wouldn’t say. But she was really blushing.”

“Blushing? You mean this is blush-worthy news? What on earth did Bill Clinton do with a cigar? This is killing me.”

I imagined what it must be like in America. The Clinton Sex Scandal 24/7 on television. Newspapers with screaming headlines. Rumors on the Internet. Magazine pieces on what it all meant for America. Salivating Republicans. How I wished I was there. Instead, I found myself at reef’s edge, under the white light of a million stars, watching the night fishermen scour the reef for octopus, as I worked the knobs of my shortwave radio, longing to hear nothing more than a Jay Leno monologue.

CHAPTER 20

In which the Author discusses the Foreign Aid Industry, whose emissaries, the Consultants, arrive monthly, air service permitting, peddling Models of Sustainable Development, which have worked very well in Africa, followed by some thoughts on the Red Menace on Tarawa, the sinister agents from China, whose Evil Plottings were Subverted at every turn by the Author’s Beguiling Girlfriend, who engaged in the Black Arts of Spy Craft, the Perilous Game, a game that she did not master, which led to some false information being sent to Washington, possibly leading to Unforeseen Consequences in U..S.-Sino relations.

I decided to diversify from fiction writing. Now and then, I passed my scraps of art to Sylvia for perusal. She was very positive. “Um… this is very… descriptive,” she said after reading a passage describing a tree, which had taken me six weeks to write. But when she declared, in as encouraging a manner as possible, that my protagonist, my hero, read like a “caricature of a gargoyle,” I knew it was time to spread my wings. I began to edit papers for the local foreign aid industry.

In one week of editing a “feasibility study” I earned more than twice what the average I-Kiribati earned in a year. The study, funded by the Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome, recommended going forth with a plan to transform Butaritari into small-farmer plots for growing market vegetables, which would then be sold to middlemen on Tarawa, called “marketers,” who would sell the vegetables to the co-ops, who would then sell them on to consumers on Tarawa. It must have looked like a sensible thing to do over an espresso in Rome. Of course, how one transports perishable vegetables from an island that lacks electricity and refrigerators was never quite addressed. By air? By boat? Had the authors actually set foot on Kiribati? Nor were the implications of the bubuti culture mentioned. What is the point of working harder to earn more money, when at the end of the day you will be obliged to turn over your profit to anyone who asks? Nor did the study find it problematic that for the scheme to break even, a consumer would have to pay approximately $10 for a single tomato. No, the authors concluded, this is a good plan. Let’s fund it.

Whatever. I soon learned that the greatest beneficiaries of I-Matang aid were the I-Matangs themselves, and I was excited to finally get a piece of the pie myself. It had been an awfully long time since a dollar had come my way. In some alternate universe, I had credit card debts and student loan payments, but that universe was a long, long way from Tarawa. No one was calling me here to remind me that a payment was due. I had vanished from that world and I gave it no further thought.

Still, even though we had absolutely no need whatsoever for extra dollars pride compelled me to, at least now and then, bring in a paycheck. I did what I could to help Sylvia with her job. Indeed, on Tarawa I was known as the FSP husband. But here and there I enjoyed the sight of a check with my name on it. And so I edited.

This gave me an interesting perch from which to observe the foreign aid industry in Kiribati. To this day, I remain baffled by the UN. I could never figure out what they did. Every few months, Air Nauru would deposit another batch of fashionably dressed UN staffers, who would then spend most of their time on the atoll bitching about the I-Kiribati. “The people are so dirty,” said a Nigerian woman, tossing a Hermes scarf around her shoulders. She was on Tarawa to improve the plight of women in Kiribati. “How could you possibly live here?” asked the Frenchman with the tasseled loafers, after he was told that no, he could not have a club sandwich. He was in Kiribati to help the children.

Watching the parade of consultants that descended on Tarawa became the equivalent of watching the evening news for us. We knew what the chattering class back home was talking about simply by noting what causes the consultants represented. One day, for instance, a team of antismoking specialists arrived in Kiribati. I had the good fortune to spy upon them in the bar of the Otintaii Hotel, where they were meeting with officials from the Ministry of Health, grim-faced men who nodded politely as they were told of the tobacco industry’s evil designs for Kiribati and who, the moment these sullen but healthy Western people departed, opened up their tins of Irish tobacco and rolled their cigarettes with pandanus leaves and had a good laugh as they began an evening of serious drinking. They were aware, no doubt, of the 1996 figures on causes of morbidity in Kiribati, which included 99,000 cases of influenza (which killed close to 2 percent of the population in 1983), 15,000 cases of diarrhea that were serious enough to be reported (including 4,500 cases of dysentery, primarily among children), and 44 new cases of leprosy. There were no statistics on smoking-related diseases and deaths. There was no reason to collect such data. No one lived long enough to be mortally embraced by lung cancer and emphysema.

There was, it seemed to me, considerable dissonance between the health care concerns of westerners and the realities of the Pacific. Diarrhea and acute respiratory infections, for instance, killed nearly 10 percent of children under the age of five. But glamorous people don’t die of diarrhea. Elizabeth Taylor doesn’t hold fund-raisers for people with the runs. And so the money goes to AIDS, and not childhood diarrhea. So be it. If donors want to give money to fight AIDS rather than diarrhea or malaria, by far the greater killers in the developing world, I certainly won’t emit a peep of protest. I thought that the wisest thing one could do to prevent AIDS in Kiribati would be to take one banana and one condom to the Marine Training School, where I-Kiribati men are taught how to crew freighters, and explain that when in port you really shouldn’t visit prostitutes, but if you must, use a condom because otherwise you will die. Here’s a condom. Here’s a banana. Here’s how it works. Total cost of program? Approximately $1. Lives saved? Innumerable.

Foreign aid donors think differently, however. Instead of pursuing a simple prevention program, three- quarters of the country’s doctors and most of the senior nurses were sent to Perth, Australia, where they attended a five-week-long conference on AIDS counseling—not prevention, not treatment, but counseling. Total cost? $100,000. Lives saved? None. I could only imagine a doctor talking to an I-Kiribati woman infected with AIDS by a husband returning from his tour at sea. How’s your self-esteem?

The I-Kiribati, however, were largely indifferent to the presence of foreigners in Kiribati and the work they did. The only way consultants could get anyone to show up for a workshop in which they would explain the proper way to live on an atoll was to pay what were euphemistically called “sitting fees,” or bribes. On the outer islands, the volunteers were generally thought of as the village pets, amusing diversions that entertained the villagers with their strange ways. On Tarawa, the I-Matang presence was still sparse enough that people would gawk and giggle whenever one was sighted. Or perhaps it was just me that they gawked and giggled at. Nevertheless, I think it fair to say that the presence of a few foreigners in their midst was hardly a concern for the I-Kiribati. Until the Chinese arrived, that is.

Seemingly out of the blue, a new Chinese Embassy was constructed. It was white with a red tiled roof and impenetrable reflecting windows. It looked like an ungainly cross between a Beverly Hills mansion and a Taco Bell franchise. In front there was a glass-enclosed display featuring a tableau of industrial images under the peculiar headline “China: Friend of the Environment.” The embassy was constructed entirely by workers flown in from the People’s Republic of China, using tons of rock taken from the shoreline, which is actually not so environmentally friendly, as it furthers erosion, and erosion is no laughing matter on an atoll.

Soon the library on Tarawa—a one-room building I sometimes visited to peruse their collection of vintage National Geographics, a remnant, as was the rest of their modest collection, of the