Tuvalu also relies on direct foreign aid. The sale of fishing rights to Japan, the United States and other tuna-loving nations brings in even more. Brightly hued Tuvaluan postage stamps bring in steady income from collectors. The islands have found new revenue sources. Tuvaluans subsist in traditional ways: men in little skiffs fishing for tuna families cultivating breadfruit and pulaka, a taro-like plant coconut harvested to export its oil. Those investments, mostly in Australia, prospered and topped $50-million last year, even with regular Tuvalu government withdrawals. To keep Moscow out, Australia, New Zealand and Britain quickly financed a Tuvalu Trust Fund of $18-million. In the mid 1980s, the Soviet Union offered aid money for fishing rights. Its assets: less than $1-million in cash and a hand-me-down British ship to link the widely separated atolls. The former Ellice Islands colony gained independence from Britain in 1978 and dubbed itself Tuvalu, "Eight Together" in Tuvaluan, signifying the eight main settlements. "If you look at them, you can see it in their happy, smiling faces." Today at 82, shrunken and an invalid, this Irish trader's grandchild knows 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, their 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. The 11,305 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 (Too-VAH-loo), a place like no other.Ī far-flung scattering of islands in a turquoise sea, Tuvalu 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," confides prisoner Lopatia Iacopo.
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