Why am I in Kiribati?

Why am I here ?

A common question I am asked about my journey to Kiribati is 'why?'

So, if that is a question you’ve been asking, you’re not alone.

To be honest, it's a question I ask myself too on some days. Or on rather a lot of days in truth.

So why?

Let me start with the straightforward explanation of what am I doing here in Kiribati, which Aristotle would call the 'efficient' explanation.

I’m here as a volunteer working as an 'office manager mentor' for Te Toa Matoa, a local NGO (non-goverment organisation) that is run by and for people with disabilities in Kiribati.

Now you're asking by what basis do I claim to know anything about office management?

Good question.

And one that bothered me a fair bit before I came here.

Turns out I know a lot about office management, or at least, a lot more than they do.

Let’s just say that calling them an 'organisation' is quite a stretch beyond our understanding of what that word means.

They have virtually zero records (hard or soft).

There are bits of paper that float around the office, some even notionally in a lever arch binder, but the binders aren’t labelled, and they are on a table one day, on the floor the next day, in a cupboard on another, and can’t be found on another.

Last week, I was digging into why the organisation [sic] was a year and a half behind on paying the compulsory employee contributions to the Kiribati Provident Fund (KPF being the national superannuation plan). 

Turns out that they simply decided to stop paying in October 2021. Who it was that made that decision is not entirely clear, but my informant was rather proud of being able to dig into a pile of random papers in a filing cabinet drawer and pull out the last signed cheque for the KPF payments for the month of October 2021.

Now, that is indeed impressive given that the no-one has been able to find for me any of the bank statements for 2021.

Less impressively, the cheque was never sent to KPF – clearly! And since that time, deductions have been made to salaries, but no cheques have been prepared and no payments to KPF have been made.

Other components that might be thought to constitute office-essentials are largely absent. The office has a telephone but it can receive calls only*. Even that is not really very useful because no-one is in any kind of hurry to answer the phone when it rings.

The outgoing calling service was turned off because it was too expensive. Very effective approach for reducing expenses, not so effective for facilitating communication.

To make outgoing calls, people have to use their own phones. Or more ingeniously, they mostly use mine because I’m the only one that has any ‘credit’ on their phone.

The internet is the same although in fairness, the internet connectivity where the office is located is spectacularly awful.

Garudasana

I have found the internet on one carrier (Vodafone) works only if you sit with your mobile phone at the front entrance to the office facing east. Internet on the other carrier (OceanCell) works best if you go to the boardroom (to the west), and slide your mobile phone onto one of the higher louvres at the window facing the ocean-side. 

It may or may not help if you put yourself into the yoga position garudasana (the eagle pose) at the same time.

All the computers in the place have various glitches. 

Most have keyboard problems where a few or many of the keys just don’t work.

I wonder if the problem is the tiny little ants that like to wander onto the keyboard and then disappear beneath the keys. I suspect they get squashed inside there and mess up the electrical contact.

When I pointed out to the office staff that their takeaway lunch boxes attracted ants and probably should not be placed on the desks, people nodded vigorously, smiled, and made grateful sounds in response to my observation.

Then happily munched their lunch and then left the partially empty lunchboxes on the desk next to their various laptops that work sort-of. A large and presumably happy colony of ants swarmed over the lunchboxes and the various laptops that seem to work sort-of less now.

The other enemy of computers is the ubiquitous dust and salt air. The lagoon-side is just 20m away from one side of the office, and ocean-side is just 50m away on the other side. There's a good chance that dust and salt is being sucked into the inner workings by the computer’s fan and clogging things up.

And if that doesn’t do it, maybe it is when the computers are dropped from motorbikes which cracks screens, hinges and casings and possibly interferes with the correct functioning of the computer.

On the bright side, it is testimony to the computer manufacturers that any of the computers work at all in this testing environment.

It maybe that the unreliability of the available computers discourages any effort to store documents in an organised filing system. Various files (labelled 'document1' or 'letter' or 'worksheet' or 'accounts') are saved in various folders (labelled 'new folder' or 'my folder') on various machines. 

If you cannot find the file on one of the many broken laptops, you might try the various ‘flash drives’ (USB sticks) that people have and use. Or at least have and use until they are lost.

But I’m probably being pretty tough on these people given that finding a pen in the office can be quite a challenge. I’ve gone out and bought packets of pens and handed them out to employees on a couple of occasions. However, they have disappeared, been lost, etc.

So who’s in charge of this chaos? you might ask.

Curiously, someone will happily put up their hand in response to your question.

However, to be clear, they are claiming the title of 'in charge', not 'this chaos' bit. 

The I-Kiribati are proud of their positions. They like the status, the authority, the titles. People are often addressed by their title ('Office Manager' or 'OM' and 'Chairperson') rather than their name.

But as to being responsible or accountable for the chaos, they will demur.

If you press on why something has gone wrong, they will dodge the question and simply respond to a tangential question that you did not ask. If you really press them, they will simply point to someone else as the problem.

In the office-environment (and maybe beyond), the people like the 'rights' that come with a title, but have little sense of concomitant obligations, responsibility and accountability.

So when giving an explanation to the 'why' question based on what I'm doing: I’m here helping a small organisation that is a lot disorganised.

However, when I am asked the 'why' question, I think most people are looking for my motivation rather than what I am doing. Aristotle called this the 'final' explanation, the end, the purpose or telos if you want a fancy Greek word for it.

My first response to this question tends to be something along the lines of 'giving back' (or 'paying it forward' if you prefer).

But as one friend pointed out, this is really a little bit glib.

Thinking that being here in person or even simply tipping in my personal wealth to these people will help is like thinking that peeing in the ocean might raise the sea level. (Despite local concerns about flooding from climate change, it is quite clear that the locals are not at all concerned that peeing in the water will raise the sea-level).

It is similar to my objection to the assertion that 'your vote counts' which we blithely accept (and repeat) as a good reason to vote.

Maybe the 'do-good' motive is something of a guilt-trip. I’m one of the winners in life’s lottery by being born into and living (most of the time) among the richest 1-2% of the world’s population. So I am trying to help others who deserve at least some share of what I was lucky enough to get without even trying.

The other element that might help answer the question 'why?' is for the adventure.

Of course, there is adventure and there's Adventure.

For most of us, an island holiday is a pretty awesome adventure – think Antigua, Bali, Cuba, Fiji, Greek Islands, Hawaii, Madagascar, etc.

Going to an island that is far away from everything else is really appealing. 

But the adventure quotient ramps up as the duration extends from 1 week to 1 month to 1 year!

Sunshine, palm trees, and that wonderful quality they call ‘island-time’ are great when you have nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it.

Kiribati is most certainly a great place to disconnect from the internet (because it works so intermittently), from telephones (because they are too expensive to use), and pens (because there are none) and paper (that’s everywhere – but you won’t find bits you want).  

It is all rather more disconcerting and annoying when you are trying to get things done.

So the answer to 'why' is perhaps a blend of ‘do-good’ explanation and adventure.

Robert Louis Stevenson seems to have had elements of both of these motivations operating for him. He spent the last years of his life cruising around the Pacific. He even spent time in Kiribati before eventually settling in Samoa with his family.

Before his death (at age 44), he began agitating for the Samoans to rise up and defend themselves against colonial powers. He was concerned that the Germans and the Americans were sniffing around and looking to make a land-grab.

His 'do-good' effort came to nought. Five years after Stevenson’s death, Samoa was divided up by the Germans and Americans. 

Or rather, his 'do-good' effort came to nought if he was trying to make a difference. Maybe the 'do-good' motive is less about making a difference, and more about caring.

Either way, it appears that I'm not alone in being motivated by adventure and do-good motivations. 

It occurs to me that the adventure-motive is about experiencing difference, and the do-good motive is about caring for a few more humans who are even more different than the strange ones I left at home.

Does that offer a some sort of explanation to the question 'Why?'

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* CORRECTION: Since going to press, the telephone has been cut-off and cannot even receive calls due to a large, long overdue telephone bill. So there is in fact no functioning office telephone.