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Feb29

KISS-ing games and broken dreams

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Take it from me, the winner of spinning complexity, who barrages oneself with the multitude of earth-changing ideals, as we roll on in life, forever forward.  Well I hope we are moving forward!

It has occurred to me, that I am far from being simple.  Perhaps it’s the legions of friends and the droves of family, who have said, many times, “M can you keep it simple?” 

Truth is – I have tried to keep things simple!  I have attempted to apply that KISS theory, ever since I heard it sprouted in a Sacrament meeting, in church (Auckland, New Zealand)  when I was 12 years old.  In a sermon where the comedic old adage was revised to suit the LDS congregation.  A wife stood in the back of the chapel and held up the sign for her Bishop-husband – spelling “K.I.S.S.”  After the meeting a counsellor appraising her wifely supportive manner, was informed it wasn’t anything to do with actually kissing her husband, but in fact telling him to Keep It Short Stupid! (KISS)” 

Thirty odd years later, that still gives me a chuckle.

How about applying that to life?  How about trying on a KISS day at the office or at work?  Where you do your job between normal hours and simply clock off or log off, go home and do whatever normal people do. 

…resolved to speaking to myself….”Emeretta there is nothing simple about you”.

Nothing is simple when you are born and raised equally, between three cultural differences.  Australian, Tuvaluan and Kiribati.  When relatives refer to you as ‘White/Imatang/Palagi, when they are dark-skinned, free-spirited islanders. On the other end of the ethnic spectrum, having been enviously referred to, by my blond, blue-eyed cousins in Australia,  “the one with a permanent tan”.

There is nothing simple about explaining your birthplace, when it is an island located on the equator in the Central Pacific Basin.  All your life explaining. Whenever saying the name of my birthplace, to have resounding replies, along the lines of “Where is that?  I have never heard of it!”   It was beyond my comprehension that I was to one day be a pivotal stop for queries about this remote location.  I am not a scholar, or an anthropologist.  I am not even a crusader for humanities.  I couldn’t help it, I had to become versed in sprouting geographical and logistical dimensions that exasperated the listener’s even more. 

“How did you get here?”  “Why did you leave there?”  “Do you have any family left there?”

The name of the island – Ocean Island, has a name that sounds like something you would get from a mediocre budgeted, comedy romance, made in the 70’s.  Ironically it’s would have been the perfect setting for the old ‘Fantasy Island’ sitcom, except back then, you travelled via Cargo ships instead of a little plane.  Instead of hearing Tattoo squealing “the plane the plane!” You were welcomed off the old WW2 barge, onto the concreted boat harbour, another monumental erection from WW2. 

Depending on the level of the tide, you could be caught in a splashing wave as you disembark. The barge smelt of salt permeated varnish on oaken planks, saturated and dried, old fish stench, which actually made us hungry for dried fish and fresh coconut.

My parents would travel back to Australia, once a year, on which ever cargo ship came to port.  The Valetta and The Triadic had my favourite crew.  They came to drop off supplies, mail, food and bring incoming expats.  Then taking back our phosphate, to nations around the globe, who still, to this day – have no idea where Ocean Island is.

People around the world eat vegetables, corn especially, which has the remnant fertile nutrients from bird shit, taken from an island smack in the middle of no where.  An island which homes the modern-day humanitarian catastrophe, exemplifying the crux of Global empirical dominance on a nation of people displaced, to serve a theory on fertile farming in developed countries.  As the home land of the isolated Banaban nation, a population of less than 4,000 people, were relocated, or rather, hopefully left to be forgotten on Rabi – another island, in Fiji

As a kid I was always ‘accidentally’ missing the dry step and would fall onto the landing.  While adults created a human chain to retrieve our cargo of gifts, I would be sensationalistic a swim with lurking dark bodies of huge fish, sharks and stingrays, in the mouth of the boat harbour. 

After a month or so in Australia, I was getting back into the ocean spray and the throngs of ‘cousins’ who wanted to see and hear all about the life in the ‘world outside Ocean Island’.  That was when life was simple.

Now I am living in Australia – the fantastic memories of the island I was born on – serve to remind me that here is a struggle.  Nothing is simple.  Back then I had powers to imagine I was a Goddess on an equatorial escape.   Now there is nothing but broken dreams.  Banaban’s are still displaced.  The Kiribati and Tuvaluan are threatened with being displaced if the world succeeds in labelling them the ‘first Environmental victims’. 

Is there anything we can do?  Yes KISS AND LET LIVE.  …or die happy trying to live the dream.