By Ursula Rakova, Executive Director of Tulele Peisa and a Greengrant recipient
I come from a small atoll made up of six islands. When people think of our part of the Pacific, they think of dancing girls and of swimming in our waters. We do love to swim. But the ocean is turning against us.
Our shorelines are eroding so fast, and there are frequent storm surges. The rising sea levels have gotten so bad that one of the islands is disappearing really fast. A gap appeared in 1984 that separated the island in two, and it’s widening. The sea is making an inroad into the island.
We’re a taro-eating community. But saltwater frequently floods the fields where we grow our food. The land is too salty, and our staple crops are disappearing. When the government gives us food supplies once a year, it’s normally just rice. We’re not a rice-eating community. The children often go without food and then school closes for months. That’s a normal situation.
It is a struggle for my people every day.
So what have we done?
The island elders got together and decided we needed our voices to be heard. So we started to get organized. We set up Tulele Peisa and started to talk to people who could help.
We got a grant from Global Greengrants to help develop a process to move our people to a new community on mainland Bougainville. This 18-step process starts with community assessment work and mobilizing and ends with people having land, homes, and a way to sustain themselves.
One thing that was really important was bringing some of the elders and chiefs from the mainland to the island. By getting them to live there for two weeks, they experienced the hardships. It gave them the story of how we live. They got to eat fish just like we do. They got to drink coconut water instead of water from water tanks.
The other significant thing was to get young people from the islands and mainland Bougainville to talk to each other. Now the islands were talking about the issues on climate change and how to work together.
But we still had to move people.
We talked to the Catholic Church. It had gotten a lot of land 100 years ago from customary owners. We got the bishop to sit down and tell us which of the lands weren’t being used. Now that church has given us four parcels of land on the coast.
We have already relocated seven families—86 heads total.
Will our island identity survive?
On the island we have four main clans and in the new location has the same clans. We’re trying to keep our society the same. We come from a tradition where women are owners of land. Will girls be owners of the land if we move? That is an issue we are having to deal with. One of the boys from my family was complaining that the land belongs to him. I said, “No, you have a small sister. She will decide what to do.”
- We want to maintain our language—our identity—we want continue to perform our celebrations and dancing. We want to maintain our island culture on the mainland.
- We have built decent houses roofed with bamboo. They aren’t cheaply built. Each costs us $25,000 kina ($9,450US). These are decent houses, roofed with bamboo. A lot of people ask, “Why don’t you build a house that is cheaper than $10,000 kina ($3,780US)?” There is no house in this area that costs less than that. So we are chasing money all of the time, and we are getting tired.
- We have given 2 hectares (4.8 acres) of land to each of the families. Right now, each family is using 1 hectare to plant 300 cocoa trees. The other hectare is for food crops they can survive on. So they are basically sustaining themselves. But there are still 2,00 people on the island, and we are sending back a lot of our food crops to sustain our families still on the island.
- We thought: “Families are planting cash crops, so let’s set up a company that will allow them to sustain themselves.” We established Bougainville Coconut Limited. Now we are exporting dried cocoa beans to Hamburg, Germany. We are now looking at getting ourselves to be fair-trade-certified farmers. Hopefully that will happen next year.
Why is this so urgent? Because I’m losing my land.
Women on my island are inheritors of the land. The island that is divided in half belongs to me. So my daughter won’t have anything in 10 years’ time. Unless I have something else on mainland Bougainville.
We can’t hold back the sea. It will do its part. It’s already doing its part. It’s displacing us.
Download Climate Justice and Women’s Rights: A Guide to Supporting Grassroots Women’s Action. And join the conversation by tweeting with us at #WomenAndClimate.
The families in Ursula’s Carteret Island community are widely acknowledged as being among the world’s first climate refugees. We were fortunate to listen to Ursula share her story in person at the Summit on Women and Climate in August 2014. This is an excerpt from her talk. Visit WomenAndClimate.org to learn about Ursula’s work.