World View

I wrote the following post back in early March and never posted it as I was coming to terms with living out here. It got lost in the events of my mother’s death and I’ve just rediscovered it so thought I’d post if for you, my musings on how our world view is influenced by geography and our experiences growing up.

World view 

How is your outlook on life, and view of the world, formed? It comes from a large range of factors including: where you grew up (place), socio-economic status (class), family type, family beliefs and traditions, your age, gender, sexual orientation, income, education, life experiences, occupation, culture, language etc. It is in effect the lense through which you see, filter and interpret the world around you. That lense begins to develop as an infant and all your experiences and interactions impact upon it and are distilled by it. In short your experiences, culture and background affect how you view the world round you.

World view is useful in that it helps us to make sense of the world we live in, but it is important to note that it can also limit our understanding of it so understanding your own view of the world and how it came to be formed can help you to understand how other people’s views do not necessarily gel with your own. For example, if you grew up in a reasonably well off middle class family, where both parents were well educated and working  so as to ensure you had financial security, and you were given every opportunity to take part in social and sports activities after school etc, that would impact on your outlook and view of the world- you’d probably grow up thinking everyone has the same opportunities and access to the things you have. Your experiences and world view would be very different to someone who grew up in a large, poor family where every day was a struggle to put food on the table and some days you went hungry. Your experience in growing up in that environment would most likely give you a very different perception of the world, and potentially, your place in it. Your attitude as to whether or not you see value in education, in work, in owning your own home, in the opportunities open to you can be impacted by your experiences growing up and those experiences will help shape who you are and how you see the world and your place in it.

Of late I’ve been pondering how geographic location affects your worldview. The atolls of North and South Tarawa here in Kiribati are no more than a few hundred metres wide at most, and usually less than a hundred. That means that you can literally see from one side of your island home to the other and it only takes a few minutes to walk from the lagoon side to the open ocean side! This is very different to the world I grew up in, even an island country like New Zealand most of us can see one, or other coast but not usually both at the same time! The atolls of Tarawa are scattered around the circumference of the lagoon, a long narrow strip of land linked by causeways, which in the north can only be crossed to at low tide. In effect it is like living on the rim of a giant fishbowl, most of which is full of water (Tarawa lagoon). A thin circular ribbon of land, barely above the high tide mark, no more than a couple of hundred metres wide right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The ocean around Kiribati and the lagoon is at the heart of life here, it is both a highway for travel and also provides food for the people.

There are no rivers here, no mountains, no hills, almost all of the land is only 1-2m above sea level and the highest point, a small area around Eita, is 3m in height and that is the highest point anywhere on these islands!  How does this reality affect one’s outlook or view of the world? Seasons, what are seasons? It is hot and tropical all year round, sure El Nina and El Nino weather patterns and the trade winds do affect the climate here but you won’t get a winter season, at least not as I know it. Speaking of which the most ironic T shirt I’ve seen here so far was one being worn by a young man on his way to church. A bright orange T shirt emblazoned on the front with the Stark’s motto from Game of Thrones: Winter Is Coming. I pissed myself when I saw that one.

One of the features that influences world view here is geographic isolation. The nearest major islands are several hundred, if not thousands of kilometres away. North, South, East, West. It doesn’t matter which direction you travel, the first land mass of any consequence is many, many hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. I stand on the edge of the reef looking south across the Pacific Ocean from my home here, knowing several thousand kilometres away is my real home and that if I drew a straight line due south on the map the next major land mass I would hit it is New Zealand or Antartica! That blows my mind! So it is easy to imagine Tarawa as its own little world, stuck right bang in the middle of the deep blue of the Pacific, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere.

Kiribati can be seen as an micronism of the earth itself- the atolls of South Tarawa especially are overpopulated and crowded and as a result are dealing with all sorts of environmental and social problems associated with this- just as the larger world is grappling with these issues. Indeed if outsiders HAVE heard of these islands it is usually in regards to the impacts that climate change and sea level rise are having here.

If you grew up here and have never been anywhere else how can you really imagine what rolling green hills, or mountains, or even cities are like? They are so far outside your everyday frame of reference. Sure these days we have TV, the internet and books but even so is not quite the same as experiencing them yourself.  I’ve discussed with the tutors here their experiences travelling overseas. All are ex-seafarers having spent a decade or more at sea. Most have travelled the world several times or more and have visited pretty much all the major ports around the world. I can’t think of a more extreme culture shock than first setting foot in New York or San Francisco, or Hong Kong or Yokohama/Tokyo after having let Tarawa for the first time!

Life here for many people is probably not too dissimilar to the way they have lived for generations. Time here seems to have a different flow to it, one days appears to be very similar to the next, there is no real change of seasons. The moon seems to play an important role though, influencing the tides and fishing patterns and I guess for generations the moon, the ebb and flow of the tides has been the main marker of time and daily life.  Many of the people here still live a subsistence existence relying on the sea to provide food and sustenance for their families. Many of the young people I’ve been working with at MTC spend their spare time fishing in the lagoon or ocean but most hope to, once they have finished their studies, get a job overseas either on a ship or at an Australian hotel resort so they can send money home to support their families.

Unfortunately, the reality is that many people living here will never get the opportunity to travel and see the wider world beyond their shores. Their perception of the world is framed by the lagoon, the atolls and the other nearby outer islands which they came from, have family on, and may call home. They may take a ferry to and from the outer islands, sometimes a journey of several days, but for a sizable percentage of the population living here they will probably never get the opportunity to fly even as far as Fiji; airfares are prohibitively expensive for the average I-Kiribati. As a result of this geographic isolation you might expect the I-Kiribati to be quite inward looking and even insular in their outlook or worldview but that doesn’t seem to be experience I’ve had. I’ve not met a more generous, happy and positive people in a long, long time. People realise the world beyond their shores is impacting on their lives here and the steady stream of consultants and volunteers visiting just underlines this to them.

The ocean surrounding these atolls is their life blood and has been for centuries; it is both a highway and a garden, providing bountiful food and yet, as people are no doubt aware, this ocean is now a potential threat to their long term survival. Will these atolls sink beneath the waves as some are predicting? Who knows for sure but no matter what happens the world outside, as well as growing population pressure from within, will continue to put pressure on this very fragile environment and continue to have major consequences for the people of these islands.

I’ve discussed this idea of worldview with a couple of other volunteers and consultants, trying to organise my thoughts on it and get my head around how these islands impact on your view of the world and your place in it. One of the consultants out here, and a former volunteer, an Aussie named AJ, I think summed it up best. The difference in world view, he told me, really come down to one thing. Choices. We I-Matung (foreigners) have choices.   He’s right. I’m here for a year as a guest of these amazing people. No matter if I’m enjoying it here, or finding day to day life a struggle (which I’m not), I know I have an end date and at the end of 12 months can leave here and return to my “real” life. I have choices. Coming here was a choice; it was my decision to take a year out from my regular life and live in another, little known to me, part of the world. It was a decision I made and I was lucky enough to be in a position to be able to have that choice. I am extremely fortunately to have landed in such a wonderful, warm, welcoming country but also know I have the good fortune to have choices as to where I live, and what I do.

The average I-Kiribati person doesn’t have the same choices or options available to them. Many will spend their lives on these, now, quite crowded atolls. Some will and do leave and often it is in the hope of finding work to remit money home, but many won’t have an opportunity to leave their small, fragile island home. The world outside is impacting on the lives of the people here and they are facing all sorts of social, economic and environmental issues which they are struggling to deal with. However, just have they have done for the past however many centuries, the people will continue to exist and their unique culture thrive in this, small, barely known corner of the Pacific. The endless Pacific Ocean will continue to be at the heart of their world and it will continue to be pretty damn easy to forget that the world exists beyond where the ocean meets the sky on the impossibly blue horizon of Kiribati.  

Craig