Showing posts with label Nauru. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nauru. Show all posts

May 17 – Constitution Day in Nauru

Posted on May 17, 2017


Recently, we discussed the small nation (small in land area and population - it's not small in "scattered over the surface of the Earth" measurements!) of the Federated States of Micronesia, which celebrated its Constitution Day.

Well, not all of the islands of Micronesia are gathered into that nation. Some examples of other Micronesian nations are Palau and Kiribati and today's constitution-celebrant, Nauru.

This island nation is waaayy small. It's just one island, with about 21 square km (8 square miles) in area. The island is surrounded by a coral reef - so much so that there is no good seaport on the island. (There are a few breaks in the reef that allow small boats to approach the island.)

Nauru is a phosphate rock island. Phosphate is useful in fertilizers and to make supplements in animal feed; phosphorous is also used in certain chemical industries. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the strip-mining of phosphates going full-tilt, Nauru was the wealthiest nation, per person, in the world.

Old cantilevers are rusting in the ocean
surrounding Nauru, part of the phosphate
mining-and-export operations of the past.
But now most of Nauru's phosphates are gone. The wealth is mostly gone, too. 

And the ugly mining operations devastated 80% of the land and killed off about 40% of the marine life! 

In its need for some source of income, Nauru has become a tax haven and money-laundering center. Also, Nauru has accepted money from the Australian government to host refugees and asylum-seekers in the Nauru Regional Processing Center. I am sad to report that the conditions there are horrific, and there have been riots, hunger-strikes, and human rights violations.  

The pinnacles in the water make for an unusual and quite lovely
beach...but it makes ENJOYING the beach and ocean unsafe. 

During World War II, Japan took over Nauru, and there is
still wreckage left from the war. Here you see artillery that was
used to shoot down Allied airplanes.


  

Also on this date:





















Galician Literature Day














Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:
And here are my Pinterest boards for:
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

October 26 – Angam Day in Nauru

Posted on October 26, 2015

Nauru is a tiny nation (third smallest in the world)
located on a phosphate rock island in the South Pacific.

According to Wikipedia, the Nauruan word “angam” means a lot of different things: jubilation, celebration, to have triumphed over all hardships, to have reached a set goal, and coming home!

So...what are Nauruans celebrating?

It turns out, recovery from near-extinction!

The nation of Nauru is a pretty small island, and there was a time in history when the population was so low, the Nauruan ethnic group was considered to be in danger of dying out altogether.

It was just after World War I, and the German troops had left the island. Nauru had been placed under the authority of Australia, New Zealand, and Britain, and an Australian administrator held a census (a population count). He was upset to discover that the population was as low as it was. He gathered together the Nauruan chiefs and told them that, if they were to survive as a people, they had to get their population up to at least 1,500.

The administrator even offered rewards: he said that, when the population reached 1,500, a public holiday would be declared, and the baby who helped the island attain that number would be declared the Angam Baby and would receive gifts.

It took thirteen years, but finally, on this date in 1932, the Angam Baby (person #1,500) was born. It was a little girl named Eidegenegen Eidagaruwo.

There was a lot of celebration that the goal had been reached!


But you probably know that there were two World Wars, and when World War II occurred, Nauru was occupied by Japan. Most of the Nauruans were evacuated to another island, and tragically, many of them died of malnutrition or disease. Ironically, the Angam Girl Eidegenegen was one of the people who died.

At the end of the war, after the surviving Nauruans returned to their home, it turned out that the population was again well below the magic number of 1,500. The people realized that they should work again to increase their population. This time it didn't take as many years: on March 31, 1949, Bethel Enproe Adam was born, making the population of Nauru once again 1,500.

Note that, although Bethel was born in March, the people stick with the original October 26 date as the official Angam Day.

I bet you are wondering how many Nauruans there are now, more than half a century later. Well, the population now in 2015 is more than 10 thousand people, and about 58% of them are of Nauru ethnicity (the rest are other Pacific Islander peoples with a few people of European or Chinese ancestry). So that means that there are almost 6 thousand ethnic Nauruans!

Why 1,500?

I tried to read up on population science, which brought me to websites like this one, and it seems that the biggest problems for small populations are:

(1) lack of genetic diversity and the resulting inbreeding, which can lead to people with more susceptibility to disease and sometimes even problems with fertility, and

(2) vulnerability to extinction due to a disaster. A volcanic eruption, tsunami, or plague can more easily kill all the residents of an island, for example, if there are only 360 people than if there are 3,600 people!

I couldn't find any evidence that 1,500 people is the recognized number you need to ensure a people's survival. But I did find an article claiming that 5,000 is a magic number for the “minimum viable population” for a variety of creatures. 

Nauru's current population is quite young,
compared with populations of some other
nations, such as these:









Also on this date:



























Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:
And here are my Pinterest boards for:


Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

January 31, 2012 - Nauru's Independence Day





Two things make Nauru unique—it is the world's smallest republic, and its economy has been based on bird poop!


Nauru during WWII
With just 8 square miles (or 21 square kilometers) of land and not too much more than nine thousand residents, Nauru is a small island in the South Pacific Ocean. It was settled by Micronesian and Polynesian people, and it was taken over by the German Empire in the late 1800s and by Japan during World War II. In between the World Wars and after WWII, it entered into trusteeship of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. On this date in 1968, it was granted independence.

Phosphate fields of Nauru
Nauru had its heyday because of an unusual resource: bird droppings! For thousands of years, bird droppings called guano mixed with marine sediments and formed natural fertilizers from phosphate rocks. Unfortunately, the mining of this resource was of the strip-mine variety, and so the fertile land was depleted and the landscape destroyed. For a while the island made a mini-boom from illegal money laundering, but international pressure and government officials cracked down on that “industry.” Now the island is quite poor and dependent on aid from Australia. Once called “Pleasant Island” by British visitors, the island is now struggling to regain a reputation as being pleasant.

According to the Nauru tourism website, people can enjoy deep-sea fishing, swimming, and scuba diving. But there hasn't been a lot of tourist development on the island. There is one airport, and flights only come in once a week. There seems to be only two hotels and only a few restaurants. (In comparison, my little hometown, which is just a rather boring suburban town in Southern California, is more than three times larger than Nauru in land area, has more than seven times the population, and has at least five hotels.)

Also on this date:


Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)