Prologue: Nauru

 

PROLOGUE

NAURU THE NOVEL 

 

Nauru, 2014

       

              The storm rains had stopped, but the water still rose higher.  It rose like never before.  It came up from underground, surfacing to feed the standing floodwaters left behind from the storm surge of Typhoon Iris.

 When the pressed coral seawall that held back Buda Lagoon suddenly collapsed and the storm-swollen waters of the lagoon spilled torrentially into the play yard of Yaren Children’s Preschool, a dozen four and five year old preschoolers simply drowned in broad daylight.  There were simply too many wriggling, bobbing, little bodies for two teachers to save. The tiny, drowned preschoolers were placed on top of their school desks awaiting the grim recovery by their parents. The surviving fourteen children who had been saved would most likely live to resent their lives.

            This tragic horror was the second worst in the island’s three hundred year spoken history.  Only Nauru’s occupation and mass slave labor deportation at the hands   of the invading Empire of Japan could possibly equal the horrifying scope of this disaster. 

 But this time, Nauru’s enemy had been water, itself.  Life giving and life taking.  Water that had been made warmer, worldwide, and now had outgrown its clouds and ocean basins.  Water that had warmed and expanded itself until its oceans were no longer deep enough to contain it.  Wider, deeper, more sustainable and more perilous.  The independent Republic of Nauru had become an inundated, saturated island mass that now was very tenuously holding fourteen thousand Melanesian and Polynesian souls above sea level.

            Since his attendance at The Kyoto Protocol,  Nauru’s eighty-four year old President, H.E. Bernard Dwiyogo, had borne the sole responsibility for his countrymen’s survival without the sacrifice of their cultural extinction.  As a result, the patriarchal leader hadn’t smiled in years.

Author’s Note:

Watch Country Blog for chapters from the Novel, Nauru, a story of global warming, real estate, a new island born from shaped thermonuclear explosions and a man-made, natural island paradise (New Nauru) and the hellish pandemic it spawned.