Brenda, who is currently serving as Director of Catholic Education in the Port Pirie Diocese, has a long background in both education and mission, having already undertaken similar placements in other countries over many years. Continue reading

Kiribati President Anote Tong publicly thanked the nation of Fiji in a speech at the Paris climate summit for agreeing to take in his people should the worst come to pass.

"It's so heartening to hear that Fiji has undertaken to accommodate our people of Kiribati in the event that climate change renders our homes uninhabitable," the president said.

Tong said he would continue to repeat this statement to the international community because they needed to hear it.

"Because it's such a noble act from Fiji to help us," Mr Tong said.

Tong said the Pacific region would have appreciated the support of its neighbours Australia and New Zealand.

"Australia and New Zealand continue to worry about their industries.

"We had our arguments in Port Moresby, we would have liked them to come to our assistance, especially at this international forum because we do that for them whenever they ask us to.

"We give them our support and this is perhaps the most critical issue in which we need the support of all of our friends, and even our enemies."

At COP21 the prime minster of Fiji, Voreqe Bainimarama called on industrialised countries to act now and save small island states from disappearing.

"I have another message today - an invitation to those of you who think this is some distant threat to come to the Pacific and witness what I am about the tell you with your own eyes."

"The nightmare scenario is already unfolding. And not only on low-lying coral atolls like the nations I have mentioned but on mountainous volcanic islands such as those in Fiji."

"So we haven't caused this crisis. The blame lies squarely with the industrialised and emerging nations."

"Carbon emissions spewing from their factories. From the energy they burn. The cars they drive. The planes they travel in."

Source

• fijitimes.com
• fijisun.com.fj
• slate.com
• Image: cdn.ipsnews.net

The Rite of First Profession took place during Eucharist at St Thomas Aquinas Church in Springwood, NSW, Australia.

Both women were born and raised in the Republic of Kiribati.

In the coming weeks, Juniko and Tuata will return to Kiribati where they will continue with a study program and engage in ministry.

They are part of a growing group of Kiribati women drawn to the Good Samaritan way of life.

Currently this group consists of two perpetually professed sisters, four temporary professed sisters and three women in the pre-novitiate phase.

The Good Samaritan sisters have been working in Kiribati since since 1991.

They are involved in education, pastoral and community development roles.

The Congregation of the Sisters of Good Samaritan of the Order of St Benedict, known affectionately as the Good Sams, is Australia's first ‘home-grown' congregation of Catholic religious women.

Archbishop John Bede Polding, an English Benedictine monk and Australia's first bishop, founded them in Sydney in 1857.

Today, there are around 235 sisters living and working throughout Australia, in Japan, Kiribati, and the Philippines.

Source

• goodsams.org.au
• Image: goodsams.org.au

It is part of a 5700 acre piece of land given to the church by a Mr Campbell.

The Anglican Archbishop of Polynesia, Winston Halapua, said the church has kept aside 300 acres for Melanesians living on the land.

He explained the land was given to the church with the instructions that it be used for the mission of the church.

"In the Anglican Church, property is vested with our trustees so this transaction because it has to do with the land and the purpose falls under the trustees and they do things according to the will of the person who gave it," Archbishop Halapua said.

Responding to questions on the valuation of the land, he said the church trustees and the Kiribati Government came to an agreement on the value of the land.

"Well they have to agree, there was a lot of negotiation and fact-finding, and waiting on those who have other say on this because this is in the Government of Fiji and there is a proper channel."

Halapua said the money from the sale would be invested to serve the purpose of the church.

Source

• The Fiji Times
• Image: fijilandsales.com

He says there are other measures that can be taken to try to reduce violence in the community.

The Kiribati parliament has passed the first reading of the bill and leaders are supposed to hold consultations with their electorate before the second reading and the vote in a month.

The President Anote Tong says the bill is a deterrent against deliberate killings in the country.

His comment comes after five women recently lost their lives allegedly at the hands of their husbands or former partners.

But Mea, who is also the chairman of the Kiribati Council of Churches says they will fight the bill because it will not stop the killing in the community.

"The thing that is going to stop them, is the education. Preparing the man and wife before their marriage. To understand what love is, to give them input on what the church teaches about real love between a husband and wife and all that."

"Counselling, introducing counselling for all those who have problems. But capital punishment is not going to give any solution."

Source

• Radio Australia International
• Radio New Zealand Pacific
• Image:omtimes.omtimes.netdna-cdn.com

This is the first successful application for residency on humanitarian grounds in New Zealand that has featured climate change.

The Immigration and Protection Tribunal said the family has strong ties to New Zealand and found "exceptional circumstances".

A bid from a Kiribati man to become the world's first climate change refugee was rejected earlier this year.

The international Refugee Convention does not recognise victims of climate change as refugees.

An environmental law expert said the Tuvalu family decision did not provide an open ticket for climate change refugees hoping to come to New Zealand.

Continue reading

President of Kiribati Anote Tong says there used to be a village around it.

"And why it remains there is because I've asked the village to build a seawall so it doesn't go, so it can bear testimony to what is happening."

Several years ago, as a result of rising sea levels caused by climate change, the water rushed in, ripped apart a village, and drove its residents to higher ground.

Tong talked about this in a conversation with Betsy Morais of the New Yorker.

Kiribati is a predominantly Christian nation, but its people also pay homage to spirits for the heavens and the land and the sea.

"This is why we must maintain the existence of the nation, because our spirits will have nowhere else to go," he told Morais.

She asked Tong how his countrymen viewed the spirits now that the tides threaten them.

"The spirits haven't created the problem," he said. "We ask the spirits to change the minds of those people who are doing this."

Kiribati is a collection of 33 islands necklaced across the central Pacific.
Thirty-two of the islands are low-lying atolls.

The 33rd, called Banaba, is a raised coral island that long ago was strip-mined for its seabird-guano-derived phosphates.

60-year-old Anote Tong, holds a science degree from Canterbury University in New Zealand and another in economics from the London School of Economics.

Source

• The New Yorker
• Businessweek.com
• The Global Mail
• Image: wired.co.uk

For those who don't know, the Republic of Kiribati is a remote island nation straddling the equator in the Pacific Ocean.

It's also where a small group of Good Samaritan Sisters have been ministering since 1991. I was there to witness the perpetual profession of Kakare Biita as a Sister of the Good Samaritan. She is the second I-Kiribati woman to do so.

Kakare's profession ceremony was held in Abaokoro, a village in North Tarawa where one of our Good Samaritan communities is based.

The other is in Temaiku, South Tarawa, a more densely populated area. Getting to Abaokoro isn't a straightforward journey.

After crossing the Tarawa lagoon by boat, in the equatorial heat we walked up the 200-metre gravel pathway to the sisters' community house.

As I walked up that pathway, lined with over 2,000 small stones packed closely together, I was struck by the importance and power of storytelling.

Patricia Comerford, one of our Australian sisters who lived in Kiribati, slowly and painstakingly, in the hot, humid conditions of Kiribati, built this pathway, lining it with local stones and plants.

The story of her patience and fidelity to the community she loves, as well as her love of the earth, continues to be told and retold among the I-Kiribati sisters, who now live out their own story at Abaokoro. Continue reading.

Clare Condon, the Congregational Leader of the Sisters of the Good Samaritan of the Order of St Benedict, is the recipient of the 2013 Human Rights Medal.

Source: The Good Oil

Image: Sisters of the Good Samaritan

But an Anglican Church spokesman Jason Rhodes, speaking in Auckland said "The best I can establish is that there has been no sale and the trustees say there has been speculation for more than a year,"

In February, Anglican Church Trust Manager of Fiji, Bob Harness, told a local newspaper that the deal was done.

But he refused to discuss the issue with Fairfax, referring the issue to Rhodes, who blames the whole story on the media, saying it began with a freelance journalist writing for The New York Times.

Kiribati President Anote Tong said last August that they were buying the Anglican land so that his 100,000 people would have some where to move should the archipelago sink due to global warming.

The Interim Fiji Government believes the sale has taken place, and it has been reported internationally that the people of Kiribati will settle on the land.

Natoavatu remains listed with land agents.

Source

• Stuff.co.nz
• Image: Fijilandsales.com

Described as, "an intense man who wears thick black glasses," he was until recently a climate-sceptic and feared that the message of activists would cause his people to lose faith in God and the Catholic Church.

A group of young climate-change activists based on Tarawa, who travelled to outer islands to educate people about the effects of climate change, were not welcome on Abaiang.

But now his 30-year-old church is flooding during storm surges. As its foundations have begun to give way, so has the priest's opposition to the science.

Martin says, "When it was first mentioned about the dangers of climate change, I was not believing myself in global warming. It was said that the ice on the North and the South Poles was melting. But I was not a bit concerned about it. But now I accept that climate change is happening and it's destroying a lot of goodness in the land we now have in Kiribati."

He now tells his parishioners about climate change: "It is not God's curse, but a blessing in disguise." This is because, Martin says, the youth of Kiribati will have better opportunities in their lives by being forced to leave the islands and atolls for other countries.

Elsewhere in Kiribati Good Samaritan Sister, Sister Marella is trying to increase the harvesting of rainwater into tanks and to stem the frequent wastage of fresh water by the inhabitants on Kiribati.

She has seen misguided aid projects do serious damage in Kiribati. Sixteen months ago she wrote of her frustrations in a newsletter published by her order, the Sisters of the Good Samaritans. One aid project installed solar-powered water pumps in household wells on an outer island of Kiribati. The new technology rapidly over-pumped the wells, causing the underlying salt water to rise and contaminate the whole of the fresh-water reserve, rendering it unusable.

Then, several hundred pit toilets were shipped to another atoll, to help it meet the United Nation's much-lauded Millennium Development Goals, which aim to halve by 2015 the numbers of people in the world without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. But the pits of the toilets were unsealed, resulting in faeces draining directly into the fresh-water reserves just below.

Source

• The Global Mail
• Image: The Global Mail

Kiribati President, Anote Tong, said fertile land, being sold by a church group for about $9.6 million, could be insurance for Kiribati's entire population of 103,000, though he hopes it will never be necessary for everyone to leave.

Tong said some villages have already moved and there have been increasing instances of sea water contaminating the islands underground fresh water, which remains vital for trees and crops. He said changing rainfall, tidal and storm patterns pose as least as much threat as ocean levels, which so far have risen only slightly.

Some scientists have estimated the current level of sea rise in the Pacific at about 2 millimeters (0.1 inches) per year. Many scientists expect that rate to accelerate due to climate change.

Tong has been considering other unusual options to combat climate change, including shoring up some Kiribati islands with sea walls and even building a floating island. He said this week that the latter option would likely prove too expensive, but that he hopes reinforcing some islands will ensure that Kiribati continues to exist in some form even in a worst-case scenario.

Source

• Sydney Morning Herald
• Image: Jane's Kiribati

She is employed by the government of Kiribati to help address that country's critical water needs caused by the rising sea level and the increasing salination of drinking water. One of the threats of rising sea levels is contamination of the fragile fresh water lens that lies under the islets ringing its atolls.

Sean Dorney, the ABC's Pacific Correspondent, has made a video report showing find out how Marella is helping to solve Kiribati's critical water needs as a water engineer.

Marella is a Good Samaritan Sister from Australia. There are two communities of Good Samaritan Sistes in Kiribati They are engaged in a variety of ministries: primary education, youth ministry, and working with people with disabilities and mental illness.

• View Dorney's report
• Read Transcript
• Image: UNICEF

"It was probably one of the most transformative experiences of my life." says Sister Veronica. She says the simple lifestyle with limited access to resources challenged her to look at life anew and realise "how little you actually need to survive in this world".

What began as a short-term ministry placement for Veronica, teaching theology at the Kiribati Pastoral Institute (KPI), quickly grew into something much more.

Read Whole article
Image: The Good Oil

Speaking to Cook Islands, Fiji, Filipino, Hong Kong, Indian, Kiribati, New Zealand, Niuean, Samoan and Tongan postgraduate students taking part in the AUT-organised writing retreat at Vaughan Park, leading Pacific demographer Professor Richard Bedford, from the Auckland University of Technology, said New Zealand and Australia are obvious destinations for Pacific migrants.

"Long term, I think New Zealand and Australia need to be aware there will be an increasing pressure for opportunities to move to other countries, not as desperate people, but just as people seeking options for their futures," he said.

"In Kiribati, of the 100,000 population, 50 percent live in urban Tarawa while in Solomon Islands of its 500, 000 population, 20 percent live in urban areas," Dr Bedford said.

He described what would happen, what their children would do, and how life would look like in these two island nations in 50 years.

The issue of population growth in these neighbouring islands is being slowly understood in New Zealand, Dr Bedford told a Pasifika writing fono organised by AUT University.

Source:

• Pacific Scoop press release
• Image: UNHCR

As the Pacific outreach officer for a Catholic advocacy group the Edmund Rice Centre, it's Tiimon's job to alert the world to the plight of her homeland. The film follows Tiimon as she holds workshops with schools and community groups, catering both to her work and the needs of her extended family - or "Noah's Ark", as she calls them - who still live back in Kiribati.

Source

• smh.com
• Image: green.tv