CHAPTER 4 – BIBI

They called it different things: Change, then Crisis, followed by Emergency. Then they changed it to Disruption, then Disaster. In the end, it didn’t matter. Finally, they – you never knew who “they” were – realised that the worsening climate converged with poverty, geography and history. So now they call it the Convergence.

I was eleven and lived with my parents in the foothills overlooking Bana. Higher elevations were cooler, so we were luckier than others and I believed we deserved it. Every night my mother and father watched good-looking men and women on television report on melting ice, swirling snowstorms, cities swallowed by earthquakes. We saw people washed away by rivers that broke their banks, taking villages with them. We watched whole islands drown.

All this was far away. I thought the news was boring and had nothing to do with us. The decapitated mountains were not ours, nor were the children swept away by raging water.

I remember the sizzling morning I went to Rae Wharf with my mother and saw the fishers leaning against the rum shop, the women facing them with empty baskets, their faces slick with sweat.

“No more fish,” the men said. “But we have a few sea-eggs.”

My mother responded that we were not that desperate.

Not long after, the crops began failing and the fruit trees stopped bearing. We tried to grow some things in our garden, but they all died. I remember this one pumpkin vine which produced a flower and then a pumpkin. My parents watched it as if they were tending a sick child, then one morning it was gone. Someone too hungry to wait, my father said. After that, the vine withered and died.

The water supply failed in Bana and I went with my father to the Ama River, which still had pools of water. Thousands of people lined its crumbling banks carrying containers. Rich people put pumps in the pools and sucked them dry into tanks in the back of their trucks. I remember we had to walk a long way to find a pool that was not stirred up. I don’t remember the journey back to our car with my water bucket full, but it must have been difficult.

I went to campus school until I was fifteen. I was good at tech support. Halfway through my final year, the power supply could no longer support air conditioning. I never went back.