The parliamentary election was happening while we were in Aranuka, and our friend Martin was up for reelection. Prior to our arrival had been the first round of voting, and Martin had made it through to the final round along with two other men.
The final round of voting happened while we were there, and it’s the kind of thing the whole island turns out to watch. They had a chalkboard set up to tally the votes keeping track of how many votes from each village for each candidate. (There are actually three villages in Aranuka.) One person pulled a paper ballot out of the box and read the name, then the ballot was passed through the hands of three people for inspection and validation, I presume, and then another person marked a tally mark on the chalkboard. This whole process took a couple hours, so the people sat around in circles with their friends and families, sometimes just hanging out, sometimes playing this game that used a bunch of rocks. We were curious about the game so Tim sat down with a bunch of kids and asked if they would teach him to play. They thought that was so funny! He sat with them for a while, and I’m not sure he ever actually learned the game, but he kept the kids entertained for a while.
When we arrived our friend Martin had a comfortable lead. And we learned that his name was actually pronounced “Ma-sin.” Of course! In Kiribati the letter combination “t-i” makes an “s” sound, but he westernizes his name for the likes of us. When they got to counting the votes of the third village, Martin took a beating in the tallies, and we had our jaws on the floor when the final count came out and he was very narrowly unseated! It turns out that third village is the home village of the winning candidate, which is why he overwhelmingly got their votes. As soon as the winner was announced, we were approached by a woman who told us she was the new MP’s wife, and we were invited to a celebration party at their house. Ordinarily we don’t turn things like this down, but we were tired, and the wind was still blowing pretty strong, so we wanted to get back to Exodus. It ended up being a very wet dinghy ride upwind.
The night before the election, we had hosted Martin and his family on Exodus for dinner, we had let him decide which night would be good for him, but in hindsight, we would feel really bad if spending time with us instead of doing more last minute campaigning in the village had cost him. We’ll never know, though.
Brenden with Martin’s daughters: Reitene (age 11) and Teue (age 13)
Gresham Family Exodus 